PhD sketchbooks: IBJ (30/10/20 - 3/5/21)

Mostly planning a presentation for that paper, a load of stuff for Disorder, drawings I did as a result of one of the funniest things that's ever happened to me, and distractions with Charley and Ann (which I'll use for some postdoctoral thing focussing on them, currently it's looking like it'll be a graphic novel about memory and time or something like that)

(Timelapse video of this one here!)

First page sideways because it wasn't entirely relevant to the main part of my work - I found out about a terrible fire in Barnard Castle when Charley and Ann were living there, and got excited and had to check the Newcastle Courant's coverage (issue dated 31 March 1848) against some directories (such as this one from 1827)

Top of left-hand page: I was practicing presenting that paper, and evaluating my performance every time I did. Right: developing a visual language that was somewhere between Mary Ann's and Charley's for a couple of pages of Disorder where they talk to each other

This drawing of Mary Ann was the last thing I drew before my appendix burst! I was partway through another presentation rehearsal and feeling increasingly rough, and, to my great inconvenience and surprise, it transpired that one of my internal organs was rupturing. I drew most of the stuff on this spread while I was recovering at home.

More stuff I drew during post-appendectomy recovery. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, especially as I was working on a comic in which my protagonist nearly dies, and then I nearly died! (But I only realised that I nearly died some time after the event. At the time it was just annoying.) Anyway, the experience of having to recover from something that scares the daylights out of everybody around you proved very useful and gave me ideas for when William is recovering from whatever happened to make people despair of his life.

I'd been reading Nigel Llewellyn's The Art of Death (Reaktion Books in association with the V&A, London, 1991) and I developed things that ended up in Disorder. (I've already discussed this book here.) Some of these drawings are influenced by my post-appendix fun.

The first version of William's possibly-weirder-than-the-rest-of-the-book bit. He sees his own corpse, and Bridget in deep mourning, and then encounters their daughter Jane, who is deceased but who remains very cheerful. I wanted this part to be ambiguous - it's unclear whether he's had a supernatural encounter, some sort of prophetic vision, a mildly alarming hallucination, a consciously imagined episode, something induced by medication, or something else. Depends on how you interpret it!

Working out logistics of some of William's pages that show his bed. I don't know what his bed was like at the time when I set the comic (or at any other time), so I used some near-contemporary tent beds, which were apparently cheaper than a four-poster - he's a Yorkshire schoolmaster offering reasonably priced education, he'd probably approve of saving money where you can (I am of Yorkshire descent, I can make these jokes)

Left: by doing that drawing of Benning, I realised I needed to do two more pages in which William expresses his concern over the ophthalmia and becomes increasingly unwell. Right, underneath Bridget and young Ockerby: I drew some rough layouts which became more disordered as William's mental state deteriorates, and, by drawing something disordered, I retitled it - it was going to be called Despaired Of (which came from one of the trial reports, Benning said that William's life was "despaired of") but Disorder can be anything: the ophthalmia was called a disorder, William's mental state is disordered, the narratives are in a disorderly state, and I want to throw ordinary ways of doing history into disorder too.

Ideas for stuff to put on William's two new pages.

Definitions from Frederick Dinsdale's A Glossary of Provincial Words used in Teesdale in the County of Durham (1849, available here) which is very relevant! Teesdale is where the people in my case study lived, and Dinsdale would have been collecting these words during (some of) their lifetimes.

Most of this is me thinking about the written bits (the introduction and the conclusion) in Disorder. I was going to have a glossary full of illustration/ history terms - things from each discipline that people familiar with the other one might not recognise - eventually I decided it was long enough, and I could probably do a bigger and better version of a glossary elsewhere (with more exploration of each term, oh no I sense another postdoctoral thing brewing). Lower right-hand page has a bit about a nasty version of William (I tend to depict him as short-tempered but generally trying to do the right thing)

There's a few spreads like this: I printed a copy of my introduction, cut it up, glued it in, and annotated it. Working out page layout and how the images would work with the words.

A distraction! It's Charley and Ann again! I'm going to do a postdoctoral project about them, focussing on memory/ memorialisation/ commemoration/ forgetting/ misremembering/ that sort of thing.  

Left: a load of symbols and such that appear in the comic in Disorder, that I also included in a couple of places in the introduction, intending on having the audience say "I've seen that before somewhere". Right: printed the conclusion and annotated it like with the introduction. 

I read Beverley Pilcher's Barnard Castle and the Cholera Outbreak, 1849 (2004, privately printed) and had loads of good ideas about Charley and Ann - they went to live in Barnard Castle in the 1840s, and Charley died at the end of the 1849 cholera epidemic. In some of these drawings, I'm wondering how Ann might have reacted to some of the moralistic things that people were saying.

More Disorder conclusion stuff

I am now totally distracted by the idea of that postdoctoral project about Charley and Ann, oh no - leave me to my diversions and go back to the sketchbook index 

Some books I read this month: November 2020

Remains to be seen whether this will end up as a series or not. Anyway!

 

The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500 - c. 1800

Nigel Llewellyn

Reaktion Books in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991

Copiously illustrated with all manner of splendid deathly items from visual and material culture: coffin plates, engravings, commemorative portraiture, effigies, monuments, mourning rings, sketches, and loads more. There’s also a few references to things not shown in the book that can be tracked down later.

The text itself has some concepts that can help contextualise death and the mentalities and practices surrounding it. I’m particularly interested in the two bodies - the social body, which is the form of the deceased as remembered by everybody else (such as in commemorative portrayals, epitaphs, and stuff designed for future viewers), and the natural body, which is the bit that rots and has the potential to cause alarm with its decay. The social body, as presented in monuments and what-have-you, could sometimes be used to communicate a revised version of the depicted individual’s life and exploits. Weirdly, history might count as presentation and re-presentation of the social bodies of people in the past, according to historians’ interpretations and their own cultural contexts and all that.

The concept of the two bodies concerns image control, reputation, what people in the past wanted their contemporaries and people in the future to remember (or to believe) - that sort of thing.

Yeah, the title says the period the book covers finishes circa 1800, which you’d think would put it a bit too early for my case study, but there’s a fair amount of stuff I’d find useful anyway. There’s a few post-1800 things, and plenty of stuff that I can pull into my work that people of the time would have understood. I came away with loads of ideas, particularly with regard to William and his potentially forthcoming death in Despaired Of - my weird experimental comic in which one small aspect of an incident at Bowes Academy is explored using five different visual languages - basically, William’s life was “despaired of” at one point, and they thought he was going to die, so this book is setting my brain on fire (in the best possible way) with all sorts of wild stuff.

Bridget in a state of neoclassical despondency.

Pagan Britain

Ronald Hutton

Yale, 2013

Not gonna lie, I’m a fan of Ronald Hutton. I’ve attended a couple of his talks, and I read The Triumph of the Moon in the summer, and, as far as I’m concerned, he says a lot of very sensible things. 

Pagan Britain is a good solid overview of belief and its material traces from prehistoric times, through to the Middle Ages, and with a few hints of seemingly pagan practices in later years.

(“What are you reading this for, Ed? This is all well before your case study!” exclaims the reader, much surprised.)

I’m in strong agreement with Hutton’s historiographical angle. He declares his standpoint, respectfully, at numerous points in the book. He acknowledges that there’s multiple interpretations of the traces that are left, and how those interpretations have changed (and will change) over time, and that we’re not going to get the final story of any of it. He presents various interpretations, archaeologists’ arguments, and so on, displaying the pros and cons of them and giving them a fair hearing, and he also shows us his own thoughts on various matters - sometimes he explains which interpretation he prefers, or he reacts with quiet emotion to one of the possible stories of what might’ve happened, rather than hiding and feigning objectivity. Basically, he says a lot of things I agree with! Especially in his conclusion - flippin’ ‘eck, it’s a glorious few pages, brilliant and concise, and can be applied to history in general rather than being limited to the scope of the book.

The illustrations in this book are fantastic, and have given me all sorts of ideas for Charley's visual language in Despaired Of.

There’s also the visual side of it. There’s plenty of illustrations, including a lot of prehistoric rock carvings, abstract motifs, and representational art. There’s drawings or photographs of amazing things regularly throughout the book. Interestingly, the figures aren’t always directly referred to in the text - I didn’t notice any “see fig. 24” or anything - so the images run alongside the text, and could be viewed almost as a separate essay in their own right. This book has been vital for some of the sections of Despaired Of - one of the characters has an almost prehistoric visual language, in a recontextualisation away from the early 19th century setting.

Charley confronts a metaphorical wolf that's been saying nasty things to him. Told you Despaired Of is weird.

Witches & Wicked Bodies

Deanna Petherbridge

National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Museum, 2013

This is a catalogue to accompany an exhibition (that, of course, I missed) and it’s full of depictions of witches, from the Renaissance to the early 21st century. 

The images provide a fascinating exploration of how witches were usually depicted by artists in order to convince their audience that they were definitely evil, although these works probably acted as further evidence confirming some of that audience’s pre-existing suspicions. They might’ve said things like ‘Those witches are definitely up to no good - I saw a picture of it!’

And what type of people are the witches in the illustrations? Almost always female, typically either quite elderly and rather unprepossessing, or youthful and somewhat provocative. Both of these depictions are intended to communicate the evils of witches: the ugliness of the more venerable ones is equated with their wickedness, while the young witches are intent on ensnaring blokes with magic spells and sexiness. (It seems that people in the past were a bit scared of women having any sort of power. I hope we’ve moved on from that way of thinking.)

This is my favourite image in this book - The Weird Wife o’ Lang Stane Lea (1830) by James Giles (1801 - 1870). I love this because there’s a witch (of course!), there’s a megalithic monument, there’s the moon and (presumably) Venus in a wonderful sky, there’s dramatic light and shade - there’s all sorts of narrative potential in this painting, things to wonder about, especially with regard to what secret things the witch might’ve just done - and it was painted during the early 19th century. Wins big points from me.

What if you’re not into witchery? This book will show you a curated group of images that document (often negative) views of women’s bodies over a set period of time. Or you could read it with the illustrator’s eye, and look for things that you can borrow or subvert in your own drawings, as a reaction to the images you’ve just seen. Or you could see how methods of image-making change over time, and what media gives the most striking results for the creator’s intent for the image. Or you could have a close look at the images in terms of their material culture, and see what sort of things people wore (or didn’t, there’s a lot of nudity, but we can all handle it like grown-ups) or associated with occult practices.

Might use some slightly more eyebrow-raising (for the time) allusions if I explore Charley and Ann Mackay's relationship - they had a dodgy not-exactly-legal wedding on Barnard Castle bridge when they were in their late teens, and then they had an official church wedding a few months later.