Recreating Work of Art: Our Hilarious Lockdown Project

What do writers do in lockdown? We write, right?

But I seem to have found myself another job in this strange time: recreating works of art with my husband using things found around the house. My Dad is an art lecturer and I have worked for years for an art and craft publisher, but I never expected to become so deeply and joyfully involved.

It started as a lark with Van Gogh’s Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear. We found a broom head in the garden, taped it to Jon’s head, added a bandage, approximated a few background details and posted on Facebook. People seemed delighted, as if we’d injected some much-needed fun into the troubling early days of the lockdown.

We started to do a recreation a day. I would emerge from the intense focus and realise I hadn’t thought of the virus for an hour or more. It was worth doing for that alone.

We began with the obvious paintings and even while sending them up, we gained a surprising insight into what makes them work. It wasn’t only poses, expressions, colours and shapes that we needed to recreate but also texture, tone, lighting, contrast and mood. I became fascinated by the artists and their original models. It was like the most enjoyable Art History course ever.

Our second effort was Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The pose looks like an effortless glance, but I soon became aware that it’s painfully unnatural as I stretched my neck and eye muscles. I can only imagine what the original model went through. This was my first wake-up call: I am a tiny bit older than most artists’ models! The Older Lady With a Pearl Earring.

The Card Players by Cezanne was the first one to involve our 24-year-old son as photographer. He did not want to faff obsessively about details as I do and was far from amused that we had commandeered the entire kitchen when he wanted to make breakfast.

For Munch’s The Scream, Jon perfected his Expressionist expression while I created distant figures from cardboard and a sunset from an orange towel. I always place our effort next to the original, cropping and placing it to enhance the resemblance. Oh the frustration when a glaring omission comes to light when it’s too late to take the photo again! I fussed over not getting the perspective right here. ‘Oh, Munch exaggerated it,’ said Dad. Now you tell me!

You’ve got to do Frida Kahlo, because of her amazing paintings and monobrow. I don’t really have eyebrows at all and have to paint them on for most recreations. Maddeningly, my head angle is not right here, but everyone’s patience was at an end, especially our cat, Misty’s. She got sick of being held over my shoulder and scratched us all.

I came home from shopping to find Jon dressed as Whistler’s Mother, with a fake painting and black bin bags pinned to the wall. I think you’ll agree, Jon was born for the role.

For Millais’ Ophelia, we dragged an old car roof box from behind our shed, but it was locked, so Jon hacked it open with a saw. It was early April so we had to search for flowers to strew. Jon filled the roof box with water and I lay down in it, which really made me feel for the original model. Millais found Elizabeth Siddall in a hat shop. She posed lying in a bath in his studio and the cold gave her pneumonia – her father made Millais pay the medical bills.

Everyone kept daring us to do a Picasso, so here is his Portrait of Dora Maar. I painted a mask with oil pastels and my face with liquid eyeliner, and I had to twist my mouth to conceal it under the mask. It’s not much of a likeness but those Cubists really messed with reality.

Sometimes you think a painting is going to take hours to recreate and then it just falls into place. Renoir’s A Dance in the Country was one of those and got a huge reaction. People just love to see marigolds in art.

Social distancing restrictions explained the deserted scene in our version of Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergeres. I sinched in my waist, corset-style, with a sports bra, and a cardigan, kitchen paper ruffles and some clear plastic made up the barmaid’s outfit.

Contemporary critics assumed that Manet’s demure, smartly dressed model, Suzon, was a prostitute, which perhaps says more about them than about her. I’d never noticed before how unhappy she looks. She really worked at the bar, but the scene was reproduced in Manet’s studio where she posed behind a table laden with bottles. The angle of her reflection was hard to reproduce, and it turns out that Renoir just put it where he wanted it. It has been fascinating to learn how artists have faked things in the staging.

I had though Jon would be The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals, but he didn’t have the hair for it and it turned out I did. We faked the hat from a fancy-dress witch’s hat and the facial hair from gardener’s coconut matting – very tickly when you’re trying hold a swaggering pose.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid had had a kitchen refit! Again, her pose looks natural but almost did me an injury. Perhaps that’s why my expression could turn milk sour! I am still consumed with regret that I found the perfect bright blue cloth to hang from the table, then forgot to put it in.

Magritte’s Lovers 1 was recreated on Southborough Common. You’ll all be wearing these hygienic facemasks soon!

Modigliani’s Woman With Red Hair was not a difficult pose, but I had to paint my eyelids black to recreate her blank stare. I should get some real white lace – it would save me a lot of kitchen paper.

Around this time the local news channel featured some of our efforts, but it wasn’t the heady fame that kept us going, but friends and neighbours saying that our ‘art’ was cheering them up every day and we mustn’t stop. They are still saying that eleven weeks on!

For Magritte’s Son of Man, I confess we ordered a bowler hat online and taped an apple to its brim. People particularly liked the clouds stuck on the wall.

Pre-Raphaelite paintings are perfect for lampooning because they are already quite silly. Sometimes, it’s a prop that inspires you, and I couldn’t wait to wear the red travel neck pillow on my head for Frank Cowper’s Vanity.

Noir et Blanche by Man Ray. Our mask was a bit big, as was my hamster-like cheek as gravity pulled it south. The model, Kiki, attracted Man Ray with her ‘cute accent and air of mystery’ – and probably her firm young cheeks.

Next came Rosetti’s Prosperine, holding an onion in place of a pomegranate. Do I have a short neck or did Rosetti exaggerate hers? The model was Jane Morris, embroiderer, wife of William and lover of Rosetti, who married Elizabeth Siddall from Millais’ Ophelia – keep up now.

I wonder why Egon Shiele’s Woman With Legs Drawn Up is wearing rags for shorts, (reproduced of course with kitchen paper)? I learned here that artists de-emphasise perspective to imitate the way our brains adjust for it, but the camera records it faithfully, so limbs stretching towards the lens looking huge and distorted.

Lucien Freud’s Girl on a Sofa does the same thing in reverse – her feet look normal-sized but mine in the photo look stunted. I butchered my fringe to imitate hers and have lived with the result for weeks.

Jon got out his fairy costume, veteran of fancy dress Parkruns and school pantos, for Degas’ Dancer with a Bouquet. I think he captured her feminine grace to perfection.

The pose for John Singer Sargent’s Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast must be natural, as it worked best when I imagined I really was drinking a giddy but heartfelt toast. A bit of transparent plastic recreated Madame’s gauzy wrap.

It all went a bit haywire as the global pandemic continued. For Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, I cast around for something for Jon to munch and found the rubber chicken my son uses for teaching. Like Abraham’s ram, it meant that the son himself was spared.

By now my lockdown hair was barely controllable – perfect for Caravaggio’s Medusa. The original shows Medusa undone by the sight of her reflection, with ‘a shocked gaze, a terrified scream’, which is how I felt looking in a mirror. No snakes were required to reproduce the horror.

Hygienic gloves and a Pound Shop brolley were perfect for Manet’s The Balcony.

We found yeast in the shops after weeks without homemade pizza, so it was lovingly placed, with flour, in The Cradle by Berthe Morisot. She was the first woman to exhibit with the Impressionists, and painted her sister, Edma, with her baby. Edma’s expression is hard to read and some have suggested she was yearning to paint, as she did before motherhood. I was yearning to do some writing and for Lockdown to end – but mainly for pizza.

The photo we did before our VE Day street party created controversy. Albert Eisenstaedt snapped a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day in Times Square. Some Facebook comments said his photo showed a sexual assault. We were too busy partying to engage, but the debate raged so fiercely on the Recreate Works of Art page that admins took the post down! We could only get the pose right once we realised it’s like a dance move. As my son took photo after photo of his snogging parents, he said, ’This is the worst thing I’ve ever done.’

Jon insisted on wielding a real axe for Ferdinand Hodler's The Woodcutter, and regretted it as I kept saying, ‘Lean over more… no, much more…’

I thought it would take ages to recreate Andrew Wyeth’s decrepit and downcast old woman, but I put my lockdown hair up and there she was! This one proved popular, probably with other people missing their hairdresser.

I was delighted that we were able to recreate the lighting and composition of Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, if not Mr Clark’s hair. The sombre expressions and the bright outdoors just beyond reach seemed to sum up Week 9 of lockdown.

Jon took a while to wash off the Emperor Augustus’s bronze-verdigris green. I used liquid eyeliner for his hair and that washed off too, though many thought he should keep it. A teacher on Facebook asked to use this for GCSE History. We were happy to consent.

It was fascinating to investigate American Gothic, which many people suggested for us. The original scene was completely contrived: Grant Wood used his dentist and his sister to pose in front of the house and ordered her puritanical-looking apron from a mail-order firm. I felt no less authentic standing in front of a neighbour’s garage in Jon’s black sweatshirt, with a paper ‘brooch’ and a bit of cut-up fabric pinned to my front.

We no longer have the time to do a recreation every day, but we will carry on as long as restrictions remain and people enjoy our efforts. Thanks to the Recreate Artworks From Things You Find at Home Facebook page, which has been full of hilarity and inspiration. In strange times, we do strange things, and God knows, we need a laugh!

The Baku Beyond - Why are the Media Afraid of Abroad?

As the Europa League final approached, the absurdity of having a London derby in Azerbaijan was much in the news. The ex-Soviet nation became the byword for a strange/foreign/far-flung place, like Timbuktu before it. How would fans reach such a destination? And if any intrepid travellers did happen to make it, what in God’s name would it be like?

I don’t deny that it was a long way to go, and expensive, and there was fury and despair, and thousands of tickets were returned.

But the press coverage was reminiscent of other panics about foreign hosts. Rumours of catastrophe are rife before Olympic Games and World Cups: the stadium won’t be finished, the local fans are vicious, racist and homophobic, the hotels and cafes will rip off travellers, the police will weigh in with batons and tear-gas and our fans will end up banged up abroad, where the judicial system is corrupt.

I know there are genuine concerns, for instance for gay or black travellers. But it always gives me a warm feeling when fans who actually make it to these alien places not only survive, but thrive. 

Reporters interviewing British fans in Baku invited gripes about gruelling journeys and local difficulties – how lovely, then, to hear them reply,

‘It’s so beautiful here! And we’ve been treated like honoured guests.’

This fear of ‘abroad’ so often turns out to be unfounded – but it’s not only the media who indulge in it. 

We all get anxious before travelling. As a trip approaches, anxiety rises. What if they don’t have this or that in the shops? What if they feed us things we’re allergic to? What if they steal from us or rip us off?

I love travelling, but I confess to packing my favourite teabags, and vitamins, and Diocalm (usually years out of date, because it never gets used). But then I arrive, and I relax, and my happiest memories are made.

Perhaps this is the reason for the sure-fire holiday, the place you return to year after year so you can bypass all that fear of the unknown and hit the ground running, doing all your usual things.

In my next novel, The Year of the Ghost, a family go on their annual trip to a house in Wales, cheerfully mocking themselves for doing the things they always do, and have done for years. Only this time, something terrifying has invaded their usual holiday. Who could be haunting them in the place they all love?

Me and Kate Atkinson

This summer I plucked up the courage to take a few copies of Unspeakable Things into a local bookseller. I mean an actual one – not a coffee shop or a secondhand bookshop.

I had been warned the manager was dubious about self-published books, but I breezed in with fake confidence and assured her I would advertise it through my vast social media following. To my delight, she agreed to try it out for three months (thank you Fiona at Sevenoaks Bookshop!)

While there, I bought a ticket for a talk the bookshop had organized by author Kate Atkinson.

I love Kate Atkinson. I loved her duo of wartime-set novels, Life after Life and A God in Ruins so fervently that I made my Dad read them too, implying that I wasn’t really interested in talking to him until he had done so.

When I turned up for the talk three months later, I felt like a tiny, unworthy fish in a huge pond dominated by the brilliant likes of Kate Atkinson.

To make things worse, I popped into the bookshop beforehand to discover that no copies of Unspeakable Things had sold. Fiona was busy with the real author’s talk so I told the salesgirl I would pick up my unsuccessful efforts later.

As the crowd gathered, I got chatting to a fellow admirer of Kate Atkinson and commented that you could assess who her readers are by looking round at the audience – for instance, most of us were women.

‘I hadn’t noticed that,’ she said. ‘What made you pick up on it?’

Now, this blog was my first big step out of the closet as a writer. Since Unspeakable Things came out in January, I am happier to declare myself.

So I replied that I am interested in such things because I am a writer, though of course, not a proper one like Kate Atkinson. She kindly she asked about my book and I told her a bit about it. I always have some postcard-sized ads with me for just such occasions, so I silenced the ‘don’t show off’ voice in my head and gave her one.

Most of us had bought a copy of Kate Atkinson’s new novel Transcription in the lobby, but this woman had decided to buy it later at Sevenoaks Bookshop and to choose two more novels to take on holiday.

And guess what? She promised to buy Unspeakable Things. It would have been lovely to chat to her anyway, but now my three-month trial had been saved at the eleventh hour by this encounter at the feet of Kate Atkinson.

The proper author came on, and her talk was great and Transcription looks excellent. I still felt utterly unworthy, but as she spoke I felt a tingle of recognition that said, yes, I get it. I am a writer too. 

When it came time for questions, a woman asked, ‘Your novels seem to flow so creatively, as though they just grow organically. Do you do any planning at all?’

Of course she does, I thought. She’ll plan meticulously. Writers don’t commit to a shopping list without working out how it will end.

Kate Atkinson smiled. ‘I’m delighted you think that my novels just flow organically,’ she said. ‘But the truth is, I plan everything meticulously.’

And it turns out we have something else in common. The plot for Transcription came to her when she was doing research for her other wartime novels and came across the story of a real spy from the era.

My new novel The Year of the Ghost is partly set in the war years. While researching the history of child evacuees, I came across some extraordinary facts and stories. Perhaps the effect of wartime propaganda, which encouraged people to see Operation Pied Piper in a positive light has lingered on, meaning that its darker side has not been much explored.

Courtesy of Defense Media Network

One of these stories, of evacuation with loving hosts, followed by the discovery of a shocking family secret, inspired a major plot line of The Year of the Ghost.

I’m not a million-selling author or a multiple prize-winner on a prestigious book tour. But I am a writer. I plan meticulously. I find inspiration from research. And apparently I promote my book wherever I go!

So yeah – me and Kate Atkinson. We do that.

Can your creativity survive motherhood?

It was winter Saturday and Jon was taking Ben and Sam to the park so that I could do some writing. They were at that age when they don’t see the connection between removed gloves and cold hands, and preparations were not going well. By the time one boy was gloved up, the other would be taking his off – and there were still hats and wellies to be wrestled with.

I had been buried in sleep-deprived, all-consuming motherhood all week. I was still writing the screenplay I had started when I was pregnant. I JUST WANTED TO GET ON WITH SOME WRITING.

I looked at my sweet-faced little ones, bundled up in their woollies, and at Jon, doing a nice thing with infinite patience. There were still four of us in the hallway.

‘Oh just bugger off, all of you!’ said Mummy.

I had wanted to be a writer since I was five. My Mum pictured me as an adult, writing at the kitchen table while my children ran around me. Wrong. I was never able to work with my boys in the building. I just didn’t have the headspace. I certainly lacked that talent men have for reading the paper (or their phone screen) while an entire coffee shop is driven mad by their offspring saying ‘Daddy?’

I had written a novel after university, but life, travel and career had got in the way, and now most of the time I was so mired in motherhood that I could barely construct a sentence in reality, never mind fiction.

Yet the seismic life event of becoming a mother had sharpened my creative hunger. The experience was central to my screenplay, in with a pregnant woman discovers that her mother tried to kill her as a four-year-old, and that her mental disturbance might be hereditary.

I carried on writing when I could. The screenplay crawled along to completion. I did a course, and wrote others. I researched producers and contacted agents. I entered competitions and got positive comments.

But who was I kidding? Ben didn’t sleep through the night until he was three and a half. Sam cried for much of his first year. I was often so tired that I spent whole days on the verge of tears. Was I seriously expecting to write a blockbuster to take the film world by storm?

I worked part time until Sam went to school, and then got back into publishing. The next fifteen years passed in absorbing work, helping others to fulfil their writing dreams.

My boys grew up, learned to put their own gloves on, and ultimately moved away. Did I say that I always loved being their mother? I mean, just look at their pictures. Nothing in life will ever be lovelier, or more important.

I thought of all this recently when a mother on facebook wondered if she’ll ever manage to write while her children are little. I told her what a woman artist said to me when I asked how she had kept the drive going through the years of heavy mothering. 

‘I built up a great creative head of steam,’ she said. ‘It paid off when I had time again.’

My creative ambition survived the wilderness years. I rewrote that first screenplay as a novel. I wrote it again, and showed it to a literary consultant. Again, I rewrote it, honed it and refined it. A second literary consultant read it and her comments were my masterclass. The task seemed never-ending, but characters wouldn’t leave my head. Like a sculptor chipping away anything extraneous, I cut back to the essence of their story. I was learning my craft.

I left full-time work to freelance and write, and in January, my novel Unspeakable Things will be published. I’m relishing writing my second, The Year of the Ghost, in which the joys, anguish and secrets of family life play a central role.

To all you mothers who are struggling to feed your creative urge: keep at it whenever you can. Make notes and stuff them in a folder. Write short pieces: poems, exercises and sketches that might one day make it into a longer form. Record moments from your days – you think you'll never forget these times, but you will. Most of all, note down your ideas: they may well be brilliant.

The era of motherhood is a primaeval swamp of creativity. It sucks at your energy and keeps you wallowing in the mire, but it’s fertile ground for the artist. The creative things that emerge from it might not look like much when they first flop onto the land. But who knows how they’ll evolve?

Keep going, keep the faith. I salute you!

Writer's Stress

This wasn’t going to be a confession type blog but I have to confess that as I come, late, to write this week’s post, I am stressed. We have come back from a really lovely weekend away, visiting my film student son in Falmouth for his 19^th birthday, and somehow we seem to have walked into a whole world of stress. I’m sorry, this post is not going to be filled with lively and varied ways of expressing things – I said I’m stressed, right? Here are some of the causes, profound and trivial:

• ·         My husband, a deputy head, is very busy and has Ofsted coming. I probably need to say no more if you have any kind of acquaintance with a teacher. Last year he pretty much succumbed to a serious bout of work stress, so the symptoms we are seeing now are a horrible reminder of a place we don’t want to go back to.
• ·         My son is in the middle of AS level exams. He is coping well but this and the above factor add up to a house in which I feel I had better not be stressed myself. Or if I must, I have to do it discreetly.
• ·         My Dad is unwell for pretty much the first time in his life and is awaiting a consultant appointment. I certainly won’t be going to my parents complaining that I’m stressed.
• ·         I want to enter my novel into a competition with a September deadline, but since I work full time and write in the mornings, evenings and weekends, I am starting to look at the number of busy evenings and weekends between now and then and wondering if I can possibly get it ready. There, at least now this unwriterly rant now merits a place in a writer’s blog.
• ·         I have a talk to write. I should be writing it now but I am taking the time to tell you how stressed I am.
• ·         This moan is going to sound like ‘my wallet is too heavy, I can’t lift it’ – but we are going on holiday next Saturday for a week. Holidays are of course nice things, they are good for stress, but we tend to forget how stressful it is clearing a way through normal life so that we can absent ourselves from it for a week. We were away this past weekend. Nothing has been done. The house needs cleaning, there is a huge pile of washing to do, I haven’t even unearthed my summer clothes and the tumble dryer has taken to blowing all the electricity in the house if you turn it on.
• ·         I have a blog post to write. I looked at my stats after the weekend and was pleased yet alarmed to see how many views the site had had in a few days; now I am picturing a crowd of people turning away disappointed at the lack of new material and deciding not to look again.

Can I write while stressed? Well, we are about to find out as I turn my attention to that talk. The upside to a whirling mind is that it gets you up early in the mornings, so I have some extra time.

Well, having got that out of my system, I actually feel better. I hope that, blog-wise, normal service will be continued soon, though not next week, as I will be on holiday.  Do leave a comment, it will cheer me up!