Looking for an excuse to have another try with Photoshop, I found this old portrait of the composer Tim Moore, for many years my landlord in Cambridge.I think I have better preserved the lines from the sketch this time, although the pencil drawing itself is a little overworked and dense in parts. The colours are from Photoshop’s palette and were only quickly added.
And what colours! Just in case anyone’s wondering, the turquoise T-shirt under a claret-pink corduroy exterior is quite accurate. Timothy Moore, who lived in the scruffy basement of his town house while the rest of us inhabited rooms in the floors above, was a genuine, unconscious eccentric. The son of the Philosopher George Moore, and the nephew (I think) of poet T. Sturge Moore, there was more than a whiff of Bloomsbury about Tim. That and recycled cigars (one butt rammed into the end of another) and heart stew. He was a gentleman, a champagne communist (which, sadly, made him vulnerable to his tenants), and a believer in a cashless society, phonetic orthography and Jazz for children.
He died in 2003.
Ooh er… this is where I confess my total ignorance and say…what is phonetic orthography? I totally agree with Jazz for children however, a very fair exchange!
Ha ha!Perhaps I should have put 'Fonehtik Awthografee'. I still have a Christmas card from Tim somewhere: Hapee Krismuss, etc.
Lovely sketch, Thomas. My daughter began discussing G.E.Moore as part of A-level philosophy revision. And I found myself leaping in the air, yelling “His son was my landlord!” Then went on a hunt for a photo of Tim and found your drawing. Thank you!
Did you ever draw Diana, glimpsed through the pall of Golden Virginia smoke?