The clump

Details from: The Sower, Canterbury Cathedral, C12th: Lady & The Unicorn Tapestry, Flanders C16th: my Laura Ashley patchwork quilt, 1975.

The clump of flowers motif is found in many of my "favourite" items: the weeds, spots and stripes in the stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral, the background to the tapestries in The Cluny Museum in Paris and the Laura Ashley scraps that I made my patchwork quilts from. 

But the best example has got to be on the serge curtains stitched by William & Jane Morris in 1860 and hanging in the hall at Kelmscott Manor. The stitches are huge and the colours dramatic, each clump (below right) is about 300 mm. tall.

Above is my first drawing inside the Manor, drawn with great excitement in front of the serge curtains, with a  glimpse of the treasures beyond. These are a 1925 tapestry by JH Dearle (Art Director for Morris & Co. from 1896) hanging next to a black & white and a coloured design for the piece. 

JH Dearle tapestry: detail of tapestry: my copy of two clumps from Dearle's black & white design.

This "millefleurs" tapestry uses the clumps not as background filling or a border around figures - as in many Morris tapestry and stained glass designs - but as an overall small scale pattern (clumps about 120 mm. tall). There are about twelve different types of flower closely packed together with just a dark narrow border around the edge. Close study of the clumps reinforces a fact I particularly like, that these plants were not necessarily drawn from nature.

The mulberry tree

Kelmscott Manor from the west in April and September

This was one of my first drawings of the Manor, from a picnic bench in the meadow. That view is now obliterated by fruit trees; I have hardly looked at the west side of the Manor recently because the mulberry tree is so overpowering - you can see it hiding the two right hand gables in the picture above. The path in front of the green room windows has been closed off because of disturbingly dropping fruit, and I am taken straight into the world of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market". 

Mulberries, blackberries, cartoon of CGR by DGR

The cartoon, above right, is one of a number of fantastic drawings by DGR at Whitwick Manor. It shows Christina in one of her tantrums smashing furniture, in reference to a favourable 1864 review in the Times that included the line, "Miss Rossetti…can point to finished work - to work which it would be difficult to mend".  If you haven't got anyone, ideally a sister, to read "Goblin Market" aloud to you, here is a link to the poem.

www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poems/goblin_market

Artistic licence

I enjoyed seeing my old work again, so here is some more. Above is a page from my 1987 sketchbook when I was designing a window for a house in Oxfordshire. This design was rejected  because of its industrial feel, the pylons in particular - outrageous because pylons are such a huge part of the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire landscape. 

I remember when I was sketching telegraph wires next to an old barn when I was about fifteen, my Dad suggested to me that I didn't need to put the wires in the drawing. He explained this was called "artistic licence". It was a great relief to discover that I could leave things out if I wanted to, but pylons and telegraph poles are usually the things that I decide to leave in.

Pylons drawn and photographed near Yate                                                 Drawing from the attic at Kelmscott Manor