Mary Shelley - in the Gulf of Melancholy

Mary in the Gulf of Melancholy

This little image had been kicking around in the back of my head for ages - it's a kind of follow-on from doing the sea storm in the picture of Shelley's Surrey birthplace last year. So I took a break between the houses of Dickens to do this imaginary portrait of Mary Shelley using magazine scraps, cuts from a photpcopy of pages from an old book about Byron and Claire Clairmont with nicely yellowed pages and an inked monoprint I pulled and then cut out

A widow aged just 26, she had experienced more life, joy and tragedy by that age than most of us in a lifetime. The rebellious daughter of a rebellious mother (feminist Mary Wolstonecraft), she had eloped with a married genius, buried three of their children and suffered several miscarriages. On the plus side, as you might say, she had written the definitive Gothic novel and an enduring masterpiece. Frankenstein has never been out of print since its publication.

Already plunged in a deep depression following a miscarriage, the death of Shelley in a sailing accident when his boat was engulfed by a storm, left her bereft and (more practically) rather less than penniless in a foreign land in what she described in her journal as "a gulph of melancholy".

So here she is in her gulph (I must say I prefer her spelling for some reason) and I can now turn my refreshed attention to Dickens's Doughty Street home.

Fiddly stuff which as you see requires lots of soothing cups of tea to aid the old concentration ...
Mary, meanwhile, is now in my online shop at www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite
(sorry the link defeats me!)

Sold

 Thank you to the person who bought these two paintings at the ABNA show in St Ives at the weekend.

I am very fond of them so am pleased they have found a good home.

Cut Off

The Blue Boat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Back to boats

Okay, so I was struggling with this house portrait and couldn't find any paper in my not exactly wide-ranging hoard of magazine pages and clippings and these colours kind of came together into these shapes to make this design.

The local harbour is after all second uppermost in my mind these days.

Something tells me it's going to be hard to find stand-ins for Lake District slate roofs within the pages of Vogue, Glamour and Cosmo. Even though I have some fine potential sheep-y clippings. 

What I really need is a windfall of architectural magazines ...

Wild Weather Blowing In

is the name of the picture I finished over the weekend.

I had had an idea for doing some local fishing port scenes for a while and have many sketchbook squiggles and snapshots to prove it but meeting up with a fellow naive (wave wave to Judy Joel) down there last week was the push I needed to put brush to canvas.

It's a start. The next one will include the harbourside dogs and pebbly beach. And there is also the old customs house, but that may be for another angle.
First I need a now for something completely different moment to release an idea that's been nagging at the back of my mind for a while: linocuts.

Haven't done any for a while and my fingers are itching after finding an odd piece of lino and inks and being still well an truly immersed in the 18th century thanks to Andrew Motion and my visit to Keats House just before Christmas.

I came across this old print while decluttering the studio (the task that never finishes).

As you see I err on the side of the simple rather than complicated multi-pieced prints. My "naivity" has always been more naturally attracted to ye olde Englishe broadsheet style rather than the slick art deco one. Which is a very happy coincidence given that the technicalities of the latter would be well outside my comfort, skills and, um, patience zone.