Premonition 1987

Pencil and watercolor 25 x 41 cm (9 4/5 x 16 1/10 in)

In this small drawing Tale, with apparently effortless ease, deploys his drawing skills to create an image, which has greater power to shock and stir the viewer than its scale might initially suggest. If the specific elements of the drawing are considered separately it is easier to understand how Tale achieves this.

It is evident at first glance that the artist is not aiming for a ‘realistic’ image. By the reduction of the image to what is essentially emblematic form Tale is able to concentrate the work’s emphasis on both its ‘meaning’ and the conveyance of feeling.

Muted lines delicately delineate the body of the animal, perhaps a deer or a lamb, the ambiguity deliberate - its egg-like form suggestive of potential. It is crucial to understand, as in all Tales’s drawings that these very lines, in themselves, express a palpable sensitivity with which the viewer is able to instinctively identify with and relate to, almost without awareness. The warm sepia and cooler mauve tones of the fleece offer contrasting messages simultaneously – the warmth of life, the cool of congealment. The darkened head, lowered in submissive apprehension, gazes with blank eyes.

A collar of red spreading ominously around the animal’s neck like a noose conveys the situation explicitly, yet this is implied rather than depicted ‘realistically’, allowing the completion of the image by the power of the viewer’s imagination. By this device Tale is able to create a more affectively potent representation with much wider reference. On the left, creating additional tension and mystery, there is a dark tree, in dark mist which seems about to enfold the animal, already ‘haloed’ in a gentle apocryphal light of small golden spheres.

Contributing to the sense of vulnerability and frailty the drawing of the spindly, dislocated legs of the animal convey intense pathos. This use of the grotesque – a form of ‘distortion’ developed in the early stages of modernism - avoids all sentimentality and rids the image of any trace of formulaic cliché. By the restrained use of the grotesque, the expressive, but never expressionistic, drawing conveys a profound depth. There is not here the detached witty irony of, for example the conceptualist Damien Hirst’s laboratory sheep-specimen in formaldehyde - Tale’s understanding of death and suffering is of a clearly contrasted nature. It may be instructive to compare Hirst’s preparatory sketch for his sheep installation. Premonition is above all a statement about compassion.

Providing yet further dimensions to an already gripping statement, as the viewer will observe, the drawing has been made on an old letter –an unexpected and arbitrary collision of totally contrasted worlds and epochs.

«previous menu next»