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.

Something about Blogger .... does my head in

I am getting soo fed up with technology.
For some reason I am unable to fathom,
I can't post any pictures to my blog at present.
And an art blog without pictures ... well, it's rubbish really.
So until normal service is resumed, I am stymied....

Will keep trying though.

Happy New Year and London memories

The first post of a new year, the first completed image of my new year!

A house in Texas, with family and pets (past and present), that was commissioned just before Christmas and my trip back to Chichester and London.

Seems a long time ago, already.

The beauty of dumping myself on my daughters is that they move around London so much. I was born in Paddington, but brought up south of the river. I never really was very au fait with the other side. Thanks to them I have found myself north-west, north and east so far.

 

This time Whitechapel, Ripper territory. Loved it. A few yards from the Bell Foundry (the oldest still in business business in Britain - since the fifteenth century) which is in a wonderful little row of dilapidated Georgian buildings with real live Georgian shops, bow fronted windows on the pavement. All empty, neglected and unoccupied and all the more romantic for it.

I love the unexpectedness and living history of London, the way as we hurried to catch the tube one morning I happened to look to the right and saw a blue plaque commemorating the fact that on that spot Isaac Rosenberg had lived, then stumbling upon Captain Bligh's house across the river, stepping into Benjamin Franklin's bare bones of an eighteenth century house near Trafalgar Square, passing by Virginia Woolf's home in Bloomsbury (you may have noticed I have a thing about houses  ....). And reacquainting myself with Keats House, of course. With the excuse (if one were needed) of delivering some cards.

 

So here I am, back in the bananas and fiddling with some sketches, some dried mulberry leaves from the original tree outside Brown's parlour window and a stash of autumnal coloured cuttings ... I feel a new Wentworth Place picture coming on ...

Happy Christmas and a Mea Culpa to All My Followers

 

Apologies for my recent neglect, apologies for not having been around to reply to lovely comments, and then catching up a bit late in the day to respond ... I have been a bit overwhelmed by work (and life) just lately. That'll teach me to have overseas exhibitions at Christmas time at the same time as an online shop selling Christmas cards ...

And having a hugely reduced screen so I miss out on blogging interaction since Blogger changed its design.

 

Will try to do better in 2013.

Promise!

My Writers' Houses in Chichester

I got back Tuesday night from England where I set up an exhibition in the cosy little Lobby Gallery in Chichester's Oxmarket Centre of Arts. The building is a 13th century former church, wonderfully weathered outside, bright and white in.  Above is a (not very good) photo of the poster for the show. Below is one of me looking a bit fierce!

It's a stressful thing to put yourself through, from a practical and physical point of view (I am a migraine sufferer at the best (?) of times) but it's great to see the series (well the ones that haven't already gone to homes that is) up, present, correct and well lit. And to sort out my thoughts about it in an introduction.

Here it is:

The Writers' Houses Project

At about the time I was casting around for a way to interpret Wentworth Place (the Hampstead home of poet John Keats) following a recent inspirational visit, a fortuitous event took place when I found a pile of discarded Vogues put out for the rubbish which I promptly rescued without quite knowing what to do with them. Shortly after came a windfall of dozens of old National Geographics.

At some point as I passed these growing piles it occurred to me I had found my medium: paper, scissors and glue. And I had found myself a project: writers' houses, one which would blend art with my love of literature, buildings, research and a fascination with the past.

It has been said that houses may shape the writers dwelling in them by inspiring or conditioning them. Many of these buildings eventually become museums and places of pilgrimage. In so doing, according to one observer, the house may become a tool that transcends the personal nature of the memories it contains, and grow into a machine to evoke, through remembrance of things past, imagination of a more universal kind.

 

Intellectual conundrums aside, it has to be admitted that a lot of writers lived in some absolute peaches of houses which are a pleasure to portray.

The challenge I have set myself is to reflect their story.

 

 

Dangerously listing actually ....

... that's me at this pre-exhibition moment.

It's all very well putting pictures up cyberwise on the worldwide web but my anxiety levels know no bounds when it comes to the prospect of actually hanging the actual pieces in an actual gallery in an actual location.

Complications arise when that gallery is abroad and I have to add the worry of normal travel details like how many clothes and bits and pieces I can stuff into hand luggage.

The large case will be stuffed solely with writers' houses.

So at least that's simple.

 

My answer to all this is to go into list-making overdrive.

I write everything down on bits of paper.

And given that the studio is naturally awash with bits of paper anyway these lists tend to go under never to resurface ...

 

So the first and last item on these lists now generally begin with "Do list".

 

In between I am darting up and down to the framer.

And revising each image.

And adding bits and changing bits.

Like the latest house above which got two more birds and a bit more foliage before glazing.

 

Anyway, just look at this posting....

 

.... I have made another list.

 

(And you now know why I haven't been around much just lately).

Great expectations in a Georgian terraced house

Sweet Baby Charles (whoops - this picture isn't cropped. to be replaced at a later date!)

"A fairly ordinary terraced house near the dockyard in Portsmouth" was the setting for the arrival of Charles Dickens, born here, at 1, Mile End Terrace, on February 7, 1812.

Okay, so the family moved to another house (now demolished) up the road when little Charlie was just three months old, but nobody can take away the honour of being the birthplace of one of  literature's greats from this modest building, now the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum.

John Dickens, Charles's pater, who worked as a clerk at the Navy Pay Office at the nearby naval dockyard, paid £35 a year in rent for No. 1.

As might be expected none of the original furniture belonging to Mr and Mrs Dickens has survived, except for a built-in dresser in the kitchen. What is there, however, rather curiously in a house celebrating his birth, is the chaise longue on which he died fifty-eight years later, in a room next to the one in which he was born. Entrances and exits ... a theatrical twist which Dickens himself would no doubt have appreciated.

The couch was bequeathed to the house by his housekeeper at Gad's Hill in Rochester, his last home, now a school. At the time it was the only Dickens museum in the country. There are now three.

I based this collage on any number of old photographs and postcards of the building and tried to give it a bit of a fussy Dickensian novelish feel. It also, I hope, conveys a sense of happiness, a sunny time before the clouds of debt and poverty overtook the family; before John Dickens "a man prone to living beyond his means" ended up in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in Southwark, surrounded by his family.

This way for Writers' Houses Christmas cards ...

 

My Christmas cards are going great guns with Virginia Woolf (above) and the Brontes (the 2012 newcomers) (below) slogging it out for top position this year.

 

 

I started the series last year with John Keats (below)

 

 

and Jane Austen:

 

 

They are printed on white stock card and come with a white envelope in a cellophane bag.

Ideal for bookworms!

On sale in packets of three in my online Etsy shop:

www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite

until December 3.

The mystery of Harriet Shelley ...

... did she drown herself - or was she pushed?

 

Poor Harriet was the much maligned first wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who plucked her from her respectable school for young ladies in Clapham (where she was a fellow boarder with his sister) at the tender age of 16 and ran off north with her to get married.

 

She was a spirited soul, as her few surviving letters show, who indulged her young husband's idealistic fads, handing out revolutionary leaflets and transcribing his manuscripts. And having babies. And putting up with his selfish crushes on other women.

 

But she suffered a proper dumping when he eventually came into the orbit of the philosopher William Godwin and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The story goes that, highly pregnant with her third child (whose father may or may not have been Shelley or an army officer), she walked into the Serpentine one November day in 1816 and drowned herself, aged 21.

 

Little is known about poor Harriet beyond her tragic end. There is no portrait and only a few letters to show she ever existed. She had brought disgrace on her own family and was living in lodgings at the time of her death, though her father, a well-to-do merchant, provided her with money. Her existence seems to have been well and truly suppressed by Shelley, Godwin and his daughter, a fact which has outraged some and prompted support from some notable supporters down the centuries, most notably Mark Twain who wrote a sizzling essay, In Defence of Harriet Shelley.

 

More recently she has become the subject of a conspiracy theory which places William Godwin in the frame as murderer.

 

Godwin spent most of his life in debt and buttonholing people for "loans". Shelley provided him with generous funds to keep him and his dire bookselling business afloat. The theory goes that Shelley looked as if he was going to return to his wife (they had had a second official marriage) and Godwin, seeing his income under serious threat, managed somehow to do away with Harriet. It is a very strange thing that her suicide note, which many claim to be a forgery given that it is not in her hand, was found among Godwin's papers after his death.

 

Did Mary Shelley, who hated Harriet with a vengeance, know about or even collude in the crime and did some trace of it - or rather her or her father's guilt - subsequently find its way into her masterpiece, Frankenstein?

Who knows?

That is the fascination of conspiracy theories.

 

In the meantime I was between Writers' Houses and concocted an imaginary portrait of poor Harriet Westbrook Shelley.

Prospect Cottage and my love of (shingly) detail

Crikey - a whole 10 days have come and gone since I signed off with Charleston Farmhouse. Tempus fugit and all that.

 

I actually (sad soul that I am) looked up that saying to check on the spelling. And ended by knowing that it loosely comes from Virgil's Georgics: Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore = But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail.

 

And God knows my love of detail led me into an almost trance-like state sticking down these pebbles one by one, to say nothing of giving me a touch of the screaming ab-dabs from time to time. Virgil obviously knew a thing or two. Though possibly nothing involving glue sticks and cut up bits of National Geographic ...

So here is .... ta-ra .... Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, East Sussex, former home of Derek Jarman:

 

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English film director, artist, author and Aids and gay rights campaigner and creator of an open, fenceless, tranquil garden in an area by the sea famed as being Britain's only desert.

 

"You can't take life for granted in Dungeness," said a friend of Jarman shortly after his death and talking about his now famous garden. "Every bloom that flowers through the shingle is a miracle, a triumph of nature ..."

 

Prospect Cottage itself is a traditional tarred black fisherman's cottage which Jarman purchased in the last decade of his life with money left to him by his father.

The building and highly original garden certainly chime with the description of Jarman (in his role as film maker) as a "radical traditionalist".

 

The same article also described how his reading of Jung affected his films and "gave him a theoretical framework for his attempt to find the past in the present and the present in the past", a sentence that sings for me.

 

Anyway, he certainly strikes me as a person who lived and loved life to the full, so I have included a kind of tree of life in the foreground.

The cottage famously has lines from a John Donne poem, The Sun Rising, carved on an outside side wall. Some of my pebbles are cut up words of John Donne.

 

Here's a detail:

 

 

Each stone cut and glued by hand.

Thank goodness for Radio 4!

Charleston Farmhouse again ...

Plein Air in the Garden of Charleston Farmhouse

The lighting was better today and so I thought I would put this up again.

Yesterday's effort, taken in the evening, was far too gloomy.

 

I have also christened it.

Once I have a goodish photo and a title I feel I can move on to the next thing, somehow.

Vanessa Bell and a blank canvas in the garden at Charleston

 

Finished at last!

 

That was my fiddliest to date. Collaged gravel is something else to try to cut out and stick down.

 

The Carrington swan insisted on staying and the dainty young chap with no clothes on (unless you count the convenient wisp of Omega Workshops-style gauze of course) appeared after I had recced some Charleston photos and noted rather a lot of Grecian posing.

Vanessa is obviously having trouble deciding what to paint. Or maybe where to look.

 

The black cat which appeared in my first sketch has jumped up onto a commanding position on the wall.

 

I do wish I had placed the sun about one centimetre higher up. It's bothering me, but glue is not the most flexible medium when it comes to rectifying misplacements. I will have to have a think about that one.

 

Of course Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were artists and so I have wandered a bit from my remit here, but on the other hand think of all the Bloomsbury writers who visited Charleston. And Vanessa Bell's husband wrote books.

So that's alright then.

 

Anyway, time to tidy up the studio, do some admin and think about my next paper and scissors challenge ...

Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex

Here is a detail of what I am working on at the moment - Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex, a beautiful rambling building set like a jewel in a lush blowsy garden which was the rural retreat of the Bloomsbury Group, the home of painters Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia Woolf) and Duncan Grant from 1916.

"It's most lovely, very solid and simple," wrote Vanessa, "with perfectly flat  and tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes..."

 

Vanessa died in 1961. Duncan Grant lived on, the building deteriorating around him. In 1980 the Charleston Trust was set up to save and restore the house and garden and open it to the public. It is now a place of pilgrimage for Bloomsbury aficionados.

There are plenty of pictures all over the place of the amazing painted interiors - just google "Charleston Farmhouse" and enjoy. However, there are some wonderful photos of Charleston in its less well-documented dilapidated early state on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46528205@N02/ which makes you appreciate the amount of work that was needed to bring the place to life again.

 

This one's taking time to do. It seems ages since my first ideas sketch:

 

Then came this:

 

 

As you see, the black swan (an echo of Carrington's one in her wonderful portrait of Tidmarsh Mill) is still hanging on in there!

Sissinghurst scanned and other stuff

Vita and Harold at Sissinghurst

Picked up Vita and Harold and others from the printer yesterday (now how does that sound?) and they are now nicely scanned, a big improvement on my uncropped distorted homemade images so thought I'd reprise them, as they say.

The Eve of St Agnes

Feeling a bit grumpy and disillusioned this morning because the rains that finally arrived yesterday seem to have vanished overnight. I stood outside in my pyjamas and whooped. The wilted gasping flowers whooped. The stressed out leaf shedding trees whooped.

The cats huddled on the window sills and looked on, mystified by water falling out of the sky.

Now we are back to searing sun by the look of it right now.

Big grumps.

Deep sigh.

 

So ... back to the sketch book and drawing board.

Charleston Farmhouse. (Home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant).

I've almost finished the tiled roof which was my biggest worry when starting. The flint wall with classical heads on top is an interesting prospect. And a borrowed black swan. I love black swans.

More later.

Vita and Harold at Sissinghurst

I put the last touch to this this morning - it was the black bird flying above the tower.

Just about the largest collage I have done to date but one of my favourites I think.

You seldom see a photograph of the Nicolsons at home but there is a dog about. They seemed to be very doggy people. So I have included a couple of what appear to be overgrown terriers.

When I read about the modern history of Sissinghurst it put to shame our paltry sporadic potterings.

Vita and Harold purchased the place in 1930 for £12,000. It was in a complete state of dilapidation. It was a case of camping out in the sixteenth century tower for months. But they didn't hang about when it came to the garden which Harold designed and Vita planted on a site which had to cleared of the "accumulated rubbish of centuries."

Within seven years it was if not exactly done and dusted, certainly done and growing in the "strictest formality of design combined with the maximum informality in planting".

Their son, Nigel Nicolson, said the garden was "like their marriage - a combination of the classic temperament and the romantic.

Here they are some years later: the elderly Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, enjoying the fruits of their labour.

And now for something ...

 

... completely different to what I had envisioned.

So much for the Virgin Queen idea. Somehow or other Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson inveigled their way into the composition. Well, it WAS her tower and writing room. She and Harold saved Sissinghurst from rack and ruin in the 1930s. Here they are, a couple of decades on with no room for any regal visitors. Only dogs.

 

This is still up for changes but most of it is stuck down or decided upon.

Hopefully finished in a couple of days.

 

Hey! My 200th post! Golly!

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.

The Eve of St Agnes

 

Finished (again).

After a bit of dithering I decided to add figures in the stained glass sky. It needed a bit of life, I felt, and the cat on its own didn't hack it.

(It is one of young Mrs Dilke's cats, from my Winter Snows collage of Keats House, one of the ones that didn't make it into that picture but was saved in a box on my table and is now having his day elsewhere, but now with the senior Dilkes).

 

So this is "Old Mr Dilke's" house in Chichester where Keats stayed from January 18-23 1819 and where he began to seriously think about and possibly pen the first lines of The Eve of St Agnes, the idea for which had been prompted earlier that week by his mysterious female friend, the sophisticated, elegant and independent Isabella Jones, who had pointed out the significance of the upcoming date.

 

According to legend on January 20, the eve of St Agnes, young women are able to see their future husbands in a dream.

Isabella, a keen reader of Gothic tales, suggested to Keats that it would make a great theme for a poem.

So hats off to Isabella.

 

 

The figures represent Porphyro and Madeline, the protagonists of the poem. But could equally be Keats and Brawne or even Keats and Miss Jones.

 

The pavement is made of fragments of a letter written to the poet's brother in America in which he informs him that "nothing much happened" in Chichester:

"I took down some thin paper and wrote on it a little poem called St Agnes's Eve ..."

 

A throwaway line if ever I heard one.