£1,500 

Charles Mahoney:
The Artist picking Sunflowers
Mounted (ref: 2144)
Pen and ink, wash on brown paper

Tags: Charles Mahoney ink Pen pen and ink wash flowers Garden men

Provenance: The Artist's Studio

Self-portraits occur rarely in Mahoney’s oeuvre. It is tempting to link this to the artist’s innate modesty. An absence of early self-portraits – during a period when artists might obviously explore their own physionomy – is especially striking. Conversely Mahoney’s young contemporaries, for instance, Percy Horton, Geoffrey Rhodes and Barnett Freedman, all made early portraits of him. In the few self-portraits that are known Mahoney typically showed himself in outdoor attire: weather permitting, Mahoney preferred working outdoors. He also wore his trilby hat to shade his eye from strong light when working in his studio.

For drawing, Mahoney liked a textured paper, soft to the touch, such as Ingres, or still better, hand-made papers from firms such as Hayle Mill or Barcham Green. Occasionally he bought cheap sketchbooks from Woolworth’s because he found the paper so sympathetic as a surface for drawing. For his earliest drawings he used mainly B or 2B pencils, but he later preferred Black Prince or carbon pencils. He often used charcoal, adding white or red crayons to highlight drawings. Sometimes he combined these with conté crayons or pastels. For his later drawings he preferred pen and wash, taking great trouble to mix and dilute his inks until he achieved the required tone and colour. His drawing pens were either reservoir nibs in holders or else cartridge pens.