Showing posts with label Wuthering Heights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wuthering Heights. Show all posts

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Haworth Moon

A long silence generally means I'm having trouble ...
And so it was.


I am a slow worker at the best of times and have nothing but envy for the prolific and (apparently) sure-footed output of some artists I follow by blog and website. I, on the other hand, spend a lot of time dithering about finally sticking certain passages down. And I haven't even mentioned changes to the original plan. And changes to the changes. Which sometimes occur to me, eureka-like, while washing up or weeding the garden.
Suffice it to say that at one point I cut this collage in half and redid the whole damn skyscape.

Then changed the printed page clouds into funereal black curtains. Which may or may not have come about after looking at prints of Victorian curtained hearses recently or possibly thinking about the theatre which was a consequence of thinking about the inherent melodrama of what Lucasta Miller called the Bronte myth. Who knows what goes on in the recesses of my cluttered mind and sketchbooks?

Anyway, here it is. In my amateur photo form. I will get it scanned at some point. The light wasn't very good on this overcast day.
The rain has changed into what? Wind? Elemental sparks? That parsonage must have been fairly crackling with elemental sparks I think.

Detail showing drapes!
The Bronte sisters here are out on a stormy moonlit night. No sign of either Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath.
But perhaps an echo of something I noted down among my prelim sketches remains:
"I understand that the sun very seldom shone on the Bronte family," Woolf wrote in 1903.
You can say that again.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Seen through a collage, darkly

Oooh look at that heading .... all this TV Shakespeare must be rubbing off on me!
Anyway, at last a return to the paintbrush, as you see:


Not sure if it's any good but it's what I've had in mind for a while: re-interpreting my collages (which after all are themselves interpretations) in paint. But in this case (and possibly others) pared back and darker.

I daresay it wouldn't do to go back to a photograph and compare this finished article wth the actual building. But then it isn't meant to be a faithful reproduction. Just a spartan and naive echo of Haworth Parsonage.

An interpretation of an interpretation. A dream of a dream. Never mind Shakespeare, now I'm veering into Freud. Though in fact I do remember reading, many years ago and possibly in a preface to Wuthering Heights, about the enormous significance of windows and doors in the Brontes' work.

I wouldn't mind betting walls are pretty Freudian too ...