PhD sketchbooks: SBD (7/2/20 - 17/10/22)

My mum gave me this one as a present, but the paper was too nice! It's wonderful thick stuff that takes wet media very well, so I didn't think it was quite proper for my usual untidy cheap black ink scratches. But it began with some of those and ended up playing host to even more. (Timelapse video here!)

Started off with some more bits for my talk for my local history society. 

Then some Disorder stuff.

Testing ideas for Charley and Bridget. 

Left-hand page is from Bridget's part of Disorder, but trying it out in my usual style. Right-hand page is development drawings for Jane. 

Initial idea for the first page of Disorder, and one of the benefits of working out: you are your own free anatomy reference. (Increase muscle definition/ size to draw Charley, he's much bigger than me)

More tests for Bridget's visual language, for the end of Disorder.

Also a few random bits, mostly focusing on Charley.

Left-hand page: thinking about Charley c.1831, when things weren't going smoothly for him - in 1830, he and Ann lost their son Charles, and then Ann gives birth to Jane - then, in 1831, according to Kirkpatrick, Charley's daughter Sarah needed parish relief, Charley tried sorting out a house for her in Cotherstone (where he used to live), his ex-employer Clarkson (in Bowes) somehow got tangled up in it (something about tenancy?) - horrid convoluted legal business - Sarah, meanwhile, gives birth to (illegitimate) Sarah, who is baptised in January 1832 - and, no doubt, further things that never got recorded. (I suspect he may have left employment with William around this time but I want to do a long comic or something about Charley and Ann at some point.) Right-hand page: trying to work out faces for Mary Ann and Jonathan Shaw, based on extant photographs of them - see Mary Ann here (and more about how I found the portrait of her here) and Jonathan here.

Left: Charley telling stories about one thing, but remembering something else. Right: taking advantage of the excellent quality of this paper for some ink-and-wash work (which could end up going towards my postdoctoral Charley and Ann comic)

Also a load of work for (Un)Known Associates. 

One of these pages later became the basis for one of the (U)KA cards.

Unsuccessful drawings. Left: visual language/ drawing style test that didn't go anywhere (needed more symbolic bits for audience interpretation), based on William's letters to the Brooks family, informing them that their son was dying (see Kirkpatrick, Fact v Fiction, pp.120-126). Right: done after looking at Remedios Varo's work - the ideas are there, but this drawing itself is clumsily executed.

Looking at Remedios Varo's work - and this is much more successful than the previous page! This one is about the fabricated and manipulable nature of history - how we control our interpretations and representations of historical people/ characters - lost voices - and related themes (depending on how hard you interpret it).

Still looking at Remedios Varo. Right-hand page referring to Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst. This one's about multiple interpretations, the voicelessness of the dead, and hidden stuff (the historical sublime).

I'm including myself in my work, which is apparently a bit inappropriate for historians (we're meant to be distanced and not get involved, which is a good joke because we're humans and so everything we do is subjective, we're not some totally disinterested history-machines). The Fool (a card about new beginnings, optimism, innocence and the search for experience, etc) shows me with the haircut I had when I started my PhD, before I grew whiskers (and also shows my dog)

The Magician (or Magicians plural in this case) is about creativity, the power to bring about change, communication, the questioning ability of the intellect - so it's appropriate for Dickens and Phiz! Mrs Young is the High Priestess (or the Popess), which is about imagination, intuition, dreams, the intangible rather than reality, and hidden knowledge (I haven't found much about her apart from when she's listed as one of William's references in his adverts)

Mrs Ockerby as Justice (big ophthalmia trials reference), and William wrestling himself as Strength (the cracks and stitches on his face link to certain scenes in Disorder). Depending on your Tarot deck, these two cards tend to swap places in the Major Arcana - Justice could be number 8 and Strength number 11, or vice versa. 

Mary Ann as the Star, which is all optimism, clarity, freedom, fortitude, and never giving up. Also a potential cover for (U)KA. 

Another potential cover design, which I tried colouring here. A lot of my work contains sneaky references to traditional planetary correspondences, which give you more to work with if you're playing with the interpretations.

The end of the book is mostly relating to those three panels (which I still haven't uploaded anywhere but I will include the link here when I do). Mostly Charley and Bridget in full Blake mode. Expanding on ideas from SBC.

Ok, that's it for this one - as usual, sketchbook index/ list here.

PhD sketchbooks: SBC (24/11/19 - 6/2/20)

Slightly different format to most of the others - this one's landscape while the rest are portrait. No real reason apart from I like the novelty of it. (Timelapse video here!)

Trying to depict what William might have been feeling around the time of the trials.

I'd done a presentation the day before I drew the left-hand page, hence Charley's enthusiasm. I drew these while waiting for my flu jab, and I think one of the nurses got turned into Bridget. 

Left hand page: development drawing for Bridget, and I'd read Sarah Winter's The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham University Press, New York, 2011) and apparently people used to teach kids to read using gravestones, so I wondered how the boys might have related to the people they'd read about on the gravestones in the churchyard at Bowes. Right hand page: initial planning for the three panels. I wanted to do portraits of William, Bridget, and Charley, with influence from William Blake's poets - a series of 18 panels his friend William Hayley commissioned him to make for Hayley's library. Here's one of Chaucer.

Trying out ideas for the panels.

More panel stuff. 

I'd recently visited the Tate's William Blake exhibition with my marvellous friend Sam and we had a very excellent time. Here's Bridget with some Blakean poses, looking ephemeral - back on the theme of how we don't know much about her!

There's larger acrylic paint versions of some of these in A4BB.

This sketchbook also contains some of my plans for my talk for CDHAS.

Designing Benning's face. I later used these as reference when I drew him in Disorder. One of these is based on this photograph of his son, but I had to make up his chin a bit due to the younger Mr Benning's rather considerable beard.

Like the vast majority of the people in my case study, I don't know what Mrs Ockerby (the lady on the right) looked like. Sometimes I like to try out a few different versions of a character's face.

Quite often, when developing a character, I'll find that at least one of them bears too close a resemblance to one of the existing characters. One of these preliminary Mrs Ockerbys here has a nose too much like William's nose. Personally, I doubt they were related, but drawings like these make you think "What if they were? And what repercussions might that have?" Or not! Haha who knows

Developing Mrs Ockerby's sons. She and Mr Ockerby, a tobacconist, had four that I'm aware of. 

The judge, Sir James Alan Park, who presided over the ophthalmia trials. Also layout for one of the slides. Here's him in his work clothes. I wish I'd drawn him in that outfit (he is very obviously a judge) but in the final illustration, I gave him the costume worn by the judge in this image of the interior of the Court of Common Pleas. (See p.42 of this for his opinions about a wig.) On a semi-related note, here is something I would love to see - his diaries, which, going by the description, have a very high possibility of containing something about the ophthalmia trials.

This sort of thing continues into SBD. Return to the sketchbook index here.

PhD sketchbooks: IBF (18/3/20 - 8/4/20)

The sixth in the IB series. This is the one I was using when we went into the first UK lockdown and it shows. (Timelapse video of this sketchbook here!)

Started off with more drawings from photographs of things in museums, etc., following on from the end of IBE. Here's an older Mary Ann wearing a c.1841 dress from York Castle Museum.

These are from photographs I took when we visited Bowes. Quick dip pen and ink, and sometimes a brush.

Based on photographs I took while creeping around inside St Giles church, Bowes. William, Bridget, and a number of people they knew are buried in the churchyard, and there's memorials to more of their associates inside the church: one of the windows is dedicated to Mary Ann and her husband, and there's memorials to Rev. Richard Wilson (who was once William's business partner) and to members of the Harrison family (another of whom used to hang out with William sometimes). There'll be other connections that we don't know about! Did Bridget host intellectual salons in the front parlour with Rev. Wilson and others? Did her and William's kids run around with the Harrisons' kids while their parents chatted?

Initial ideas for the windows. An experiment in mythologising historical characters. 

See the east window here (and digitally placed in-situ here) and the west window here.

See the finished illustrations with a tangle of notes in sketchbook A4BB (right at the end).

Then - pandemic horror! I didn't catch covid, but I did get a strong (and, at the time, seemingly endless) bout of dread/ paranoia/ despair. My case study involves a disease - ophthalmia - so, thinking about how people react to contagions, I could use my own experiences as fuel/ material.

Historian uses his own context to inform his work. 

Left-hand page includes joke about ophthalmia-infected William self-isolating. I'm familiar with that feeling on the right-hand page: "I suppose it's time to descend into a pit of despair."

This sketchbook also includes notes on theory that I'd been reading, such as Alun Munslow's The New History (Pearson Education Ltd., Harlow, 2003).

Lower right-hand page: Munslow mentioned Natalie Zemon Davis beginning her book Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives with "an imaginary conversation between herself and her subjects" - oh hell, just realised I haven't read this book - ok back now, I have literally just ordered it and it looks great

More visual responses to things I read in Munslow's The New History. Pseudo-autobiography (would that look like puppetry?) and the historian being tangled up in the history they create. 

The resurrection comic ended up in my thesis. You know how it is when you want to do strange experiments, you use a load of bits of, uh, material (as some of the old resurrectionists used to call those that they dug up) and stick it all together and give it life, of a sort.

Then some slightly unsuccessful experiments on loose bits of paper. They weren't successful because I didn't really have any direction for them - I didn't have a solid intention or a question that I wanted them to fulfil. It was just me playing with materials, which is a useful and fun thing, but purposeless in this instance.

I realised I needed to use an incident from my case study, and interrogate whose perspectives might be involved. And this is how Disorder started...

I chose that point during the ophthalmia epidemic when William's life was, in the words of Henry Benning, "despaired of". I could give it a really short timescale or expand it as necessary. I could have chosen what might happen if one of the boys gets infected, but William nearly dying would have a wider social impact, so I could explore more people's viewpoints. However, I'd still be focussing on William, who's in charge of the Academy, so it could look like the Yorkshire schools version of history-from-above/ grand narratives about Powerful People Who Do Important Things and that sort of nonsense. Also I have a massive bias towards (my interpretation of) him and I enjoy drawing him. Right-hand page shows how I chose whose perspectives to interrogate/ explore.

Left-hand page is ideas for different visual languages - I needed one for each viewpoint I was going to explore. Right-hand page is my initial test for what became Mary Ann's visual language - I wanted to do something completely different to my usual tight colourless linework (now all colour, no outline!) - more experiments (and final illustrations) in this style in A4BC.

More of this sort of thing in the next one, IBG. Return to the sketchbook index here to view another.