Indigo Days (Julian Trevelyan) (1957)

Dust-wrapper designed by Julian Trevelyan.The development of an artist must always be a hazardous business. In these pages, Julian Trevelyan describes the episodes of his life as a painter which have led him gradually to a full understanding of his art.At school and at Cambridge, he was already itching to paint, but his gregarious nature put many obstacles in his way. In Paris, where he worked for three years, he developed a split artistic personality. Among the tarts and scroungers of the Dome, he learnt perhaps more of life than of painting. When at last he settled down in his studio by the Thames, he was still the victim of various influences. For a while he was a Surrealist and describes amusingly the vicissitudes of the band of faithful English followers before the war. They met and followed leaders in the shadow of the Spanish civil war and the growth of Fascism, against which they attempted ineffectually to protest.During the war, as a Camouflage Officer, he was able to temper the absurdities of Army life with a kind of Surrealist vision, but serious creative work was hardly possible under such conditions and inevitably his painting suffered. In 1942, however, he was sent on a short fact-finding mission across central Africa to the Middle East. The visit opened an exciting world in which he now found himself gave a much needed stimulus to his art.After the war, Trevelyan at last found an individual style, truly suited to the expression of his personal vision. He ends his book by explaining, from the inside, how a picture is born and how, as in his own cases, Chance and Volition fight over its growth.Condition: small chipping to head of dust-wrapper’s spine otherwise near fine