Ed Draws History: PhD sketchbooks: SBF (24/4/21

Small but chunky - this one originally had a nasty plasticky cover, which I pulled off and replaced with boards that were slightly too small. The spine nearly came off and I had reattach it with paper tape but it's otherwise doing alright. It got me back into doing (bad) bookbinding! (I made the next two SB sketchbooks.)

Timelapse video of this one here!

Drawing about the passage of time

Left page: things redrawn from Bad Form - that's the (rather awful) graphic novel I did for my final major project at undergrad, and it was about the experiences of a fictional boy at Bowes Academy, and featured some of the same characters (but they were quite different then). Right page: William having a Sad Time

Preliminary work for one of the more striking images in the conclusion of Disorder. Final version in A4BE.

Then some character design work for (Un)Known Associates

Markmaking experiments with a very short pencil - satisfying to make, not quite satisfying once you're done with them - surrounded by written rants about the historical sublime, not needing certainty, meaning being projected onto things by the observer, etc.

A lot of stuff in here is scrabbling around for a visual language for (U)KA. And then it happened.

Bottom of left-hand page: "FEELING STUCK IN MY WORK like the drawings aren't really going anywhere and are just doing the SAME STUFF over and over again FFS which means it is time to experiment again TIME TO LOOK AT WOODCUTS"

I found this book and was much delighted

Tarot references sneaking in (Mr Gairdner has a sword, a disk, a cup, and a wand on his floor today)

Then sometimes I was greatly vexed about things

Vexed at historiography

Vexed at third-person writing/ "objective" viewpoints

Vexed at disembodiment

Vexed at the use of passive voice in academic writing

Vexed and gleeful and also a clown

Then I started looking at W. G. Sebald to see if he had any potential strategies I could borrow - seeing how he constructs narratives and joins things together. (I've only read The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo and I mostly enjoyed them but there was a lot of melancholy and one or two unpleasant book hangovers, you know when you stop reading but you're still in the book and everything you encounter is viewed through that book)

Sebald included images smack in the middle of paragraphs which I think is brilliant (and I do it in my thesis) - this challenges how you read (do you look at the image first, do you jump over the image and finish reading the paragraph first, do you pause word-reading in the middle of the sentence and read the image)

Sebald also makes strange sideways links between things. He jumps conversationally from one topic to another through weird/ apparently insignificant/ seemingly random connections. Sometimes there'll be hints of the next topic hidden in the one before, then he'll pick up that thread and go elsewhere with it. That's what this spread was about - working out how to do that using images.

An idea for using three separate (U)KA cards to make a single image, which isn't quite a single image because the character is shown in three different contexts. (The original pose is adapted from the end of SBA.)

Also other stuff

Notes on Dada manifestos and Tristan Tzara's writings. While I didn't explicitly use these in (U)KA, I'm probably going to refer to them again for some postdoctoral alarum.

Analysing things in some other sketchbooks. These are from SBD.

Fruits of vexation (good name for a band) - an idea for a comic about the popular perception of historians/ the discipline. A few bits of this turn up in some other sketchbooks. It's gonna be postdoctoral! (I've got to make a list of my postdoctoral project ideas, it'll be as long as any of my limbs)

Then some business with the four classical elements and their associations, which I used in developing (U)KA.

I decided I needed to focus a bit less on my main four characters (William, Bridget, Ann, and Charley) so I listed a load of people William (probably) knew here. I chose four of this lot and assigned one element to each of them (similar to the whole William/Reason and Charley/Imagination business in A4BB, or Ann/Beauty and Charley/Sublime in SBA.)

Initial ideas, and trying to work out Mrs Young's face.

More Mrs Young. I thought Air would be an appropriate element for her - we know nothing about her, apart from her name appears on William's adverts (I haven't seen her anywhere else yet). Air is about clarity, language, communication, precision, reason, etc., but can sometimes find it hard to express emotion. As one of William's references, she would've (hopefully) been able to communicate with prospective clients and tell them what a good school Bowes Academy is. This could've become a bit tricky post-1823 (when William was the defendant in the ophthalmia trials) but she's still listed on his card of terms c.1831.

Richard Seaton, William's agent (until, for reasons that I do not know, he was replaced by Jacob Metcalfe around late 1833/ early 1834). I associated Seaton with Earth, which is about finance (he's William's agent and had his own business for a while, and went bankrupt a couple of times), material considerations, comfort and provision, practicality and reliability (you want those in an agent), but sometimes tends to stick in the mud. Earth is also linked to some bull symbolism (such as the zodiac sign Taurus and St Luke when involved in the four evangelists/ tetramorph situation) and I think it was bovine products that Seaton sold. I wanted to draw him as strong as an ox!

I associated Frank Addison with Water - which is about emotions, relationships (he married Bridget's sister Mally, so he's brother-in-law to Bridget and William, and he and William turn up in documents about trying to start a Methodist chapel in Bowes), methodical (he's a tailor), regeneration, cleansing, but sometimes lacks direction (I don't think the chapel got too far, but I don't know what happened there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it involved one gentleman's mismanagement of his school, health and safety William, cough cough 👀)