book find…
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I do what I do and where I want to take it over the next few years. Drawing and blogging have become a big part of my life, though both are quite new activities - or at least I thought so. Wandering round a junk shop of sorts a couple of weeks ago, I found a copy of Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and was suddenly transported back to my early teens when I first read the book. I remember desperately wanting to recreate something like it myself - a visual journal of my own life - it’s just my life didn’t feel interesting enough (and of course I was too scared to try and draw). I did make an attempt though. On a holiday to Guernsey with my mother (holidays felt sufficiently out of the ordinary and interesting to merit recording it seems) I took a sketchbook and some watercolour pencils and made some disappointing drawings of flowers, in an attempt to be just like my favourite Edwardian chronicler.
Of course, I was making two mistakes. My first was to try be like someone else (never a good idea). The second, to think only the out of the ordinary was worth recording. It is the everyday and ordinary that is really interesting, the little things that speak about how we spend our days. That is where life is lived, and that is what I’ve learnt I want to record.
I suspect it’s a good thing I don’t want to be Edith Holden anymore, though I feel a little sad, looking at the book, that I feel none of the excitement for her drawings I felt in my teens…
January 20th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
i love that book too!
January 20th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Thanks for reminding me, Michael! I was just bemoaning my prosaic lifestyle.
-J
January 20th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
i can understand your feeling a little sad that you’re not excited by her book anymore, but i bet there are TONS of books/illustrators/authors that DO excite you a ton that you would never have given a second thought to when you were a teen!
January 21st, 2006 at 6:05 am
That is a treasure of a book, and I still enjoy looking through mine. But I find so many others to be exciting, too … from the gentility of the Edwardian lady to the wildness of Peter Beard. Many moods, many journals.
January 21st, 2006 at 10:51 am
wow I’d forgotten how everyone went mad on that stuff… her relatives must have made a bomb… however wouldn’t it have been more interesting is she had really drawn the countours of her life? England in the Edwardian period was going through a the last gasp of the industrial revolution, cities were teaming with people, new fangled technologies like cars were being adopted but instead she presented a very circumspect and very proper sketchbook of ‘nature’ and ‘beauty’. It says a lot about the constrictions and boundaries of Edith’s life.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:05 am
Oh, I remember this one - avery popular book in it’s day. Maybe this had some subliminal part to play in us all becoming bloggers?
Your blog is better than the book though Michael.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:06 am
PS: At the time, i thought this book was genuine, but I seem to remember reading or hearing somewhere later, that it is in fact a work of fiction…thoughts?
January 24th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
I believe you’ve a book in you, Michael. You’re right about recording the detail, which is in the ordinary. Old family photos in shoe boxes are as just as valid a form of social and documentary resource as are past issues of LIFE magazine.
Direction? Take it wherever you feel you need to: drawing is you.
Cheers,
B.
January 26th, 2006 at 8:25 am
G’day from Oz,
I have been looking at your site for some time now. Thankyou for sharing all that you share. Do not be sad! The Edwardian Lady was an important part of your teenage years and obviously instrumental in encouraging your creativity.
You know the saying, ” When I was a child, I thought as a child etc,etc,”!