Dante Heads
pencil and blue crayon on paper
22 x 16 cm
1977
These works in the collections of The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Royal Academy of Arts, London
black felt pen on paper
21.6 x 16.5 cm
1977
pencil and crayon on paper
22.8 x 16.8 cm
1977
pencil and crayon on paper
22 x 17cm
1977
pencil and watercolour wash on paper
pulled from ring bound sketchbook
25.5 x 15cm
1977
pencil and crayon on paper
22cm x 17cm
1977
In the course of 1977 I drew almost every day from a small bust of Dante (a distant cousin of the famous Torrigiano bust as featured on Italian stamps in 1965) in various materials on various bits of paper torn or trimmed to the same size. Each was stamped with the date of its execution and there must have been over three hundred in all. I destroyed about a third of them and the fire at Editions Alecto almost halved the number that remained.
The bronze remained resolutely grim from all angles, propped up this way and that, and sometimes suspended upside down. The charring of the edges of some of these drawings, though it looks like some natty reference to the Infemo, testifies in fact to their having been in the blistered portfolio that was the solitary item I managed to rescue from the Alecto ashes.
Works and Texts 1992, p.224