Schubert’sWinterreise (“A winter’s journey”)

On a wet, winter evening over 25 years ago, in the car to Suffolk, I first heard the complete Winterreise: a spellbinding cycle of 24 songs from Wilhelm Mueller’s poems and set to music. It spoke to me shockingly, and profoundly about the journey of life, and I have often turned to the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Joerg Demus recording of 1966 for its range of humanity, tenderness and pain - even though the narrating traveller, despite his sincerity, gets it all pretty hopelessly wrong about love and life. But that’s the point of the Mueller poem, I think.  The traveller, like us all, is deeply flawed, but like us all in our own ways, tries to make as best of the journey he can. His compassion for others’ suffering endures to the end - even for the poor hurdy-gurdy player.

I recently decided to make a series of 24 paintings based on each of the individual Lieder (songs) but trying to update the context to avoid the overuse of snow, pine forests and overuse of a faceless traveller in a black hat and oversized Crombie, viewed from behind. The latter is particularly hard to discard. The CD cover designers seem stuck with that idea; and this made me want to tackle it outside the cliché.

I have been looking at night scope imagery and heat sensor images as a starting point. Our language of emotions is big on temperature – hot and cold being the most obvious. This will all take quite a while and for the moment the butchery series has priority.

But here’s a taster and glimpse of work in progress (which will be for sale in due course) with the other 21 to come(!):