cecil collins

Lying in bed ill - especially if you are not too ill to read webpages on the laptop - allows for an amiably non-scholarly kind of research into all manner of varied and tenuously connected subjects.

A chance meeting with an old scrap of paper that fell out of my sketchbook reminded me that I had been very much taken with the work of Cecil Collins at the Blake exhibition in March, and so it began...

Quite a long time and much exclaiming and clicketyclicking later I am fascinated to find that this brilliant artist spent several years living in a village less than ten miles from my childhood home in the Buckinghamshire hills, where he was near neighbours with the iconic yet deeply pervy Eric Gill and where he met the illustrator and poet David Jones who I hadn't known about, but should have, because someone I know of through work has written masses about him.

Collins, who taught alongside all sorts of amazing people like Mervyn Peake and Bernard Leach, is probably most famous for his Fools series of paintings and drawings, but I like his more organic, curvaceous and visionary works better.

Another interesting thing I discovered about CC is that he was born in 1908, making this year the anniversary of his birth, another good reason to post about his beautiful work.

Hope you like it too.

All the images are as usual copyright of their various owners, used by me only as illustration for my amateurish musings and mustn't be used for anything important.