Cogan's Portrait zizzi canterbury - sketch and final work

Zizzi requested that their associated Illustrators produce an interpretation of the portrait of John Cogan - former owner of their historical Canterbury premises.

Though we were provided with a lot of information on the various hauntings on the site, I opted to focus on the Will included in the original posthumous portrait. Cogan was, apparently, quite generous - beqeathing his property to various ministers' poor widows and clothing to maidservents and girls working in the house.

Zizzi norwich

Here are the results of the Norwich commission. The work took about three days all told but progress was slower than I anticipated - I think due to the wider range of materials, approaches and colour I was using, some for the first time.

As with all on site work - as you see how its unfolding in situ and given your time constraints-you you have to make adaptations. The Lower floor work (the girl with pattern) had to be modified -the wallpaper pattern lacks anvils and some of the carriages are reduced to basic shapes without wheels. I hope this won't irritate any diners. But i felt the wall was visually busy enough without adding these extra details. I felt much happier with the upstairs illustration (the farrier and horses). I'd use the stencilling and spraypaint techniques again as they were effective in this.

Thanks to Big Al the sparky for providing a sense of scale, there!

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New Zizzi

Lately I've tried to combine the characters and pattern in one image using different drawing styles for each.

As the comission is for two walls on different levels I will require two final images. I hit on the idea that they could be linked by a narrative such as a lady thinking wistfully of the coach-house farrier on one level, and he her on the other.

Although the illustrations here don't describe it at the moment, the pattern behind the life-size figures could give an insight into their thoughts: she could have horses and farriers, and he coaches and ladies, but never the twain shall meet.

This all riquired me to think up my own repeat pattern, but at the present hurdle is thinking how best to tranfer something this complicated to a 2m x 4m wall.

My coach wheels are based on the stonemasonry details of Norwich's Ethelbert gate while the birds that occaisionally appear are canaries: the local F.C.

New Zizzi

Continuing on then, I wanted to use the victorian silhouette ( Like artist Kara Walker) or use decorative textile and pattern... or, indeed, both at once. But is hard to strike a balance between all these factors while still making an image that works and is interesting to make.

New

New Zizzi

Working some ideas for a possible Zizzi commission working to ' victorian coachhouse' brief. I started out with a sort of Lewis Carroll type scene which while simultaneously playing with existing images. I just really liked the horse-headed woman!