A master pastelist and draftsman with coloured chalks and charcoal, Degas created pencil drawings of warmth and charm that were quite unlike the cool, classic works of Ingres or the highly animated, sometimes violent sketches of Delacroix.
In a manuscript about the garden, he cites Pablo Neruda's description of Mexico, "with its cactus and its serpent," as being a land both "flower-bedecked and thorny, dry and hurricane-drenched, violent of sketch and color, violent of eruption and creation".
It inspired "a quite intelligent seven-year-old" (his words) called Cameron Mackintosh to pursue a musical theatre career, and provoked a notoriously violent Monty Python sketch.
The violent inmate's surreal sketches will be exhibited at the Zebra One gallery in Hampstead after the artworks (the ones peppered around this post) were discovered during a clear out.
Violent men die violently.
The procession is structured so that it never feels episodic; a symphonic continuity ties the character sketches together, and a violent, splenetic climax erupts in the wake of the comeuppance of the Merchant.
He regularly hangs out at a local bar where he gets free drinks from the female black bartender, Carole, in exchange for sketches of the somewhat annoying Shorty, Carole's violent, legless bouncer devotee.
The brisk eighty-three-minute running time boils the action down to some fairly flat sketch comedy and a very few (although effective) violent sequences in which absurdity and calamity unite to make grim situations seem funny.
But the details that emerged sketched a portrait of a deeply disturbed young man with a grudge against his employer and violent ideas about ridding the world of disabled people.
Marty remains blank even as his violent fantasies break through to reality, but his tenuous connection to his family and the countdown of his scant funds sketch a chilling story.
