Press "Enter" to skip to content

2022. Winterreise Lockdown

‘Alice Coote (accompanist Christian Blackshaw) performing Schubert’s Winterreise at Wigmore Hall during lockdown’. Drawings (eight images).

I took screenshots of Alice Coote’s recital of Schubert’s Winterreise when it was live-streamed from Wigmore Hall in November 2020. As my drawings progressed I began to strip away Wigmore’s sumptuous interior, gradually reducing the colours to a grisaille and returning the flock wallpaper and polished mahogany to a muted tangle, more Winterreise than Wigmore perhaps. Alice Coote, although difficult to identify in these drawings is as present as the screenshots and my memory of the performance could achieve. I drew with combinations of hard pencils, watching the singer emerge through the thickets of background texture. I made the drawings to the accompaniment of recordings (Alice’s mostly) of Schubert’s Winterreise.