Wilder Weather in Haworth

I took this new take on Haworth Parsonage (yeah, I know, I have a bit of an obsession with some buildings) to the printer for scanning before sending it off for an exhibition in Yorkshire next month.

I thought it was finished.

 

 

 

When I picked it up I immediately knew it wasn't. A week's break from an image is a wonderful thing I have learned. Even better than looking at it in a mirror which is another way of refreshing the old eyeballs.

So I set about adding bits and pieces...

 

 

Compare and contrast - it's like one of those spot the difference puzzles.

The finished picture (forgive the pallor and blur - it's my own snap and I'm not very good at getting lighting and things right) has more weather and lots of manuscripts. I think I may have been influenced by the witches in Macbeth that I've been hearing about and reading and remembering from school lately. The fact that so many great classic novels were written by three different people in that house is nothing short of sorcery to my mind. So I conjured up a full blown Haworth full moon storm.

The question is, is it really and truly finished now?

The next one is can I get back to my Christmas church?

Then, what on earth will the printer think when I turn up with this one again?

And when can I get to the post office to send it off?

 

So many questions, so little time ...

In the meantime here's a link to the exhibition at the Art In The Mill Gallery:

http://www.feva.info/programme/view/6pN81VlQ/now-for-naive

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.

Haworth Parsonage Revisited (again)

I have been invited to take part in August in a group show entitled Now for Naive at the lovely Art In The Mill Gallery in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, which is very exciting. They would like some Writers' Houses, preferably with a northern slant. (Here is the link: www.artinthemill.com)

So I immediately thought of Haworth Parsonage for one and searched for a new take on it. My first idea was to place two famous visitors outside: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. (Never mind half a century separated their visits!). And that's how it started.

But as I have said on more than one occasion, the best laid plans ....

The collage and the papers I sorted into the colour scheme I was after, plus reading Woolf's essay and other stuff, kind of took over and I'm afraid Ms Plath has been subsumed into the paper plot - she's still there alright, but under a few layers of blocking which I don't like to disturb. What a fate! Also in there (but on the surface) are echoes of the sheep painting I finished last week.

The clouds are photocopies of pages from an ancient and battered tome I found in my local library: "Life and Works of Charlotte Bronte and Her Sisters" (Vol. V. Wuthering Heights, Etc). Poor old Agnes Grey, (the only other work in the book) dismissed as a mere etcetera!

It was printed in 1900 by the Brontes' original publisher, Smith, Elder & Co.

Shame on them...

Anyway, more later.

And doubtless more changes......

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 ...

Little Brontë foxes

Finished at last!

It's been a long time coming, mainly because of other stuff, as I mentioned before. Can't be doing with distracting background noise, literal or metaphorical, brings out the worst kind of procrastination in me.

Anyway, here it is, Haworth Parsonage in the snow (despite the fact that we have been experiencing summertime temperatures over here for the last few days).

The snowmen, which started out more prominent, have been relegated to watchers - watching the three sisters watching them from inside. So they retain their sinister, gothicky aspect even if somewhat watered down. The foxes were introduced as a splash of colour (I just knew that National Geographic portrait of an orange-haired kabuki actor would come in useful one day!) and movement. Three sisters ... three foxes ... mmmmm. Three snowmen if it comes to that. Obviously highly significant.

Or maybe not.

As is often the case with these house portraits it was a piece of the occupants' writings that settled me on the final image.

In this case a poem by Emily which starts:

The moon is full this winter night;

The stars are clear though few;

And every window glistens bright

With leaves of frozen dew ...

Well okay, lots of snowflakes rather than a few stars and lamplight rather than leaves of frozen dew.

Big full moon though.

 

Anyway, it is ready in time for my Christmas 2012 greeting card collection.

Method in my madness.

Of snowmen, Brontës and tropical brass monkeys ...

A rough beginning ...

 No doodles this time ... because two sets of photographs featuring the snowmen of North and East London on the computer gave the impulse I needed to get cracking on an idea I had had for a while about "revisiting" Haworth Parsonage in winter. That and the cold weather currently assailing the allegedly semi-tropical island where I live. (I sit typing this in a thick woolly). 

A set of rather-worse-for-wear parkland snowmen popped up on one of my favourite blogs, Justine Picardie's (link down on the right somewhere) yesterday and just hours later my daughter sent some photos of a massive one with a huge spherical head and pebble teeth she had met down Clapton way.

I have always loved them. Spontaneous pieces of primitive art that spring up whenever a half-decent layer of snow is laid down. Strangely misshapen, grinning or grimacing, no two snowmen are ever the same.

Now I know the Brontës aren't exactly the sort of writers we would immediately associate with skylarking in the snow, but heck, even they were children once and must have taken time out at some point from eternally writing about Gondal in their teeny weeny interminable notebooks.

And even if they didn't - well I'm making them. 

My cut paper world, my say-so!

The Universal Snowman: A tropical version made by my daughter and nephew up on Tenerife's volcano a few years ago

Haworth Parsonage Revisited

I have done another Haworth for the ABNA show. Slightly smaller with transportation in mind. It's a tighter composition and has the addition of Victoria and Adelaide, the Brontë geese exiting stage left. The moors are darker and the moon has a yellowish tinge though it probably doesn't show up much on the photo.


Comparing the two reminds me a bit of those spot the difference pictures you used to get in comics years ago.
I did consider putting Black Tom, the Brontë cat into the mix but haven't so far. However, there is still another 24 hours before I take this to the framers - anything might happen!

Haworth Parsonage, Autumn Evening

I finished this piece, pasting the final leaf on, at about 2 o'clock this morning. Obsessive or what? Anyway, I am fairly happy with it and it captures the atmosphere I was after. Gone are the dog and the plethora of graves. It would be too easy to always plump for a strictly bleak and tragic view ... coloured by our knowledge of how their brief lives played out. It's autumnal, yes, but happy autumnal I hope. Before the advent of the grim reaper down Haworth way.

"My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the profound, the intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas from the same source - when they have clung to each other from childhood ...", said Charlotte Brontë in 1841

Detail showing the sisters

So there she is clinging to Anne by the side of the parsonage, Emily striding out across the moor in the background. The three large birds? The sisters' soaring imagination, with the distant Branwell perversely flying in the opposite direction, poor thing.

And there they are again, inside the plain, solid, somewhat comfortless house (their father brooked no curtains or carpets for fear of fire, apparently) looking out of the windows.

I once read a Freudian interpretation of Wuthering Heights, the author of which had counted the number of times that windows and doors featured in the work. Having lived with the facade of Haworth Parsonage for a couple of weeks I have to say that windows were an architectural feature the Brontës must have had an awful lot of trouble ignoring in their day-to-day lives.
They certainly had me cursing with the fiddly panes.

Eight years after Charlotte Brontë wrote the lines quoted above, she was to write to her friend, wryly laughing off the suggestion she take a companion (her siblings having died in the intervening years):
"... the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth - to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect - the dead silence of a village parsonage - in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long - and a grave, silent spinster for her companion ..."
Needless to say she didn't wish the fate on anyone.

Now that does sound a grim and tragic scenario, but even that isn't as grim and tragic as the one which would be the lot of their father who outlived them all by six years,

I feel a bleaker parsonage picture coming on ....