Adventures in Time and Space

Well it’s taken me three whole Cyberman stories now to get round to the whole Body-shock imagery of the half-human monsters. Hopefully I’ve created something confrontational, contrasting organic and linear shapes, and the tones of blood and ice that I feel sum up this story, the Cybermen at their most chilling and menacing.

Its common in literature to look to one character in relation to another, to draw conclusions by looking at symmetry in a play – we only really understand Othello and Iago in relation to one another. If this is the case, then we learn more about the Daleks’ nature in this story than since their first appearance, and it is through Maxtible – he holds up a dramatic mirror to the Daleks, to the Emperor, and to whatever twisted genius created them, gave them “the Dalek factor”. Maxtible’s pursuit of the secrets of alchemy isn’t really motivated by Avaricious intent, or wealth – he’s a wealthy man already – but by the pursuit of a seemingly unobtainable, scientifically unproven intellectual goal, founded only in archaic mythology and antediluvian pseudo-science. A bit like Dalek genetics. Really, it’s a portrait of madness, of hell given human eyes.

The amazing thing about this story is that, after all the worlds and alien stories of Dr Who, it still manages to make the good old aeroplane (airplane to our American readers) seem amazing. There’s such a sense of scale as the Chameleon Tours flight wings its way into the sky, to a station up in the stratosphere. The combined images of aviation and the biological, organic nature of the threat seemed to lend themselves to some bold, abstract art. Here’s theplane, then, dwarfed by the Chameleon sky.

A claw snaps in the night, bold catoonish strokes, a colony where ideas are shrouded by brash colours.

This painting does not exist!

Really needed to do some more figure-drawing, not been happy with my work in that area of late. Much happier with the sketches here though. Plus only Polly could still look gorgeous in those space-suits!

What a bonkers story – lots of visuals, though, so I felt that dictated a very abstract approach – aquatic textures, rock formations, the Fish People’s balletic movement. Hopefully I’ve got a bit of the sense of a Zaroff’s world spiralling out of control too.

There is something about battlefields. A strange serenity. I’ve never visited Culloden, but I have visited Scotland (a pic from my hols years ago served as a model for the topography), and a few battlefields in Normandy and Flanders. I wanted to get that sense of stillness, to imagine Culloden as a stage to this explosion of activity, to the terrible events there, and also the strange element of humour in The Highlanders. I’ve stilled the image through subtle vertical streaks in the watercolour, and tried to create a sense of the Scottish hillsides through strong line-work.

A questionable identity, trusted and distrusted by the colonists in equal measure. The Doctor and the Daleks’ motives are at the heart of this story.

Marathoners with long memories may remember what I did with The Daleks’ Masterplan, and it felt fitting to reference this in their subsequent story, if only to highlight the differences. That dark crimson seemed appropriate for the late Hartnell era, at once rich and textured, and punctuated by a futuristic aesthetic. But the Troughton era feels like it should have a warmer palette. By using the crimson again, though, hopefully I’ll draw out the undercurrents and the continuity in the show.

Oh I was going to do something bonkers, some graphic celebration of the Cyberman, highlighting the creatures’ nature as the result f some post-modern Prometheus (if you’ll forgive the pun). I can see it now – flesh and metal, cogs and valves and veins and sinews.

But cyberman stories are two-a-penny. There was only one sketch I could really present for this one.

Bill, we will miss you. You gave us The Doctor. Companions came and went, only one man let us touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky. Those closing scenes of Part 4, “wearing a bit thin”, it’s a shock, it’s amazing acting. How will things ever be the same?

Well I admit I did choose any tenuous link to the Cornish setting and went off at a bit of a tangent. Probably a good thing, because it highlights my problem with this story, in that I just don’t seem to “get” the atmosphere of it. As a result, I went back to what I know about British Landscape painting, and I love Peter Lanyon’s work, and also tried to get in some nods to other landscape artists. The model I used wasn’t actually from the Cornish coast – I was down in Aberystwyth the other week, and took my sketchbook along, did a couple of pastel drawings (which you can see on this page, by the way!), and whilst not the actual setting, I hope the painting benefits from some primary observation – something it’s not often possible to do on this project, what with it being about TV episodes made 40 years ago!