Portrait of a lady

Or should that be Regency wild child instead of lady?

It's a long time since I did any portraits. I was reading about the Shelley entourage again recently and this was the result - inspired by some cuttings I happened upon in my bits and pieces box and by Claire Clairmont, teen runaway who threw in her lot with Shelley and her half sister Mary when they decamped for France.

Then threw herself at Byron and ended up pregnant and deserted.

 

Here she is, older, wiser and still poor, as a governess in Russia where she did her best to distance herself, geographically and metaphorically, from her scandalous past, though judging by her letters and recently discovered memoir (in which she rages against Byron and Shelley's conduct)she retained her splendidly fierce independence of spirit, in contrast to Mary Shelley whose somewhat prim and proper life-after-Shelley always seems a bit of a disappointing anti-climax.

Had she been born a hundred years later I think she would have made a wonderful suffragette.

36 Craven Street

So here it is finished...

 

Dr Franklin is looking out of his first floor rooms, occupied by himself and words. Words being so important to him. I found a clipping featuring eighteenth century typesetting. Oddly enough and quite by coincidence the text was part of a poster advertising slaves for sale. And slaves lived in No 36. Ben Franklin's slaves.

 

I have to say I found it surprising to learn that the enlightened great man owned quite a number.

Two of whom, Peter and King, came to London with him.

I moved Peter, apparently the more "competent and loyal", out onto the street where he is seen bringing in a parcel addressed to Dr Franklin, possibly one of the regular packages sent by his wife Deborah in Philadelphia. King is upstairs, with the other servants, planning his escape.

 

Within a year of his arrival in London King had absconded. He was eventually traced to Suffolk of all places where, it appeared, a lady had take it upon herself to take him in and "gentrify" him, teaching him music and literacy. Franklin didn't pursue the matter further and left King to it. I'd love to know what became of him.

 

Polly is on the front door step in welcoming mode, while Mrs Stevenson is upstairs in what looks suspiciously like party mode. I have added in one of Polly's daughters who in reality would have been younger than she is seen here.

But I'm allowing myself, as ever, to concoct convenient time shifts, artistic licence and all that.

 

I think this is one of my busiest collages to date. Maybe I felt the need to people the house which must be one of the barest museums ever. The inside is stripped back to the bare original minimum, no furniture, and the tour is conducted by an actor. Which probably sparked the theatrical idea here.

Finishing off Dr Franklin ...

 

Down to details ... what is it they say? That the devil is in them? Well it could well be, they certainly take a lot of patience and a bit of swearing - especially when some tiny piece falls on the floor and gets lost amidst the off cuts under the table.

Should be finished today though.

Mmmm that cat needs a tweak or two too......

Ben Franklin & Co

 

Well I said I'd be back on this one.

Sorry about the convex look, still haven't figured out how to correct that on my camera.

I have largely finished the main bricky part of the facade and am now down to the stuccoed ground floor, entrance basement and pavement ...

 

I said there must have been a buzz at No 36 with all these (and oh so many more) occupants and visitors and goings-on and I hope I am managing to convey that. It puts me in mind of the eighteenth century comedies I used to study. All periwigs, New Ideas and comings and goings.

 

Anyway, I have had to squeeze Dr Hewson in in the ground floor window though where exactly his anatomy school was situated within the building I'm not sure. He is looking a bit Hamlet-like with that skull.

And thereby lies the tale I promised to tell ...

 

During restoration work in the basement (which was formerly the garden), a pit was discovered which contained 1,200 pieces of human and animal bones, the detritis of the anatomy school.

Here's a couple of quotes referring to that gruesome find which get the imagination racing:

 

"Dr Hewson had a rich source of subjects at hand: the resurrection men could deliver bodies stolen from graveyards to the Thames wharf at the bottom of Craven Street, while there was a weekly public execution at the gallows on the other side of the garden wall ..."

 

"A significant find in the pit gave a direct link to Hewson's school was a portion of turtle spine and mercury. In an experiment conducted in 1770 at the Royal Society, Hewson showed the flow of mercury through a turtle to highlight the lymphatic system."

Mmmmm .... thinks .... can I fit a turtle in there somewhere?

 

Hewson, as I already said I think, was married to Polly, the daughter of the landlady. Their marriage was not a long one. Just four years. He died a victim of his profession. In 1774 he contracted blood poisoning after carrying out a dissection and died aged just 34.

 

Dr Franklin paints a vivid picture of the sad time in a letter to his wife:

"Our family here is in great Distress. Poor Mrs Hewson has lost her Husband, and Mrs Stevenson her Son-in-law. He died last Sunday Morning of a Fever which baffled the Skill of our best Physicians. He was an excellent young Man ... belov'd by all that knew him. She is left with two young Children, and a third soon expected. He was just established in a profitable growing Business, with the Prospects of bringing up his young Family advantageously."

 

Polly eventually moved with her children first to Paris then to Philadelphia to be close to Franklin after the end of the Revolutionary War.

 

Golly, this is a long post.

Sorry about that.

Will continue anon with the identities of other personages on the Craven Street scene.

Benjamin Franklin in Craven Street

So here's the current state of play as regards my latest house.

Number 36 Craven Street, an unassuming Georgian terraced house which just a few years ago was in a dire state of delapidation, has the honour of being the only surviving home of Benjamin Franklin, statesman, diplomat, writer, philosopher and all round good American egg.

Franklin shipped up at this house, then owned by one Mrs Stevenson, on July 26, 1757 when he was 51. There he lived on and off for the next 16 years, occupying the first floor rooms. His long-suffering wife, Deborah, was averse to sea crossings and stayed behind at their Philadelphia home.

The Stevensons became Franklin's surrogate family, in particular the daughter of the house, Polly, with whom he corresponded regularly when away.

 

Franklin was sought out by the leading radical politicians of the day and his first floor suite of rooms became a focus for American dissidents, philosophers and writers.

 

Polly married in 1770 and her husband, a doctor, ran a private anatomy school in the house.

All in all No. 36 must have had quite a buzz about it.

So I have decided to feature some of the occupants in the windows to try to give an impression of that buzz:

Things are still a bit fluid and I still have to find places for several more characters in this almost theatrical line-up.

More about them, their doings - and the recent discovery of human bones in the garden - in my next post!

Back to Bricks

After a surfeit of leaves and greenery, I'm going urban again. Georgian again.

 

 

As you see, I am still at the messing-about-with-proportions blocking-in stage.

Reminds me of that old Rolf Harris cry of "Can ya tell what it is yet?"

Well it's in London, with a strong American connection is all I'm saying until I am sure I will carry on and get going with it.

 

Selling Writers' Houses

 

Sold: Writers' Houses collages that have found new homes recently

Thank you to everyone who has purchased original collages from my Writers' Houses series recently and also to everyone who has bought large giclees from my website and small digital prints and greeting cards from my online shop.

 

I'm so glad that people "get" my obsession with historic literary bricks and mortar!

 

Here's the link to my online shop if you are interested:

http://www.etsy.com/people/AmandaAWhite?ref=si_pr

 

and my website:

 http://www.amandawhite-contemporarynaiveart.com/

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.

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.