Words Upon His Stone: Hoofbeats at Drumcliff Churchyard
by Steven McCabe
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by!
Irish poet William Butler Yeats
June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939
Horseman, pass by!
Horseman, pass by!
abstracted painting blended
with arcane images
of ancient Egypt
suggesting influences
of the esoteric
and modernism
upon
Yeats
public domain Egyptology image: Internet Archive
painting 2003 S. McCabe
poemimage 
vertical fading along life’s time-line…ending with ghostly fingerprints almost not there at all…powerful images, colours, can’t stop scrolling…
Hi John, thank you…In a way l tricked you inadvertently because I woke up and reconfigured the ending…then saw your comment… and by then the ‘ghostly fingerprints’ were gone.
I liked your phrase so much I created a new image with ‘g.f.’ in mind…& traces of their movement…just before the appearance of the blue ‘shape.’ Thank you for contributing!
Ha! Love the collaboration. I was here earlier too. Totally taken by and with the edit!
Hi j.h., Thank you for your thoughts and I’m glad you were able to catch it in process. If this post was a movie it would backtrack and change directions multiple times before settling on the final storyline. Quite a phenomena how digital formats offers both instant gratification and ‘real time’ possibilities for revision.
Powerful work. There is something so moving about Egyptian figures in sarcophagi. Their constraint, vulnerability. Perfect companion to Yeats’s poignant words. Thank you.
And thank you for your thoughts about the work, as well as your observations about the sarcophagi and their dovetailing with Yeats’s words…
The last one is gorgeous. Fantastic blues. Is it all photoshop, certainly doesn’t look like it, particularly the rough/scratchy texture. Greta work.
Thank you Michel. The last painting is acrylic on canvas (24″ X 32″) with some wax and traces of plaster gauze (mostly affixed in the first place to pull off and create a texture). Otherwise a lot of photoshop.
Confused. Don’t want to pry into your technique but do you mean you work on canvas or paper and then photograph the artwork to work on photoshop or is it the other way round?
That’s fine Michel I don’t take it as prying. I think the answer to your question is ‘both.’
In this case I had a photograph of the art work (painting) and then manipulated it in photoshop to create certain effects. The final shot is the painting straight up.
Often I work scanned ink drawings into already generated/ colour & texture photoshop compositions.
And sometimes alter ink drawings in photoshop and they evolve into whatever place they go.
Now I’m trying to remember if I ever just start in photoshop with a blank white space. Sometimes. But usually drawing. With a tablet. Then the colours and textures follow.
And even if the drawing ends up as textural images more than a ‘picture’ I have that in a ‘folder’ to use or incorporate with images of finished artwork.
I think that’s the process! I often end up with a folder of 50 or 80 or over 100 images to select from for each post.
Interesting and inspiring!
I’ve wondered too how you go about about your stunning work Michel especially the photomyth series. There is such an air of mystery and completion.
Similar process. I work with my own photographs usually of Greece and other landscapes and then build layer upon layer in photoshop, using photographs of mine of nudes or statues and textures. Than sometimes I print a copy on textured paper, work with pastels or gouache, take a photograph of the finished artwork and continue working on it in photoshop. I then order prints on a nice paper called Hannemhule.
Fascinating process. Thanks much for sharing this!
Fading in and out, beginning and ending with the sublime.
I’ve always loved the word hoofbeats for some reason…
thank you Karen…now I’m thinking about the word hoofbeats…insistence, echoes, weight, soft/hard sounds intermingled…movement..texture & to think about these sounds as one layer in an image…