Boy, my beloved Charlotte B really stumped me. I've long wanted to do a piece using the famous portrait of Charlotte and her sisters by their brother Branwell. He painted himself out of the center of the picture but feels almost more present as a brown absence than he would as a figure, which seems quite apt for his brief, strange movement through the family's life. I could never make that piece work, and (typical of her era) images of Charlotte are relatively few.
Here, I've used George Richmond's chalk drawing of her, made five years before her death at the age of 39. It sits on a decorative frame collaged from several different pieces of vintage ephemera and "attached" to the piece with digitized ribbon. In the traditional language of flowers and plants, ivy was associated with close bonds and the ability to thrive in the most challenging environments, both qualities that felt appropriate to Brontë's life.
The red background, also an amalgam, includes the page from Jane Eyre in which Jane describes her "peculiar" artworks, a digital flourish or three, and a photograph of one of the houses that may have inspired the fictional Thornfield Hall.
Coloristically, I wanted to use the deep red that figures so prominently into Jane Eyre (and Gothic literature generally) in the image. Yet Charlotte herself was pragmatic as well as passionate. I felt that the simple brown tones balanced the heightened red nicely.
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© Suzanne Fox 2020 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: stock images plus |