After the Victorians

The Victorians were the real storytellers. This for me is what this book is about, not their paintings. I do not respond to the paintings of the time, but to the ideas of story and how to tell them. This left me with hours of drawings, hundreds of sketches, and many filled sketchbooks. The final works and how they were arrived at is what this book is about.

The sketches are as important as the final, finished works. They speak to how the works came about and how the mind of the artist (mine) works. There are off-shoots, but then what mind doesnt try other things or does not wander? This is the way the book should be seen and enjoyed, the thinking in the drawings and how the final work is discovered.

Though storytelling has not lost its drive, toward the end of the time of the Victorians the artist looked across the channel to France, to Czanne, as I did. New concerns were seen and struggled with. But the joy of doing the works of storytelling have stayed with me, and so, this book.