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Etchings with aquatint, 1970, on Hayle Mill Hand Made cream wove paper, signed, titled and numbered 10/70 and 1/70, respectively, in pencil (there were additionally 10 proofs of each), images 30.4 x 25.2 cm on sheets 59 x 40 cm, with full margins, unmounted (but laid into folios of Zander Elephant Hide Natural heavy wove paper), in fine condition. Catalogue reference: Wiseman, Caroline, Elisabeth Frink: Original Prints: Catalogue Raisonné (London: Art Books International, 1998), no. 28, p. 98, and no. 29, p. 99, respectively. Provenance: with Berry-Hill Galleries, New York. Frink's technique in these 1970 precursors of her magisterial 1972 second series illustrating The Canterbury Tales starts with hand-shaken resin dusted onto hand-wiped plates, imparting varied tone and life to the neutral background. A first course of outline etching on hard ground would be followed by strengthening or burnishing the aquatint ground, then free-form detail etching. These tools would be refined and extended under Cliff White and Nigel Oxley in the White Ink Studio, Lant Street, Southwark, but clearly here have their genesis with the artist herself. These prints are two of the five comprising Frink's first series illustrating The Canterbury Tales. From her second series two years later we know that she was using the 1958 Penguin Classics edition by Nevill [Henry Kendal Aylmer] Coghill, Merton Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford 1957-1966 and active in Oxford and BBC live dramatic workshops, setting Chaucer to music. As Frink transcribed them onto the plates of the second series, thus Coghill's freely modern and frankly bawdy rendition of the Miller's tales (first one only here, second on request): "The Miller's Tale I./ Dark was the night as pitch, as black as coal,/ And at the window out she put her hole/ And Absalon, so fortune framed the farce,/ put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse/ Most savourously before he knew of this - / And back he started. Something was amiss/ He knew quite well a woman has no beard - /" "Dame Elisabeth Frink, R.A. 1977, D.C.E. 1982, known as Lis, was a woman of great courage, integrity and style who gambled continuously against the odds, both in her work - against stylistic fashion or any kind of comfortable or ingratiating image - and in her life. [- -] [T]he images of a single naked male figure, standing, walking or running, say something about endurance, vulnerability and essential human nature that haunts the memory" (Obituary, The Independent, 19 April 1993). As The Independent's obituary suggests, the spare, expressive male figures in these prints draw inescapable comparison with the ancient Greek bronze warrior figures that however were only later recovered from the Aegean near Riace in 1972. Seller Inventory # ABE-1530551546393
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