February Art: moon
For tonight’s full moon a harvest festival is brought to life in moonlight. The artist, Edward Calvert, is associated with William Blake, Samuel Palmer and the ancients, and the group’s unorthodox Christianity is on view in this woodcut with the perhaps surprising epigraph ‘By the gift of God in Christ’. The print’s title, ‘The Cyder Feast’ tells rather of pagan exultation.
Carved not long after Keats penned ‘To Autumn’, this minute but sensuous depiction of English country life hints at a comparably decadent abundance, though where Keats has a languorous Autumn by a cyder press watching ‘the last oozings hours by hours’, for some here the work is still going on as apples are brought to be pressed by an oxen. Yet the spilled baskets and the paired gestures of the front couple suggests a freer partaking of the product, flinging them towards Dionysian revelry as groups unreel and dance by the light of the moon. Calvert’s intricate engraving technique borrows from Blake, and manages like Palmer’s ink and gum drawings to let sheer texture create extraordinary contrasts, as between the gnarled bark and the round purity of the moon (perhaps hinting at a political sensibility to such licence). It is hard to believe such colour and energy can be wrought from so little: just three-by-five inches of black and white.
thebicyclops 