Life Drawings by alej ez at Bottoms Rest, Hove
🗓️ 24 Nov 2025 – 12 Jan 2026
📍 Bottoms Rest Pub. Lower Market St, Hove BN3 1AT
A show of my latest experiments in life drawing: a series of ink and pastel pieces, each one created on a page from a 1912 edition of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. The result links the immediacy of drawing from life with the literary poems of the Victorian era.
Reading the poems in this book — before, after, and during the process of drawing at the studio at the Sussex County Arts Club — together with the interaction with our models, throws new emotional light and meanings not only in the poems but also in the lives of the authors I research. Especially those who are now identified as queer, and who at the time struggled with their identities.
And he is clothed in white,
I’ll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
As unto a stream we will step down,
And bathe there in God’s sight.
“We two will stand beside that shrine,
Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirred continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.
From
The Blessed Damozel
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
And shall I weep that Love’s no more,
And magnify his reign?
Sure never mortal man before
Would have his grief again.
Farewell the long-continued ache,
The days a-dream, the nights awake.
I will rejoice and merry make,
And never more complain.
From
Le Roi est Mort
by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson
Straightway then aloft I swam
Through the mountain’s sulphurous sty:
Not eternal death could damn
Such a hardy soul as I.
From the mountain’s burning crest
Like a god I come again,
And with an immortal zest
Challenge Fate to throw the main.
From
Holiday
by John Davidson (1857–1909)
The swallow leaves her nest,
The soul my weary breast;
But therefore let the rain
On my grave
Fall pure; for why complain?
Since both will come again
O’er the wave.
The wind dead leaves and snow
Doth hurry to and fro;
And, once, a day shall break
O’er the wave,
When a storm of ghosts shall shake
The dead, until they wake
In the grave.
From
The swallow leaves her nest
by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
FIND MORE ABOUT THIS FASCINATING QUEER ARTIST IN THIS LINK
And ‘twixt them glinting curves of silver glance If Zephyr, dimpling dark calm, counts them o’er.
Let soak thy fruit for two days thus, then tread !:
While bare-legg’d bumpkins dance,
Bright from thy bursting press arch’d spouts shall pour, And gurgling torrents towards thy vats run red
From
Sent from Egypt
by T. Sturge Moore
Forgive and tell me that sweet tale, How you and I one day may live In some diviner vale.
In some diviner vale, dear child,
Than this in which we lie
And watch the monstrous mountains piled
And clouded into sky.
Yet even there, far out of reach Are peaks we cannot scale,
For God has something still to teach In that diviner vale.
From
Le Roi est Mort
by Francis Burdet Money-Coutts
READ MORE ABOUT THE FASCINATING QUEER STORY OF HER DAUGHTER IN THIS LINK
Latest, earliest of the year,
Primroses that still were here,
Snugly nestling round the boles
Of the cut-down chestnut poles,
When December’s tottering tread
Rustled ‘mong the deep leaves dead,
And with confident young faces
Peeped from out the sheltered places
When pale January lay
In its cradle day by day,
Dead or living, hard to say;
Now that mid-March blows and blusters,
Out you steal in tufts and clusters,
Making leafless lane and wood
Vernal with your hardihood.
Other lovely things are rare,
You are prodigal as fair.
First you come by ones and ones,
Lastly in battalions,
Skirmish along hedge and bank,
Turn old Winter’s wavering flank,
Round his flying footsteps hover,
Seize on hollow, ridge, and cover,
Leave nor slope nor hill unharried,
Till, his snowy trenches carried,
O’er his sepulchre you laugh,
Winter’s joyous epitaph.
From
Primroses
by Alfred Austini
The croak of a raven hoar!
A dog’s howl, kennel-tied!
Loud shuts the carriage-door:
The two are away on their ghastly ride
To Death’s salt shore!
Where are the love and the grace?
The bridegroom is thirsty and cold!
The bride’s skull sharpens her face!
But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold,
The devil’s pace.
The horses shivered and shook
Waiting gaunt and haggard
With sorry and evil look;
But swift as a drunken wind they staggered
‘Longst Lethe brook.
From
A Mammon-Marriage
by George MacDonald
