PhD sketchbooks: IBH (28/7/20 - 18/9/20)

Continuing from IBG. This is also a lot of Disorder stuff. (Timelapse video here!)

Still trying to work out some arrangement for the Shaw family on that one page in Mary Ann's visual language (the final version is in A4BC). On the inside of the front cover is a sticky note about drawing as a research tool - partway through Disorder, I realised that, in addition to discovery/ description/ interrogation/ expression/ processing information, drawing can also be used to interpret information. (I added this because history isn't 'discovered' in the archives or wherever else you're looking - you have to interpret things in order to make history.)

Left: working out timing for Mary Ann's panelled pages, wondering what happens if she goes and looks in the back parlour (where some of the infected boys are, and which she does in the final comic), and considering giving William a nightmare. Right: developing Mary Ann's siblings Will and Jonathan, and wondering how to depict their deceased sister Jane. 

Trying out poses/ gestures, and what they might suggest. The writing on the right-hand page is about leaving the exact nature of the family scene to the audience's interpretation - is it Mary Ann's imagination, memory, some sort of alternative present, lost future, idealised situation, or what? (Also Mary Ann demanding I actually get on with painting her pages rather than constantly finding costume reference, trying out compositions, etc.)

First appearance of Jane, alarming William who is kneeling on the floor having a crisis. She died in May 1820, before Disorder is set (late 1820 - early 1821), but she (or her absence) would still have had an influence on her family. In one of his letters to the Brooks family in 1826, telling them that their son had died, he wrote that "... I have no doubt his happy spirit is now with the one I lost some time since, and that both are now better provided for, than being here below ... I sympathise very much with Mrs Brooks and Yourself as your feelings will be indescribable, but the thought of having a little Angel in heaven, how consoling, when calm reason resumes her seat again ..." (quoted in Kirkpatrick, Fact v Fiction, p.124)

Left: analysing visual devices/ recurring imagery that link some of the drawing styles/ visual languages together. Right: analysing a couple of Mary Ann's pages (see the finals in A4BC and A4BD). 

Some writing about doing a paper (which eventually became 'Lines on a Page') and, rather more fun, drawings about feeling like the people in my case study are just out of reach, and how sometimes I see/ encounter/ experience things that remind me of (my interpretations of) them, and also the irretrievability of the past, which ended up with me projecting my thoughts onto William which I sometimes do when I'm having a Not Great Time (like in SBA).

Then more work on Charley's visual language, with some Blake influence. This spread also shows how I sometimes turn my sketchbook sideways and add in not-quite-relevant ideas - in this case, what if William got a book about science and tried making Charley learn it so he could put it in his adverts? Stuff that can't be proven!

Planning for this image of William lying in a graveyard! It's about voicelessness! I printed a copy of an article about the ophthalmia trials from the Hull Packet from 10 November 1823 (article titled 'Cruelty of a Schoolmaster', how embarrassing for him), covered it in household emulsion (making sure that the words were still visible), then drew William over the top of it in graphite.

Right: sometimes I can be planning a project for a long time and then suddenly things just line up stunningly - so here I began to make Disorder (or, as it was then, Despaired Of) make sense. I suddenly had ideas for more of the pages, whereas before I'd just been doing one page at a time, responding to whatever I'd done previously with the next one. (This is probably something to do with how, if you let ideas sit in the back of your head and concentrate on something else, your subconscious gets to work and sometimes turns up the goods. Or mine does, at least. I'm sure there's literature on this but I'm looking for it in the wrong places at present.)

More Disorder planning.

Another version of upside-down William, and a comic that I could have put at the end of Disorder, but for some reason didn't? I think it just turned into a historiographical minefield: lots of spicy business about breaking the fourth wall, the power of the historian in representing people from your case study (do they have a say? they're only your interpretations, oh no here we go again), emphasis on creative/ practical aspect of research, interpretation, imagination, etc. 

There's a lot of writing in this sketchbook. Find a more exciting one on the list.