Home
text/catalogues exhibitions   collections   1990 - 96   1997 - 99 2000 - 17
s
s
about contact   1969 - 75 1976 - 80 1980 - 89
             
preface to Hommage a Queneau  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthony Stokes Ltd. 1977

 

These drawings, made between the beginning of 1972 and the summer of 1975, take as their starting point the central idea of the book Exercises in Style which Raymond Queneau published in 1947. In his book Queneau tells the same anecdote in ninety-nine different ways: the competed Hommage contains one hundred drawings of a cup. And rather as Queneau had written twelve or o exercises a year for a number of years, I thought when I set out that the drawings series could go on indefinitely.

I treated the idea rather lightly, as a relief from what I was otherwise doing and as a project large enough to contain a tendency to make pastiches and to draw for its own sake. There are sketches, constructions, copies of photographs, working drawings for others in the set. They are all in pencil on paper and twelve inches square.

The set was already dispersed before the final total of one hundred drawings was reached, not counting the very few I had thrown out. The opportunity to present them together, in book form, restores the original intention: a look at style and meaning.

Colin Crumplin
June 1977

BACK