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.

A Sussex Albion

Finished this today. 

William Blake and his wife metaphorically cast out from the Garden of Eden - or rather in this case Felpham - Adam and Eve style, after the incident with the soldier, and overlooked by one of his angels that lived in the trees.

Most of the cuttings for this collage came from a stash of old National Geographics - I believe the thatch in reality is a desert and the angel's robe, for instance, part of the Lascaux caves.

I love these transformations.

Anyway, it's a relief to have finished it at last.

Its completion coincides with my beginning a new book tomorrow which may or may not provide me with food for thought for my next House......

Wrestling with Blake

This is possibly my most difficult one so far, in that it has so far caused not one but two headaches. There is a lot of standing up involved in making a collage, what am I saying, more standing up than sitting down. And the combination with a bowed head is not good. Last night I feared a migraine so took myself off to bed with the cats locked out. Ooof, very serious that. They are still sulking..

The hippy lookalike is gone and replaced with a tree which I hope looks a bit Blakean with some sheep and vapours. Blake was big on sheep. (While I am in danger of contracting the vapours). In fact I may put this vignette on the back burner for a painting at some point.

Hopefully it's all looking very Albion-y and green and pleasant landish. I think I'd like to go for a walk through this garden.

Oh, and the significance of the scythe - I nearly forgot:
"In the summer of 1803 Blake found in the garden of his cottage a soldier, called in by the gardener, it seems, to cut the grass. Blake did not like soldiers; he was against war as such, and against the war of English intervention in France in particular. He ordered the intruder out by main force. Ill-advised words followed, reported as "Damn the King, and damn all his soldiers, they are all slaves"; and some remarks about Napoleon more fitted to the mouth of a French than of an English poet ..."

The upshot was poor old Blake was tried at Chichester for treason but eventually acquitted.

Bring me my scissors of delight ...

Well, it's got a catchy tune ... and I am enjoying getting stuck into this (puns'r'us). It's getting to the complicated, decisions-to-be-decided-upon stage. I always seem to start with the windows, I find they concentrate my mind wonderfully.

Blake and Catherine, his long-suffering wife, were known for stripping off in their garden in Lambeth so I have no doubt they did so in the far less urban surroundings of Felpham, so there they are. At the moment.

"I have very little of Mr Blake's company," Catherine was quoted as saying, "he is always in Paradise."
So I must place much more paradaisical green and pleasant vegetation in here to compliment the Adam and Eve of Felpham.

The archway I think may have been a later addition to the cottage but I have purloined it for 1800 as it has a Blakean, grotto-like feel. The scythe represents an infamous episode which led to Blake's trial for treason in Chichester, which I will relate in my next post being as I am pressed for time right now.

The angels .... Blake used to converse with them and see them in trees. I am not sure the more finished one on the left isn't influenced by my last post and Alan's comments - a bit flower-powery and harking back to those art school days of mine.

Entirely unlooked for effect.
Such is the power of the subconscious...

Beginning with Blake

My love of William Blake dates back to my art school days when he fitted in with all that rebellion, mysticism and downright morbid angst to which spotty youth is so prone. Bedsits with Athena posters of Blake's engraving of Newton, funny cigarettes and vile smelling joss sticks ... those were the days... Blake spans such a wonderful period of English history, being born just before Romanticism really got underway , in 1757 and dying in 1827.

A dyed in the wool Londoner, he nevertheless has a connection to my favourite county, Sussex, having lived in the idyllic village of Felpham for three years (1800-1803) during which time he produced the strangely wondrous words for Jerusalem. The cottage, then called Rose Cottage, still stands but is privately owned.
So I have decided it is to be my next collage capture.

Here is the roughest of rough beginnings:

And here is an engraving of the building by the great man himself:

I think the blue is too strong. I want to keep to the true Blakean palette. That means a lot of whittling down of cuttings scraps ... watch this space!