Autumn Days ...

Golly, where does the time go?

Look, we're in September already and it's ages since I posted a thing.

 

Firstly, last week I sent these two collages off to a new home in England. The one above (which I put as the header because it's called Autumn Days and we're in it. Autumn, that is). It's Keats House.

 

And then the one below After The Waves, which is Virginia Woolf's garden shed or Writing Lodge as she preferred to call it.

By a strange coincidence in the same week I received weighty orders for these images as cards and prints from both Monk's House and Keats House.

Must be something in the air.

 

I have stocked up on magazines! Look what I found at the local second hand market:

Only 3 euros for the lot!

Hooray!

 

I also got side-tracked from carrying on with my new Christmassy image by feeling the urge to do another imaginary portrait which popped into my head while I was reading Richard Holmes's

The Age of Wonder.

 

But that is for another post.

It's getting late and the plants are wilting after another scorching day.

To the rescue .......................

Back to the past

Here I am returning to my roots!

John Keats started it all, my writers' houses that is, when Keats House contacted me after seeing some of my early efforts on line, with a view to cards and prints.

One of those was a design with the thrush that Keats wrote about in a note to his beloved Fanny chirping away in the foreground:

 

Although it has a certain naive simplicity, the colours didn't work, the atmosphere was wrong and the whole thing seems quite crude now. It was abandoned and committed to my drawer of what I think of as my lost souls, there to languish.  I think my collage style has refined and become more detailed in the intervening couple of years but I still liked the original idea, so I am having another crack at Autumn Days with a view to refreshing the range at the Keats House shop.

 

 

 

I am after a softer, mellower look. This is a badly lit photo taken in the studio on what is a cloudy day. So far the only thing which is certain and stuck down is the lawn. Everything else is just blocked in, in flux and in mortal danger of being messed up by a breeze or rogue cat. Note to self:  It is a windy day and all the cats are in, be afraid ...

 

 

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 ....

The Four Seasons

Right, here is the full 4 season set as photographed with my daughter's Canon. A nice hefty proper camera that you can actually look through a viewfinder (is that the word I am casting around for?) with, instead of squinting at a stupid tiny reflecting screen and pressing the button on a wing and a prayer. 

Thus spake a confirmed Luddite...

Spring

Summer

 

Autumn

Winter

I am rather pleased with them and the fact that I think I pulled off the idea of capturing a separate and distinct atmosphere in each one. 

Reading the Gittings biography of Keats and the letters between his friends and relatives helped with details to create a little world in each: Carlo the dog; the writing of the Ode to a Nightingale under the plum tree; the "fine fellow" that was the song thrush watched by Keats and Fanny Brawne, and lastly the Wentworth Place cats and the denuded plum tree recalling "In a drear-nighted December/ Too happy, happy tree/ Thy branches ne'er remember/ Their green felicity ...."

It's not often things turn out the way I mean them to, but on this occasion they did and I am satisfied. Good feeling. What was it that Vaughan-Williams said about "I don't know whether it's any good, but it's what I meant". Probably entirely misquoted, but a good maxim to (creatively) live by.

Keats House in Spring

Well, it was certainly the most fiddly of the four but I stuck down the very last leaves this morning:

For some technical reason I have not yet (if I ever will) fathomed there is a distinct distortion on vertical images. To be rectified when I finally persuade my daughter to get out her Canon this week and take a swatch of proper photographs.

More poetic birds ...

Autumn Days

... which is my last word on this particular subject.
For now anyway.

Now off to review what I might describe as the housing situation re Wordsworth, Shelley and Beatrix Potter ...