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Lionel Miskin - Still kicking…Just

I began etching when I was a student at the London St. Martin’s school of Art, fifty-one years ago. For this I enrolled in a studio at central where several ancient old codgers were etching cathedrals and endless details through magnifying glasses. So, I began to draw from imagination, as a change and relief from nudes and nurture, choosing the medium of etching because I worshipped Goya, Ensor and Picasso.

I had no clear idea when I started on a plate, but the scene and its protagonists always produced dream-like situations that surprised me then, and looking at them now reveal a lot of unconscious material, anxieties, violence and Oedipal situations which only later made sense to me. But this opened me up to all my later work from imagination, etchings, monotypes, ‘smokes’ - which I invented as a figurative medium, and ceramic sculpture, and even a novel, which was published in 1969. I can say that they all reflected back to me this and that aspect of my unconscious life.

More recently I have got my teeth into our long and destructive suppression of wild Nature and our pollution of even the air we breathe and the water we drink, which is an extension of the of the way we back brains against body, health and feelings. But art should also be witty and comical as in Ensor, Ernst, and pre-eminently, Picasso - what better material for it than the ancient myths.

Art fashions tear past at increasing speed. Every week a new sensation and hopefully a new outrage – don’t worry, I’m already a century out of date. I have learned in art, what goes backwards also goes forwards.

Even before my student days I held exhibitions in Dublin, London, Paris and Macon Georgia, of paintings, drawings, etchings, figurative ‘smokes’, ceramics and even decorated balloons. In 1960 I caused a media sensation with the first post war installation in the form of a 2 metre iced Madeira cake self-portrait to be devoured by London’s art critics. Widely discussed in the press, the event on TV was later judged the TV sensation of the year.

The 1960 show of ‘smokes’ was also televised and the method of doing them. In 1967 I launched a polystyrene Christ and angels lifted by helium balloons into the sky above Falmouth in England.

Living in Cyprus between 1981 and ’93 I held triennial shows of ceramic sculptures in Nicosia. Bored with self-advertisement, I now work continuously in etching and ceramics – free at last and still kicking…Just

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