Nicholas Byrne: Hosier (2010)

“Drawing is the basis of my work, though I don't often have one image that I refer to in making something. Each painting is a different thing where an interior develops. I have an aesthetic idea or sensation of what this is, but it's intuitively led. With Hosier and Cropper I wanted to make illustrations of the 'sinuous line' which is a constituent element of the Rococo period. I'd read a passage in Jean Starobinski's The Invention of Liberty that takes a picture of William Hogarth writing on sinuosity, about 'leading the eye in a kind of chase'. From tending to limit himself to writing about the 'pure geometry of the spiral' Hogarth goes on to confess an erotic origin to his taste for the sinuous line: a childhood memory of a dancer with 'a ribbon entwined around a staff.' It’s interesting how his desire could be felt in particular distances.”

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