20 October 1986 - 2025: Happy 39th Birthday, "Ask"

veradapozzo8
3 days ago
2 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Last year I had not the time to write something about one of my favourites songs by The Smiths, but I made this drawing, taking my inspiration from the Australian sleeve of the single.

Here is my artwork:

Below, the Australian sleeve for Ask, with Cemetry Gates as the B-side. Photograph by Jo Novark.

Cemetry Gates is another of my favourite Smiths songs: I was blessed to listen to both of these songs live, at my very first Morrissey's concert at the Paris Zénith in 2009.

As I noted on the page of my 2024/2025 diary, when I finished my black Bic pen drawing (always made without preparatory sketch), there is something in Morrissey's pose, expression and hands that reminds me of Egon Schiele's paintings and drawings. When I was in Vienna, last July, for enjoying both Morrissey's gig and the stunning beauty of Vienna, I visited the Leopold Museum and an exhibition focused on Schiele's last years. Even if the main theme was the life and work of Egon Schiele during the Ist World War, many works from Schiele's first part of his (very sadly) short life and artistic journey were showed too.

Egon Schiele is an artist I deeply appreciate since my childhood (I was a quirky little girl and I would have rather spent school time in museums, theatres and music halls, instead of suffering in a schoolclass with a horrible and bully teacher) when history of art books were to me a sort of paper Wunderkammer. I guess that, when I made this drawing, I was unconsciously influenced by Schiele's impression, so that my drawing makes this more evident.

This year, I drew the sleeve for the British and European single with a beautiful picture of the late British actress Yootha Joyce. Her story would deserve an entire article, but for the moment I do not know when will I have the time to write it.

In order to evoke the original sleeve, I have experimented a dichromy black-red with my four-colours Bic pen; no preparatory sketch for this drawing neither. It has taken a little hour for making this drawing.