Bobbins your Uncle

As we march towards the spring Equinox 
Clouds blink and then cry outside my West London skyline. 
Faint rays of light bend through the veiled window of my studio.
In a mere ten minutes, a dull tone of grey pastel takes a walk
With confident, improvised strokes.
As I step back and view, Lautreamont comes to mind:
"As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine 
And an umbrella on an operating table."
I step forward and substitute that sewing machine for a tattoo machine. 
There is also no need for an umbrella as the clouds have dissolved in real time. 
On the picture plane, we have a domestic interior looking out across suburbia. 
A machine vibrates and draws blood. 
This is a cottage industry of body art. 
Bobbins your uncle!

Notes:

• The drawing commenced on the morning of 27 February 2017 in a London studio whose west facing windows were saturated with initial cloud and light rain. How does the gloomy quality of light affect the mood of an artist staring at a blank sheet of paper? Not sure why I broke the silence with a grey oil pastel? 
• Comte de Lautreamont is a 19th century poet whose meagre output had a major impact on those with a Surrealistic and Situationist bent. His oft quoted line was conjured out of my past and teenage years when reading texts like Les Chants de Maldoror was second nature.  
• I kept putting pastel to paper over the following twenty days until the 19th March. This labour (of love) involved an estimated 36 hours all told. In between first and final touches to this drawing, I had visited the Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain. Perhaps the figure standing outside in a garden and framed by the door is an ironic not to H's Californian portraits minus the sunshine.
• "Bob's your uncle!" is an old fashioned phrase rarely used in England, but equivalent to the French "voila. Bob morphed into a bobbin for a radical form of sewing or tattooing, is as far as I can tell, a first, on a par with Lautreamont. 

Bobbin's your uncle!  
56x82 inches.
Oil pastel.
2017.