Michael Leonard extract

Chapter Two
Early Work

Like many artists before him Michael spent
the early years of his career searching for an
individual voice and a personal style. Among the
few works that survived the drastic cull when he
moved from Egerton Gardens to his present flat
were some beautiful harbingers of what was to
come. Michael’s interest at this time in trying to
create dense and expressive surface textures was
not something that continued into his mature
work. On the other hand, his experiments in
stylization and the abstraction of form were to
pay rich dividends.

The earliest images to appear on Michael’s website were Three Disciples
and Lazarus from 1959. Both were executed in the relatively conventional
combination of India ink, wash and gouache and had a restrained and
delicate palette of silvery blue and grey. Each exhibited the high viewpoint
and flattened space that would later be found in many of Michael’s
illustrations. The Three Disciples were arranged in an arc with powerful
diagonals created by the dark staves on which the disciples were leaning. The
image of Lazarus was dominated by a spiralling winding sheet that in its wild
gyrations anticipated the trailing kite tail in Flying a Kite: Brompton Oratory
and the exploding wrapping paper of Charlie’s Parcel and which led eventually
to Afternoon of the Kites. For these figures Michael used dancers from a West
End show as models. He said he liked working with them because they were
passive and biddable. ‘When I am in director’s mode I can be formidable and
have to be obeyed.’
In Three Disciples and Lazarus, despite Michael’s growing interest in design,
the figures were relatively naturalistic and remained largely untouched
by the drive towards stylization. This came into play more powerfully in
the illustrations for Homer’s Odyssey. In these he was aiming for something
more primitive and archaic. The extreme simplification of musculature was
borrowed, appropriately enough, from ancient Greek vases. We see him trying
out two different approaches for two versions of Ajax with the Dead Achilles,
one more radically simplified than the other. His depiction of the climactic
Battle in the Hall, in which Ulysses returns to slaughter the suitors of his wife
Penelope, was primitive, brutal and violent and his warriors both stylized
and exaggeratedly masculine.
At this point in his career Michael was obsessed with Classical Greece.
We can see this in his design for a plate with a galloping centaur and attendant
satyr and in his three lino-cuts of Jason, Medea and Hercules which were
created separately and then united as a triptych. It is surprising perhaps there
weren’t more of these, as the technique is admirably well suited to this kind of
primitivism, but at this period Michael was trying out every possible medium.
Anatomical exaggeration was taken to the extreme in the two versions of The
Victor, one executed on a reddish background and the other – which Michael
feels is the more successful of the two – on gold. In both cases the contours of
the figures were outlined in white rather than black.
This experimental side of Michael’s art is very much in evidence in works
based on mythological themes and painted on hardboard panels, using highly
unconventional mixed-media techniques. In the brooding Jocasta and Oedipus,
which stylistically remains a one-off experiment, he describes himself as
‘trying to find his way into a style’.
Three Disciples, 1959,
gouache on card
chapter two: early work 29

Michael relishes
the challenges that
illustration offers and
the stretching of his
powers of invention
Icarus and the Minotaur are mythological figures with whom Michael
strongly identifies. He was dissatisfied with his first version of the Minotaur,
The Minotaur in the Maze, finding the body too slender and the head too small,
although he liked it enough to retain it when destroying many other works of
this period. He describes his Minotaur as a fugitive fleeing from an imaginary
assailant. It is painted coarsely on cardboard using emulsion house paint
with India ink rubbed into its textured surface. The subject engaged Michael
sufficiently to inspire a poem to go with the image. It had several verses; this
is the first:
Within the antrum of a dark estate
Beholden to the screw-thread of the way
He walks attended by a surrogate
Of one ripped howling out of Parsiphae.
In one image Michael has Icarus flying across the white disk of the sun.
In another Icarus is already beginning to disintegrate into bone and ashes.
This was achieved by pressing strips of cloth into wet emulsion on hardboard,
waiting until it was dry, then rubbing India ink into the textured grooves.
A related technique that he used at this time was to press Kleenex tissues
into Unibond glue. We see this in the highly abstracted image of three women’s
faces (The Women). The faces are given geometric form rather in the style of a
well-known sculptor of the day, Lynn Chadwick. Michael uses the term tachiste
in relation to these images, explaining that they embody the perhaps fanciful
idea that even blind people could experience them through touch. He used
similar methods in three portraits in varying techniques of the Canadian
Shakespearian actor Leo Ciceri, who famously made a career out of playing
kings and princes.
Michael was particularly happy with the portrait he made of his close friend
Desmond Heeley in which abstract image and likeness were perfectly aligned,
and with the intensity of the subject’s gaze magnificently caught.
The tendency towards abstraction reached a conclusion in a triptych of
hieratic heads, The King, The Queen and The Prince and some nudes based on the
photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. The Queen was perhaps the most austere
of these images. The Prince and The King were enriched with heavily stylized
and textured crowns that doubled as the battlements of ancient citadels.
The Eadweard Muybridge photographs of human and animal locomotion
were reissued by Dover Publications in 1955 in time to provide useful source
material for some of Michael’s early work. We have two scenes of textured and
stylized wrestlers and one of the back of a male nude. All were derived from
28 michael leonard painter and illustrator

Muybridge’s photographs. These are Michael’s most abstract works, and at first
glance and without knowledge of the photographic source material they could
easily be taken for fully abstract works.
Throughout the 1960s Michael continued to experiment endlessly until
a moment of epiphany occurred, in which his portrait of Roger Coleman
sent him off in a different direction and he decided to abandon surface
textures altogether.
The Minotaur in the
Maze, 1960s, India
ink and house paint,
66.8 × 50.8 cm
chap ter two e arly work 29

Zipkin, Jerome, 100
Zydower, Astrid, 7, 13, 83–4, 85,
102, 178
30 michael leonard painter and illus tr ator