The Waves and the Writing Lodge

After The Waves (Virginia Woolf's Writing Lodge)

 

I will not disguise the fact that this latest picture has been something of a slog. I tell you if I don't see another ruddy leaf it'll be a day too soon. Hundreds of the things there are in this. Well, that's what it felt like anyway. Which of course is the effect I was after, but still ...

 

I have promised myself an urban house next. Lots of bricks to take away the pain of all these leaves.

 

Having said all that I think I managed to approximate to what I was after re the subject of the piece, that is, the moment when Leonard comes out to tell Virginia that The Waves is a masterpiece. She sure earned that drink down by her side! (So did I when I glued in the last leaf). I've put waves (thank you, National Geographic) in the windows of her writing hut and there is a bit of a wavy thing going on with the whole composition too - chestnut tree included.

Sea greens and sea blues ... and a foam of daisies encroaching on the terrace.

Whoops - you'll have to click on the picture if you want to get a complete view (otherwise you'll miss the ubiquitous Amanda W cat!)

Virginia Woolf's wood pigeons

She has a lot.

Overhead.

Hope they don't disturb her train of creative thought!

 

Tricky little blighters to cut and stick too ....

 

 

 

I love the sound of these birds and seem to remember them calling when I visited Monk's House years ago. I daresay they aren't as gregarious as this little lot but that's my artistic prerogative!

 

So here's a detail of the writing lodge's spreading chestnut tree as it stands at present on my drawing board.

 

On we go ...

Collagistic hangover

This is no fun. Feeling totally groggy after a late night session at the cutting table. Finally called it a morning at 3.30 am and although I haven't totally broken the back of Virginia Woolf's writing shed, I am now pretty confident of it turning out okay.

Eventually.

My problem was I had zonked out on the sofa earlier due to some desperately boring rubbish on the television. Which catnap kept me going into the early hours with the aid of the BBC World Service (NEVER desperately boring) on the radio via my computer. I love working through the night like that, hearing stories - in the safety of my studio - from foreign correspondents in far flung dangerous places, (I will always associate that apple orchard on the right with a war photographer's harrowing account of Marie Colvin's last days) but the price is to feel like a half dead zombie (if that is possible) the next day...

Anyway the above is what I came through to this morning.

And here is a Sussex Downs vignette coming along in the background. Norman (?) church and all.

 

More sheep are needed over here - and more chestnut leaves.

Right, better try reviving myself with some tea and toast...

 

Progress on the Writing Lodge

 

This is the tricky bit .... stopping myself from getting caught up in the creative moment and going too far with blocking in a collage before it has been transferred to its paper base.

Even worse, it is a Sunday and I have no suitable paper other than the piece all these bits are currently occupying. Worse still, it is not one but two pieces which I shall have to tape together. The only available blue in the shop yesterday was a rather fetching teal shade, but far too dark for what I have in mind. So these two pieces it will have to be. And I will have to reconstruct the image so far.

Thank goodness for digital photos.

But blimey, all those little leaves on the spreading chestnut tree!

Serves me right for getting low on powder and mid-blue Canson papers.

Writing lodge doodles ...

 

Initially I thought about putting one of those convivial groups of Bloomsbury members sitting about in deckchairs outside the hut. But then I read this:

 

"It was here that Leonard came out in July 1931 to tell her that The Waves, which he had just finished reading was a masterpiece."

 

So, a bit of drama.

The deckchair will probably go.

Far too laid back (both literally and figuratively)!

 

Blake's Cottage and Woolf's Lodge

Struggling here with a different formatting to post a message to confirm I am still alive. Looks awful as I type but seems to come out okay. Anyway, that's enough of the technicalities .... Here's what I have been doing lately. It's an image I made a while back of William Blake's cottage in Felpham, West Sussex. It is about to go to a new home in the US so I added a few finishing touches and tidying round the edges I had been meaning to do for ages but never got round to.

The colours on the finished picture aren't true, it being an overcast morning this morning, but you might see a few small changes in the details. Golly, it's like one of those Spot the Difference puzzles I remember from the olden days of Look & Learn and News of the World! I have also been sorting scraps and making sketches relating to another Sussex resident. It's a take on Virginia Woolf's dinky little hut which she grandly called her Writing Lodge that stands in the garden of Monk's House. I have assembled quite a pile of possibilities scrap-wise and am looking forward to getting stuck into it tomorrow. Should be interesting. I do like huts.

Posting to Virginia Woolf

Two and a bit kilos worth of cards and mini prints are at this moment winging their way to the cottage in East Sussex where Virginia Woolf (when not in London) lived, wrote, and ultimately from where she walked to her death in the nearby River Ouse.

It is now owned by the National Trust.

It is hugely exciting to have my work on sale in places where my literary heroes lived (as I said last year when I got cards and prints into Keats House). I can't remember exactly how and when I came upon Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, but I do know I was at art school, so that's almost donkey's years ago!

So here (just in case you missed them previously!) is a reprise of the images of Monk's House which will be on sale at their newly installed shop as of next week.

Virginia Woolf in the snow

I think this is finished. In fact I will put it away before it gets over fussy.

Virginia Woolf being greeted by the couple's dog, Pinka, the spaniel given to the Woolfs by Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic writer/poet/gardener who was also at one time the lover of  Virginia and muse for her novel Orlando.

Note her Omega-inspired handbag and Omega-style curtains!

(The Omega Workshops were the artistic wing of the Bloomsbury Group).

I have taken a massive artistic liberty in leaving so many leaves on the plants and trees at Christmas time. My excuse is that they are the ghosts of leaves past.

And I'm sticking to it. Or rather they are if you'll excuse the pun.

This is the fourth in my series of Christmas card designs.

On sale later this year ... watch this (and other) space(s).

A Virginia Woolf Christmas ...

This is what is on my drawing board at the moment. The cottage of the Woolfs.  To add to my Christmas card selection. Very little is stuck down, a slight breeze or a wayward cat could cause a Rodmell earthquake. I get nervous about leaving the studio door open.

But the table is full of offcuts from my magazine cuttings box which may be substituted before anything gets glued. And Pinka Woolf, the spaniel, has to be fitted into the picture too.

All in all it's a bit up in the air (though thankfully not literally) right now.

Meanwhile, outside the heatwave continues to swelter.

And our mad neighbour continues to play at earth moving...

Dust and deafening noise ... thank goodness I can concentrate on tranquil snowy Sussex.

Who's afraid of the Long Man of Wilmington?

Night and Day, Monk's House, Rodmell.

Nobody, now he's been restored to his original form after that massive aberration (is this the word I am searching for I wonder?) given him by some pranksters a couple of years back. So here he is, not in need of any modesty foliage, guardian of the South Downs and Virginia Woolf's countryside retreat.

It is many years since I visited it but I remember it as a place of wonderful tranquility and dense greenery. Some of that greenery I had to sacrifice in this picture in order to allow for the sight of the house itself. Inside it was almost like being underwater, what with the shrubs and trees pressing up against the small windows and the walls being painted in a lovely antiquey pale green shade.

Given Woolf's untimely end that is perhaps unfortunate. 

Or maybe fitting.

Anyway, I'm fairly happy with this one.

Now onto someone else's house......

Who will it be I wonder?

Tweaking away at Monk's House ...

.....Described as "a modest brick and flint dwelling, weather-boarded on the street side", it was bought by the Woolfs in 1919, the year of the publication of Night and Day (hence the moon and the sun) for all of 700 quid. It had no bath, hot water or even a toilet.

As Quentin Bell puts it:
"On September 1st they loaded two waggons with their possessions, crossed the Ouse and moved into Monk's House ... Virginia was obliged to admit to herself she was depressed. Whether the melancholy arose from the comparative imperfections of her new house or from the fact that Duckworth was about to publish Night and Day is not easily determined."

I am no Virginia Woolf but I have to say, in a flippant aside, that the possession of hot and cold running water and a toilet does contribute greatly to my happy-ometer. The personal hygiene arrangements - or rather the lack of them - of past generations has always been a deeply interesting subject for me.

Anyway, to get back to the picture in hand, I am now seeing my way with it and plan to include the Long Man of Wilmington which I am quite sure cannot be seen from Monk's House but is in the vicinity, well about 10 miles off. He is a figure, originally carved from the chalk uplands, regarded as a guardian of the South Downs. So in he goes. Tomorrow
For now, it's back to the drawing board ...

The Woolfs' Retreat

Virginia and Leonard, that is, in the East Sussex countryside.

Near Lewes.

This is still at the planning and moving around and humming and ha-ing stage, as you see. But I needed to take a photo just in case the lot went flying and I was left with bits on the studio floor and a paper puzzle to solve.

Next to Keats and his circle come the Bloomsberries in my affections. I caught both early - in my teens - and they persist all these years later. In fact now I come to think of it the first two things I bought myself with the first wages I earned in my first job was a smelly Afghan jacket and the two volume biography of Virginia Woolf by her nephew Quentin Bell.

Many years and thousands of kilometres later I still have the books. 

God knows what happened to that absolutely frightful jacket.