PhD sketchbooks: A4BA (12/7/18 - ongoing)

I say "ongoing" because it is! I haven't finished this one. It's got alternating black and white pages, and sometimes I don't know what to do with it. It's amazing how the paper in a sketchbook can influence how I work with it. (Time-lapse video of this sketchbook here!)

SWARM OF EYES

I bought an old school cane and found out that you can play balancing games with it

More notes and such from before I'd decided that I was definitely tackling social relations at William Shaw's Bowes Academy - and before I even knew that historiography was a thing.

Left: I think I was wondering about oil paintings of landscapes, vanitas dinners, etc., that would be familiar to people contemporary with my case study, and how I could subvert those to communicate ideas about the experiences of people at cheap Yorkshire boarding schools. Right: I really enjoy seeing how my designs/ interpretations of characters change.

Left: metaphorical exploration of William not having a good time (also available here). Right: a phenomenon I call the black edges, which is when everything - even good stuff - has a tinge of melancholy and mild despair round the sides; more on that here. 

Left: planning how to make puppet/ effigies/ whatever they are out of polymer clay and string, based on Charley's visual language in Disorder. Right: visual language experiment that never really went anywhere because I didn't have a specific intention for it - this is part of my pre-Disorder messing about, trying to make things without really knowing why I was making them and what I wanted to say with them. More of that sort of thing towards the end of IBF.

Left: I know less about Frank Addison, so he isn't given as much visual definition as William Dixon (whose life is somewhat better recorded, as far as I'm aware). Right: media/ line tests before I worked out exactly what I was doing with (U)KA.

Left: visual language (drawing style) test for (U)KA. Right: notes on the historical sublime

Left: experiment for (U)KA - I did a few things like this, but found them generally unsatisfying as there was a bit much going on with the colours, and not enough symbolic fun stuff to interpret. Right: diagram about how I do history (or how I was doing it a couple of years ago, that thing's undated) using (U)KA's visual language.

Left: looking at Valentine Hugo's L'espirit Du Vin Ou L'alcoolisme and thinking about the historian's inability to grasp the things they investigate/ imagine. Right: notes on Simon Schama's Power of Art (BBC Books/ Ebury Publishing/ Random House, London, 2006) - mostly about presence of the creator in the work, using your own experiences in your work, and other useful things

Sometimes I stick my planning materials into this book. Here's stuff about the thesis and (U)KA.

I've still got a few pages left in this one, so I'm sure I'll put some more things in it at some point. Return to the sketchbook index here!