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.

A Painting! Yes, really!

A little breather between collages took the shape of this small painting:



Calm Before the Storm



 I have tried photographing it in every room, on every terrace, using every setting on the camera .... and still the true dark colour of the sky refuses to be pinned down!

 

In reality I used a mix of Windsor Blue and Violet with a dash of black

to make a rich night sky and here it is, looking like daytime!

The sheep have a muddy Naples Yellow wash too, but you wouldn't know it.

But I have lost patience now.

If I get a truer photo I will replace it.

 

Anyway, it's a small piece intended for a group show in St Ives in August, quarried

from one of my old sketchbooks with doodles done on my last visit to the Peak District.

 

 

Many, many years ago, when I lived there, I used to make and sell sheep along the lines of "fairings"

out of plaster. Very primitive. And I still have these three hanging around in the studio here, very much the worse for wear.

But still inspiring me, it seems, years later.

I'll never kick the Staffordshire pottery habit!

 



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 ...

Allan Bank by Moonlight

Finished this last night ... Allan Bank in Grasmere by moonlight, with William Wordsworth and his books in the foreground.

The poet was a keen gardener and spent a lot of time in that of Allan Bank, creating a romantic landscape, complete with "viewing tunnel" and walks. So sheep, with their voracious appetite, were probably a no-no, but I have put them in to add a Samuel Palmer-ish touch.

The windowframes, as often happened with Georgian buildings, were later replaced by gaping plate glass numbers. I went so far as to get in touch with the National Trust to check on their former small-paned status, which was confirmed by Sarah Woodcraft, a very helpful NT outdoor team curator for the area.

Progress in paradise ...

Golly, the sheep are threatening to overwhelm things. I may have to have a cull ... Though I have to say Palmer was never one to eek out his sheep when it came to a rural landscape.

And there's William Wordsworth, contemplating the moon in the finest nocturnal Romantic tradition of contemplating the moon, life, love and everything. And sheep, of course.

I almost had a disaster when I came in and discovered the big ginger, Princess Pushy, lying fast asleep in total feline abandon right across the board. (Actually, thinking about it, it would be a cat-astrophe, not a disaster). Anyway, to a large extent it was as so much was dislodged (and this despite my not yelling at her so as not to frighten her and scatter the lot), it took ages to restore order (thank goodness for my digital images).

Am having trouble finding a nice large piece of slightly off-white for the house .... nothing in the scrap boxes is quite what I have in mind. And I really like to start the process of sticking the whole collage beginning with the house itself. 

Might have to resort to the stationer or art shop tomorrow .....

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).

Sheepish indecision

Sheep in?

 

Sheep out?

And why am I dithering and stressing about a blimming sheep?

Get a grip Amanda.

Blimey

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.

Working on Wordsworth

It's coming together at last.

I was still faffing around in a fairly directionless manner, abandoning the board and going back to my doodle book.

 Then I found these four tranquil lines from a longer poem by Wordsworth called 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 ...

Then I found a couple of full page Dolce & Gabanna ads in some magazines I bought at the car boot sale on Saturday .... allowing me some big pieces for smooth fields in just the right Lake Districty shade ...

 Another day or two and plenty of foliage should do it.

I want to keep it looking rough-hewn.

The Dove and Olive, Grasmere

The Dove and Olive was the name of William Wordsworth's seventeenth century cottage during its time as an inn. Some also refer to it as The Dove and Olive Bough. By the time the Wordsworths (brother and sister) moved in on December 20 1799, it had been empty for several years and was known as Dove Cottage.

Here, on the edge of Grasmere lake, William and Dorothy - and eventually William's wife Mary - spent eight idyllic years of "plain living and high thinking".

It was the beginning of English Romanticism and here was written Wordsworth's greatest poetry.

Here endeth the lesson.

And here starteth the collage.

I made the mistake of laying down papers and playing around with them on the hideously bright Mediterranean blue cartridge paper currently covering my drawing board.

THAT IS NOT THE BACKGROUND!!!

I always start off with the windows.

The windows are the eyes to a building's soul.

To badly misquote somebody or other.

The left hand window was finished. Or so I thought. It is now binned. For being too neat.

The windows (and everything else) will be pretty much as you see the rest here: rough hewn and sort of geological. To echo the rugged Lake District. No good giving this home a delicate refined look. It is an honest seventeeth century cottage set in a landscape fashioned by glaciers rather than man.

I lived in a primitive, thick-walled seventeenth century cottage in the north once. Massive thick walls and little in the way of refinement - and that was the twentieth century. So I feel a kinship and am keeping the feel of the thing primitive and "plain living". Earthy. No mod cons. Part of the landscape.

Anyway, more later ...

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

A Sussex Albion

Finished this today. 

William Blake and his wife metaphorically cast out from the Garden of Eden - or rather in this case Felpham - Adam and Eve style, after the incident with the soldier, and overlooked by one of his angels that lived in the trees.

Most of the cuttings for this collage came from a stash of old National Geographics - I believe the thatch in reality is a desert and the angel's robe, for instance, part of the Lascaux caves.

I love these transformations.

Anyway, it's a relief to have finished it at last.

Its completion coincides with my beginning a new book tomorrow which may or may not provide me with food for thought for my next House......

Wrestling with Blake

This is possibly my most difficult one so far, in that it has so far caused not one but two headaches. There is a lot of standing up involved in making a collage, what am I saying, more standing up than sitting down. And the combination with a bowed head is not good. Last night I feared a migraine so took myself off to bed with the cats locked out. Ooof, very serious that. They are still sulking..

The hippy lookalike is gone and replaced with a tree which I hope looks a bit Blakean with some sheep and vapours. Blake was big on sheep. (While I am in danger of contracting the vapours). In fact I may put this vignette on the back burner for a painting at some point.

Hopefully it's all looking very Albion-y and green and pleasant landish. I think I'd like to go for a walk through this garden.

Oh, and the significance of the scythe - I nearly forgot:
"In the summer of 1803 Blake found in the garden of his cottage a soldier, called in by the gardener, it seems, to cut the grass. Blake did not like soldiers; he was against war as such, and against the war of English intervention in France in particular. He ordered the intruder out by main force. Ill-advised words followed, reported as "Damn the King, and damn all his soldiers, they are all slaves"; and some remarks about Napoleon more fitted to the mouth of a French than of an English poet ..."

The upshot was poor old Blake was tried at Chichester for treason but eventually acquitted.

Sheep and Magpies

Just finished this

It's what you might call a spin-off from my Sussex picture. I foresee a field project coming up.
Of which more later but this has been a bad, bad morning. Our aged dog died.
Then I accidentally deleted about 350 photos from my camera.

Dark day so I will shutup now, keep my head down and hope to duck the third whammy.

Angels round my Sussex church

This is a painting which gave me a lot of angst as far as the colours and overall composition were concerned and which was finished in fits and starts.

It essentially follows my original idea, so lord knows why its execution was such a trial. Funny how some pictures just come tripping off the paintbrush, as it were, and others are a struggle. I think a lot of the trouble was that I stubbornly refused to change the angels from their scarlet frocks, for some reason. Once they changed into their gold - or rather Naples yellow - ones it all came together. Like the meerkat says, Simples. I  must say I like the spiralling movement of angels, sheep and clouds around the rock-of-ages-like church.
For the record here is a photo of my somewhat grubby and dog-eared original same size drawing: