By Window 1970

Ink and watercolor 33 x 26 cm (13 x 10 1/5 in)

In By Window Tale’s vibrant pen and brush strokes offer a contrasting effect of the grotesque to that realised in War Children. Light filled and pulsating with energy Tale’s strokes take on the brio of, for example Tiepelo’s drawing studies of people. Both artists seem to share the same joy and exuberance in the power of their graphic skills.

In the drawing dazzling sunshine floods into an interior with high windows – defined by rhythmic strokes which almost dance. This is particularly clear in the window on the right where the top left swish of the pen seems to indicate an ogee window and thus a hint of Eastern Mediterranean background is implied - emphasising how much a single flick of a pen can achieve in the hands of a master.

The upper part of the high ceilinged room is covered in lightly tinted and varied subtle textures which contribute to an intense feeling of almost electrical atmosphere. This energy charged bright lightness is achieved by the use of pale, textured sepia washes over the lightest ochre ground.

This feeling of excitement is even more intensely conveyed by the figures in the lower part of the drawing. Movement, collective activity, a baby, small children and a supervisory adult while a patient animal looks on are all suggested rather than described, by a series of vigorous but never over emphatic strokes of brush and pen.The operative word here is ‘suggests’ for as the viewer may see by careful scrutiny of this particular area, what Tale achieves is more an understanding of a happy, if somewhat frenetic domestic melee rather than a more ‘literal’ portrayal. Yet the over-all feeling is one of poetry and joy rather than triviality into which such a subject could perhaps so easily descend by a more factual rendition. Yet again by his use of the grotesque in emblematic and reductive form – here that is the reduction of an image to its essential features – Tale is able to form wider reference by, as it were, co-opting the viewer’s imagination to ‘fill in the blanks.’

It might be instructive to compare Tale’s drawing style here with for example Rembrandt’s’ Reading Woman’. Both works share the innate fluency of an assured hand together with an ability to achieve a greater effect than the use of a few strokes would suggest or economy of means. However Tale’s subtle and entirely distinctive use of the grotesque marks him clearly as an heir of the 20th Century.

A further point is that while this drawing was completed early in Tale’s career the source of Tale’s  ‘calligraphic’ style in the later abstract work is clearly apparent - an inherent part of Tale’s distinctive artistic ‘persona’.

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