A Ticket to Ride...

David Avery

David Avery says of this print: "For a long time I had been thinking about the last couple of stanzas of "Tom O'Bedlam", which I had discovered in Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight. Upon revisiting Durer's engraving "Knight, Death, and Devil", this image started to take form. These are the lines in question:

With a host of furious fancies / Whereof I am commander,/ With a burning spear and horse of air, / To the Wilderness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end: / Methinks it is no journey.

In addition, William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was quite influential for me at the time, and I replaced Devil and Death in the Durer engraving with disembodied hands ("Idle hands are the tools of..."). Needless to say, Kenneth Patchen's underlying theme of confrontation with the self was inescapable in the realization of this work, as well as anachronism, which plays an important part in my work, connecting themes of the past with out current predicaments to create multilayered possibilities of meaning.