Writing Projects

• Completed Project I: Paul Vuillard. Title of project: ‘The Pink Bedroom.’ Date of completion 19.09.2014. Profile: 8,000 words short (long?!) story.

Experience: This story came to me quickly initially, and the first quarter of the text, setting the scene of the apartment etc. virtually wrote itself. This portion of the text was written in a cramped and cluttered but charming corner behind my mother’s stall in the Hampstead Antiques Emporium. I used to cycle there in the morning in the week preceding my departure to Ghent. The writing would begin when all the chatting with fellow tradeswomen had finished, and the compulsory cup of strong coffee, meticulously crafted by a Turkish vendor in a small aluminium caravan had been drunk. Sometimes my dreams and researches into the great Symbolist painters would be interrupted by a would-be customer or antiques enthusiast asking me a question about some article of porcelain or jewellery on my mother’s stall or cabinet. Occasionally I could answer these, but more often, I could not. After this groundwork had been laid, there was a considerable lull in productivity following my move to Ghent. This was actually the opposite of what I had intended in moving here: I wanted to find space to think and write not to lose all sense of who I was. But perhaps this is inevitable. Indeed, I think that I underestimated the energy that necessarily needs to be invested in setting up a new life for yourself. One needs solidity and certainty in material conditions in order to allow creativity to flourish, and these things need to be built, they cannot just appear. The life of calm, moderation, comfort and sometimes seclusion, that is so celebrated and romanticised in connection with writers, actually expresses, not just simplicity in lifestyle but  real economic privilege. Laying Virgil and his bees to one side: In order to have space and time to write you must have money or be prosperous. This is the bottom line. After two weeks in which I began to grow despondent about my lack of progress  in which I found myself stuck in a creative rut about the story’s structural design (especially the Bonnard section). However, I suddenly experienced a surge in creative output in week 3 of my stay in Ghent, and within two days had finished the project and produced a first draft. Sections II and III were written in this period on the fifth floor (music section) of Ghent’s glorious public library (‘Bibliotheek Gent’).

Challenges: Though lectures I attended on France in the Third Republic and literature (of Proust, Balzac etc.) I had read  of the period equipped me with a good working mental landscape of Paris at the turn of the century, one challenge I found myself faced with and that I do not think I altogether surmounted, was how to vocalise Bethany’s thoughts in a way that was consistent with her class and likely education, while still compassing the complexity and beauty of Vuillard’s art.  My decision to root the story in Bethany arose out of a frustration with the project in general and not specific to project I. That gripe is embedded in the gendered partisanship of art history, and the history of its majority-male creators. I.e. I realised that if I was going to generate a portfolio of stories based on – probably, let’s face it – mostly male artists (thereby amplifying the bias?), how was I going to admit the female voice into the equation? In the explication of exploration of these artworks, how was I to avoid conducting a choir of exclusively male voices? I want to return the female voice to art history. I realise that this is a bold statement, however this question of the female voice seems basic for a subject that bears – perhaps more than any other -the scars of the battle between the sexes. After all, the history of art is really the history of visual representation, and visual representations are storm-centres or force-fields of ideological interplay, places where fantasies can become concrete. Often fantasies represent the worst in human nature, leading to images of pornography or enslavement. However, the suggestion that the female voice is absent or not admitted from the majority of art history is also erroneous. Because, in a way, they were always there: as spectators, subject-symbols, and sometimes, even as patrons. Women have always taken part in the history of art, they just have not been its scribes. The challenge then, is to uncover these hidden seams and narratives and to use the power of the imagination to project us into the world of unwritten female art history.

Appendix of Images:

• Completed Project II: Harold Gilman. Title of project: ‘Phoenix Road’. Date of completion 04.10.2014. Profile: 7,000 words short  story.

Experience/Explanation of Text: This short story would have been unthinkable without the considerable amount of research I plugged into the topic during the summer of last year, for my master’s dissertation. This thesis considered how representations of women were altering in Edwardian England in the wake of the Women’s Movement. My initial idea was to focus on the Camden Towners, though of course through my book-mediated acquaintanceship with them, I became introduced to all of their friends, their families, those that they admired in society, those that they feared. I began to assimilate a fairly detailed picture of British Society at the time, building a web of associations that stretched from the francophile influences of Post-Impressionism in Fry’s exhibitions, to the great artists of the Second World War.  Of course Bloomsbury looms large over this period as well as the aspirations of the British modernists. But there were other players – perhaps smaller players, who were just as radical in their way. Harold Gilman is among them. He was a strong and charismatic man, also, I believe a truly gifted painter. When I spent days sifting through the image archives of the Witt Library last summer, I felt myself deeply calmed and satisfied by his art: the tender portraits of his family, and all those other women, as well as the topographical studies that he executed  of the suburbs of North London that I know so well. This story is an homage to Gilman and his vision, but it is also a kind of critique of it. This critique is obviously expressed through his meeting with Bertha, who challenges him and develops him in several ways. When I first saw the cycle of portraits and sketches of ‘Clarissa’ upon whom the Bertha story is based, I was immediately struck by how different in mode such paintings were to almost any other nude studies completed by the Camden Towners, especially the Mornington Crescent nudes by Sickert. So this is a meditation on early feminism, and a critical period of change in British art history, slightly predating modernism. A more lengthy and detailed exegesis on portraiture – a subject that I find very interesting – will follow in a story about Whistler.

Appendix of Images: 

• Completed Project III: Leopold Blaschka. Title of project: The Antarctic.  Date of completion 15.10.2014. Profile: 12,000 words, novella.

Experience: The idea for this piece has been brewing in the back of my mind for a long time – ever since a visit to The Natural History Museum’s ‘Treasures’ exhibition last Spring. At that point (and still now) I was very interested by intersections between the history of art and natural history – and this intersection is powerfully emblematized by the scientific-aesthetic sculptures of Leopold Blaschka. However, the events of my life in Ghent that especially triggered the writing of this story – the longest one to date – included my trip to Arnaud’s geology department in October, where he showed me specimens of deep sea creatures under a microscope. In tandem with his explanations of the geological features of life in the sea bed and the existence of vast, cleaving sea trenches, I felt that it was time to begin writing my most ambitious story to date. Challenges: Most of the challenges I faced in the writing of this story were research challenges. I had many scenarios to sculpt and imagine that I did not yet have the conceptual tools to deal with. The two most obvious gaps in my knowledge were related to ship architecture and marine geology. So I spent many days studying diagrams of nineteenth century packet ships and trying to imagine what life on board them would have been like. But there was also much to learn about the craft of glass-blowing itself – a medium that in all my years of art study and design, I had never personally worked with. The other yawning gaps in the project were suggested by the story itself. Though the story is based on a real episode in the life of a real artist, as there were many facts and stray bits of information about the project, that research online could offer no direct help with. So I found myself becoming momentarily not only a writer or an art historian but a historian – filling in with educated guesses and speculation, answers to the questions that plagued the project. For example, I knew that Blaschka undertook a trans-Atlantic voyage, but it was down to research to try and reconfigure his journey. Did he leave from Antwerp or another European port? How did he travel from Bohemia? Where could his ship have been becalmed and in what part of the ocean could the jelly-fish that he observed be most likely to accumulate. There was much to learn and gain from this project and I enjoyed the writing of it, finally, very much.

Appendix of Images:

 

A nineteenth-century packet ship

• Completed Project IV: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Title of project: The Dragonfly.  Date of completion 06.12.2014. Profile: 2,800 words, short story.

Experiences/ Explanation of text: I had known for some time that I wanted to write a piece on Whistler. One nocturne of his depicting a firework  display on the banks of the Thames – Nocturne in Black and Gold –was the first painting I thought of. I had seen it in all its encrusted glory in Tate Britain last year and remembered that it had also been the cause of one of the most infamous artistic feuds in the late nineteenth century – a lawsuit that Whistler issued against Ruskin for indemnity and slander following a negative review of the painting. So it was a painting already rich in exciting narrative detail. However, just before I launched into this project I was reminded of a slightly earlier and more formally restrained painting by Whistler – the famous Harmony in Grey and Green. The more I looked at it, the more it fascinated me and the more puzzling the disparate elements of the painting seemed: why were there butterflies fluttering about above Cecily’s head? Why was there a pile of dirty clothes in the left-hand corner? And why did he paint her in such a deliberately constructed and mournful manner? The painting seemed to be a great tribute to a popular theme in literary culture of the nineteenth-century:  the passage from girlhood to womanhood and the loss of innocence. Rich in contrasting feelings – anger, admiration – and dense with visual poetry, I decided to finally write a short story trying to imagine the portrait sittings in situ. After much paring down and fine-tuning I believe the final result was the strongest and most concise story I wrote that year.

Appendix of Images

Harmony in Green and Grey: Miss Cecily Alexander (1874)

• Complete Project V: Rembrandt. Title of project: The Triumph of Mordecai. Date of completion 05.01.2015. Profile: 4,800 words, short story.

The Triumph of Mordecai  came about as the result of two separate events in my life: a trip to Rembrandt’s House in Amsterdam in December 2014 and a decision to start reading the Old Testament around Christmas time. The etching after which the story is named was one of the few original pieces of work on display in the artist’s house – but it was not by Rembrandt, but by Lukas van Leyden. Having read the brief text summary on the wall I realised that the story of Mordecai was actually the genesis of the ‘Emperors’ New Clothes’ myth – a philosophical riddle that I had interested me since childhood. The story of Mordecai, which its emphasis on themes of professional rivalry, subterfuge and identity-play, also interested me because it seemed to resonate with some of the aspects of Rembrandt’s studio practise discussed by an assistant and educationalist in the museum. What was a ‘real’ Rembrandt? How could we disentangle the work of his hands from those of his contemporaries, students, assistants? What if a paining was collaborative or completed by a student but signed with his name? Rembrandt was a crafty commercial operator as well as an artist. Determining where Rembrandt stopped and everyone else  began wasn’t always easy, even for experts. So originally I wanted to write a story about this painting, the Lukas van Leyden, and through it – indirectly – approach Rembrandt, via the back door, on a slant, perhaps as his work (so embedded in the visual culture of everything around him) should be approached. However, after discovering Rembrandt’s etching after the same theme and actually reading the apocryphal story, I realised that the story could no longer be about authorship identity and authorcentricism. The Bible story itself was so clearly about other things: darker, more terrible and profound. It was a story about suffering, discrimination and political opportunism. So just as with The Dragonfly I ended writing about something I had never intended – but felt I needed to in order to be true to the spirit of the artwork – so it was with the Rembrandt story. Thick with historical and theological references as well as a deconstruction of the famous Esther myth, this story was certainly one of the most challenging to write, but hopefully also, most rewarding to read.

Drypoint etching: The Triumph of Mordecai

• Completed Project VI: Walter Sickert.  Title of project: Chicken.  Date of completion 25.01.2015. Profile: 5,700 words, short story.

Chicken was inspired by the wonderful story of Walter Sickert’s friendship – unintelligible to his middle and upper-class friends – with the music hall singer Emily Powell or as she is consecrated in his work, ‘Chicken’. Ever since writing my Masters dissertation the year before last I had been fascinated by their friendship and the captivating portrait that he painted of her, rather difficult to get hold of. So this story was an exploration of their friendship and a celebration of platonic love between men and women, but it was also a kind of homage to Lukas and the musical connection that we shared together. Finally, I dedicated this story to him. Most of the historical references are accurate. For example, we know that Chicken modelled for him, she writes in her memoirs how he loved to hear the barcarolle from Les Comptes du Hoffman – a magical and spellbinding piece of music which set the tone, more than anything else, for the fairy-tale-esque atmosphere of the story.

Portrait of ‘Chicken’, Nee Emily Powell

• Completed Project VII: Henry Moore. Title of project: Once Upon a Winter’s Night. Date of completion 15.02.2015. Profile: 4,500 words, short story.

The seed for this piece of work can be traced back to a period of intense research I undertook two years ago on the collections, character and writings of the art historian Kenneth Clark. Of all the lectures, monographs and broadcasting I saw and read, the piece of work which stayed with me the most was his wonderful monograph on Henry Moore. It was during the reading of this book in the British Library that I first came across Moore’s fascinating Tube Shelter sketches. I was delighted – as most people are I imagine – to see his sketches and graphic work, knowing him in all other respects as so much the sculptor, and also keen to see how his famously abstract and esoteric imagination would interpret the mundane realities of 1930s Blitz Britain. After looking through a number of these I felt certain that I would have another chance to reflect on this work and the interesting political project of The War Arts Advisory Committee – and I did, two years later. Originally I wrote this from the perspective of a first-person narrator – the ‘little boy’ – but finding that his ability to understand Moore’s work could not be any thing but – perhaps charmingly – limited, I re-wrote using an objective, middle-distance narrator instead.

Pink and Green Sleepers

• Completed Project VIII: James Ensor. Title of project: The Lady from the Low Country. Date of completion 02.03.2015. Profile: 3,000 words, short story.

 

Afterword

Altogether I wrote 7 art-historical stories in Ghent,  one novella and competed this blog. I’m not sure if I really reached my 833-word per day target but I wasn’t so far off! I hope to put all this work together in one place: hopefully in the creation of an art-object-text, limited edition print run. I will also include with this edition of short stories, two further stories that I wrote proceeding my trip to Ghent during the summer of 2014 in Provence. One of these stories focuses on one of Cezanne’s final portrait commissions, while the other explores the eerie nature photography of plant taxidermist Karl Blossfeldt. I also hope to write a short introduction to the book about the relationship between painting and writing.