Mrs Gaskell at home

So I have been ruminating on another northern writer and jotting down some flotsam and jetsom in my sketchbook which may or may not have any relevance eventually when I sift it through.

Mrs Gaskell is a natural follow-on from the Brontes as she was a friend and, famously, the biographer of Charlotte Bronte.



Stage 1!

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was married to a unitarian minister and came relatively late to novel writing. Most of them were written in a rather grand-looking seven bedroomed Italianate villa in Manchester. The Gaskells rented the house for £150 a year. At that time Plymouth Grove was described as being "beyond the manufacturing district, in view of open fields" and to complete the semi-rural ambience, there was a cow, pigs and chickens in the garden.

My research - ragbag style

Charlotte Bronte stayed at the Gaskell residence on three occasions and on one of them hid, Jane Eyre-like, behind the drawing room curtains because she was too shy to meet the other visitors. Now there's an idea for one of the windows .........

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......

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 ...

 

 

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......

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!

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!

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.

A Tudor tower

This might look as if I am going off on a completely different tack ... but it really is a writer's house as anyone recognising Sissinghurst Castle's tower (okay, so I have replaced some of the facing which appears to have dropped off over the years) will confirm.

In this case the writer's house really was her castle. Vita Sackville-West had her study on the first floor of this wonderful building. She was the friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, whose house was the subject of my last image. So you see, it's not the non-sequitur it at first appears.

Vita Sackville-West with Rollo and tower

By coincidence I had borrowed The Queens and the Hives by Edith Sitwell from the library, the Queens of the title being Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. There is an evocative description of one of Elizabeth's visits she inflicted on her aristocratic subjects and courtiers during her "progresses" through the kingdom. Dumping herself and her hundreds of followers on her hosts could prove costly to the point of bankruptcy but was an unavoidable honour.

Sissinghurst was a port of call in 1573, on August 15 to 17 to be precise, when the then lord of the Sissinghurst manor was one Richard Baker. Unfortunately I haven't come across any references as to how the Virgin Queen was entertained during her brief stay. The surviving record of her visit to Long Itchington in Warwickshire two years later veers between the sublime (she was met at the Castle gate by the porter in the guise of Hercules and greeted at the lake by a lady and nymphs who seemed as if they walked upon water) and the ridiculous (as the Queen dined under a large tent she was shown two wonders of the district, a huge fat boy and a correspondingly monstrous sheep).

Here is an Elizabeth which will eventually take her rightful place in the foreground. Not sure where I will fit Vita in yet.  But first I am going to get the tower finished and properly scanned as I quite like it in its naked state on a white background. That means it will be out of my hands at the printer for at least a week or so, so I will probably start on something else before I get this house finished. I have a show coming up in December and must crack on ....

An earthly paradise

That's how Dorothy Wordsworth described the grounds of Allan Bank, the rather grand house on the hill overlooking Grasmere Lake where in 1808 she, her brother William, his wife Mary, Mary's sister Sara and the three little Wordsworth children moved when they left the increasingly cramped conditions of Dove Cottage.

In addition there were two friends, fellow poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey, who also came to stay for protracted visits. Extraordinary characters, one of whom was in love with Sara.

It must have been quite an interesting and emotional household!

Ironically Allan Bank had been lambasted as a horrible blot on the landscape by Wordsworth as he had watched it being built, slap bang in the middle of his idyllic, beloved view from Dove Cottage a couple of years previously, a no-concessions white rectangle in the midst of lush green upland.

But as it turned out the Wordworth Allan Bank interlude was a brief one. The chimneys smoked horribly and William fell out with the landlord. After two years they left for pastures new though near.

The house is now a National Trust property, recently restored after fire destroyed much of the interior a few years ago.

The above is what I did yesterday. I haven't got very far as you see. Though I must admit it has moved on from the minimalist evening before:

As you see, it's all about moving the pieces around at the moment.

I've been looking at a lot of Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert and British neo-Romantics lately and I think some of it has rubbed off. I enjoyed going through my boxes of cuttings to assemble a nice big swatch of nightime colours and reading some Wordsworth at bedtime to try and think my way into this imaginary landscape loosely based on some photos hunted down on the net (good old Google).

Chawton Cottage - again

Drawn back to doing a view of Jane Austen's Hampshire cottage from the front, overlooking the busy road to Winchester. Okay, so I am capturing it at a not so busy time of day. Or not so busy day. 

Sunday then.

And it looks a bit churned up.

And there's a visitor calling.

Darn! Right in the middle of a beautifully turned sentence ...

Apparently Miss Austen, who didn't have A Room of Her Own (in the Virginia Woolf sense of a study - her father had one of those), would hide her work (i.e. whatever one of the series of classic works of English literature she was engaged on) under a blotter whenever visitors interrupted her flow of written words. A squeaky door she didn't allow to be oiled would give her sufficient warning to compose herself.

I hope the visitor in the picture is a welcome one.

With lots of the sort of gossip Miss Austen thrived on.

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

Al fresco with Miss Austen ...

You find me struggling with the garden, not an hour since I was hacking back the ivy (which is going bonkers - or should that be growing bonkers?) and potting up some pansies.

But my mind and inward eye was on Jane Austen's shrubs and borders which are what's on my ancient drawing board (a venerable and battered piece of solid wood that dates from my first week at art school more years ago than I care to remember - I may upload a photo of it some time).

As you see, I am still at the piecing and plotting stage after laying in a crazy quilt-style lawn.

Here's my original doodle:

Jane Austen's great-niece said:

"I remember the garden well, a very high thick hedge divided it from the Winchester road and around it was a pleasant shrubbery walk, with a rough bench or two where, no doubt, Mrs Austen and Cassandra and Jane spent many a summer afternoon ..."

Well, I have departed a bit from the rough benches I know though who knows they may yet supercede the more elegant wrought iron furniture.

Anyway, this is the current state of play.

Anything - or then again nothing - may happen in the next 24 hours.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere and a lot of weather

Finished at last.

After a lot of putting in taking out of sheep and a whole lot of weather. As I said in another post, heavy weather and the cozy clicking of windscreen wipers are what I remember most about my childhood day trips to the Lakes. 

Consequently it is a bit of a wet and blustery vision I have snipped of the cottage with Mr W himself watching that flock go by, though they look lively rather than leisurely, I'm afraid.

So here it is again, that inspirational fragment from To Sleep:

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,

One after one; the sound of rain, and bees 

Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ...

Far too cold and wet for bees , murmuring or otherwise I think.

As usual the picture above has lost some details, it not being the same proportion as my camera shots and me being a non-cropper (still).

So here is the unadulterated version, adulterated by bits of masking paper round the edges.

In the bleak midwinter

This is taking longer than I would like because of all the other things going on right now, not least of them being Christmas, which all of a sudden is upon us. And not a single card written! 

Just as well I have decided on placing Dove Cottage bang in the middle of winter with none of that foliage I was talking about. Far too fiddly for the feel of the picture, anyway. 

 Must be the effect of hearing carols on the radio seeping into my scissors. In the Bleak Midwinter has always been one of my favourites, mixing my poets here I know. 

I have taken a bit (a bit? you must be joking) of a liberty with the positioning of the cottage too - in Wordsworth's day he did have a clear view over Lake Grasmere but I doubt whether even then it was lapping almost up to the front garden! But needs (and spatial limitations) must.

All we like sheep ...

... is the name of a piece by Handel (I think), and I always have. Liked sheep, that is. 

I'm the mad woman who quietly squeals with delight when I get back to England and pass my first green field of sheep on the train.

So I had these scraps left over from my Naples Letter collage and they were hanging around on my table top and rather than throw them away I made one of my miniatures:

Sheep 1

Which of course led to me doing a larger one, the composition of which was based on a drawing I did ages ago of sheep in Edale, where I lived at one time.

Going With the Herd

Portrait of a worried woman

The Newstead Abbey collage should be finished today.
I had thought of including poor Lady Byron in it, running off with her babe in arms. When doing these houses I can't help but thinking about their occupants ...

Annabella was well aware that her husband cared more for her half sister than he did for her.

In the end I did a miniature portrait, playing card size (the correct term is ACEO but I loathe acronyms) which - as usually happens with me - kicks me into series mode. It is a small picture with a very long title - a sentence from a book. Last night I started on one of Fanny Wollstonecraft. I would like to see how a mosaic of about 20 would look together .... but I am getting ahead of myself.

Annabella Milbanke's unfortunate marriage to Lord Byron took place on New Year's Day 1815. A year and one child later she was divorced, hinting at but never specifying, his allegedly perverse practises in the bedroom and his much gossiped-about unnatural feelings for his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

So she cut her losses and got out where other women at that time might well have put up and shut up.

The formidable Lady Byron is listed in Chambers as "English philanthropist". She went into the marriage with the celebrated poet with a view to reforming his character but spectacularly failed. She later put her reforming spirit to work more successfully elsewhere: in improving women's education, in agriculture and industry and in the anti-slavery movement.

Newstead Abbey with a ghoul and ghost garnish

All of a sudden it is coming together.

I was getting a bit worried that this would be the first writer's house I would have to give up on but I really applied myself to the scissors and drawing board yesterday and got the architectural bit largely sorted. 

Then went through my "maybe" pile of cuttings I had set aside, found something that jumped out at me for clouds and once I framed the bottom with some National Geo underwater vegetation from no idea what part of the planet it all clicked into place. 

Nothing is certain yet, of course. Not till it gets aerolsoled or Pritted down. 

I like the flying skulls, an idea lifted from a doodle in my book which originally came (I think) from a Fuseli engraving. 

Amusingly Gothick.

I want to camp it up a la Byron.

He was such a poser.

Struggling with Newstead Abbey ..

Well it might be enough to drive me to drink, but honest, guv,  it was just a lunchtime vino blanco caught by the side of the drawing board ...

Might help to orchestrate the perpendiculars and ogee curves better - now there are a couple of words kicking in that I hadn't grappled with since my art history A Level. It's a question at the moment of chopping up the building into manageable proportions.

The trouble is Byron's relatively short life (relative, that is to his fellow Romantics Keats and Shelley) was so packed with places, incidents, characters and animals it is hard to know what to put in and what to leave out. Add to that the impossibly complex character of Gothic architecture and it's an explosive cocktail (to continue the alcoholic metaphor).

I came across a marvellous quotation of Pablo Picasso's in an old sketchbook the other day which sums up this dilemma so wonderfully:
"When one begins a painting one always meets with temptations. One must distrust these, destroy one's own painting, and do it over many times. Even when the artist destroys a beautiful creation, he doesn't really do away with it, but rather changes it, condenses it, makes it more essential. The completed work is the result of a series of discoveries which have been eliminated one by one ...."

Anyway, as you see, (to come down to earth after Picasso's marvellous thoughts) I am going with the Gothic romance theme,  with not one but (possibly) two black friars with a touch of classic Greece in the shape of the Byronic bust for good measure. They may all, of course, be eliminated in due course.

Once I have the house itself sorted out I think working out the foreground and background will be fun. Ghosts, ghouls and an owl or two. Lovely.

Mad, bad and difficult to decide ...

... on how to go about portraying Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's gothic pile in Nottinghamshire. Which I have decided to do.
Having collaged the homes of his fellow Romantic Poets, Keats and Shelley, I feel I can't leave out Byron though his place is nothing if not a real rambler of a building and hard to get a handle on.

Byron wasn't born at Newstead Abbey but grew up there with his querulous mother and the dilapidated  building and its history obviously had an enormous and lasting influence on his life and work.

"Eternally romantic and beautiful, like a smaller version of the great cathedrals of Wells or Salisbury, the great west front of Newstead Abbey stands as one of the most perfect examples of thirteenth century monastic architecture. The Abbey has a long history, but it is the spirit of the sixth Lord Byron which pervades the place today ..."

During the course of one of his not infrequent cash flow problems Byron ordered his servants to dig up floors looking for treasure reputedly buried by monks centuries before, but all they found were a number of stone coffins full of bones. He had a drinking cup made from one of the skulls.

The building is said to be home to any number of ghosts, including a nebulous black shape with staring eyes, a white lady and The Black Friar - this last immortalised by Byron in his poem Don Juan - the appearance of which was believed to portend bad luck for the family that had usurped the monastic order's home ...

All in all I think a large helping of Gothic Romance with a bit of spectral horror a la Fuseli is called for for this one ... but I am determined to introduce Boatswain into the picture somehow, Byron's beloved huge Newfoundland dog who has a magnificent tomb at the Abbey.
Animals were one of his lifelong passions.

And apropos of dogs, here is a tiny collage I did the other day:

It really is tiny, playing card size, based on a previous collage of Fanny Keats's dog Carlo. Another poetic pet. Just playing around, in between pictures, with leftover scraps I am too miserly to throw away.
Right, off to do some more research and review my stash of suitable papers ...