Henry Moore enjoyed the grazing calmness of sheep. The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way as his own sculptures, simultaneously fitting in and seeming anomalous. They litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.

Writer Roger Deakin recognised this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs. He wrote of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep. ‘I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses’, he recalled. ‘They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animated stones, the makers of their own landscape.’  This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink that would eventually make up his 1980 publication Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook.

Moore brought a physicality to the flat surface of his paper when drawing his sheep.  He used a regular ball-point pen, allowing him the ease to glide over the paper when necessary but also to swirl violently and cut into it. For such a placid subject, the movement and energy generated by Moore showcases his deep fascination with the animal, but one that is essentially of the moment.

This sense of timeliness in the frenzied, woollen swirls seems at first to go against Moore’s own assessment of his methodology whereby ‘Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life – but may be a penetration into reality… as expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living.’

In some ways, Moore was attempting to recreate some sort of natural appearance but it was not the point of the work. The natural appearance is the portal to something else, the placement of shapes in an abstract landscape. Perhaps Moore could see the process occurring when a sheep was augmenting its surroundings naturally and more quickly than he could with a sculptural work. Speed becomes a new tool in Moore’s repertoire when drawing sheep, forcing him to innovate and tap into the fluid motions constantly associated with him but in a more instantaneous way.

This ties in further to how Moore actually went about the very structure of the sheep drawings. As Becca Lewis writes in her essay on Moore, the artist took the risky strategy of beginning the shading of the animals straight away rather than attempting an initial outline:

His sheep sketches are very accurate and first look solid in form when standing from a distance, yet when you get closer to the imagery you start to notice his style. Zig-zags and rushed ball point pen lines dominate the drawings, thicker and more panicked scratches where there is less light and softer yet still sudden and vigorous on the brighter parts of the scene. Moore also rarely started his sketches by outlining his sheep, but started shading straight away, a risky strategy especially with the use of ball point pen but nonetheless effective. (Link)

This arguably belies Moore’s primary role as a sculptor, engaging in texture right from the off. When sculpting, the relationship between outer form and general texture would be constant. On paper, the attempt to recreate that same relationship provides a surprising element of transience to the sheep as they go about their everyday business of milling about. They may have moved out of the position that provided Moore with this initial inspiration but the artist essentially links their textures to the landscape that they inhabit; the woolly cacophony of the animals being part of the momentary process of place.

Zigzag wanderers of the meadow,

Gateposts marking boundary,

Out of the dazed eye-line,

Awash with ink eddies,

Itching ked. 

Revolving knolls, woollen wisps,

Ghost mammals chewing their way,

To the other side of a rocky outcrop. 

Moss in the Dewclaw: kick, flit, sketch, limn. 

Ad hoc, dock and hock. 

Come-By,

In Here,

Ink to shape,

Silhouette,

That’ll do.