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!)
Then some Disorder stuff.
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| Testing ideas for Charley and Bridget. |
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| 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. |
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| 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) |
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| More tests for Bridget's visual language, for the end of Disorder. |
Also a few random bits, mostly focusing on Charley.
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| One of these pages later became the basis for one of the (U)KA cards. |
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| 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. |
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| 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). |
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| 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). |
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| 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) |
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| 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) |
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| 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. |
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| Mary Ann as the Star, which is all optimism, clarity, freedom, fortitude, and never giving up. Also a potential cover for (U)KA. |
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| 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.
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