This print is something of a departure from the work I have been releasing so far with The Lost Domain. I've a retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and in the long, and quite peculiar process of finding, gathering, collating and sorting hundreds of drawings, paintings and sketches from the past thirty years I found quite a few pictures that had been seen by hardly anyone except me.
This is one of those pictures, one I had almost completely forgotten, a picture that until I found it had only existed invisibly as a digital file. Not really a picture at all, until now. The Wanderers, as I've called this picture, was one I made in about 1997. I had been asked (by Penguin Books, very exciting!) to design a cover for a book by Alain Fournier called Le Grand Mealnes... also known as The Lost Domain. And, I think, perhaps as The Wanderers.
I was very happy about this because the book was very dear to my heart, and accordingly I made many pictures in an attempt to capture the essence of this captivating novel. The one you see here is not the one I ended up using for the cover; but now, in 2025, I'm glad that I found it again, hidden, invisible in a snowdrift of digital data that was stored on an outmoded hard drive, in a box, in a storage unit out near the cemetery.
And I recommend seeking out a copy of Le Grand Mealnes; it is beautiful, elegaic and strange book. I don't think Penguin are using the cover I designed any more though. So it goes.
More