In the works is a newsletter on Whistler, Eric Ravilious et al and David Hockney.

I have been reading about Whistler’s apparently spontaneous strokes in his smoky London pictures which were in fact laborious – he would make a mark, decide it was wrong, paint over it and begin again rather than adjust it. Many layers lurk beneath the final creation of ‘freshness and movement.’ I have begun reading of Tirzah Garwood, wood-engraver, painter, writer (and wife of Eric Ravilious but let’s afford her her own space in sentence and in consideration) and the stunning work she produced in her few 42 years. I have read about Betty Freeman, a great friend of Hockney’s, a patron of artists and composers and the fuchsia-clad figure depicted in his painting, Beverly Hills Housewife. She fits neither the box that the ironic title of the painting (her suggestion) implies nor the boxy house which plays its part(s) in the picture too.

So full are the days with book groups, events, and agreeable silliness in the shop, so rich are the books I have been reading on these subjects and so much does each painting really merit days of study that more on this must wait until next week. To whet your appetite, in my usual restrained manner I shall claim that James Cahill’s book on Freeman is one of the best books of the year. It has it all: well-researched, engagingly-written, thought-provoking, varied in tone, like the painting itself, and beautifully produced – when a book weighs this much you know that every proper attention has been paid to the art reproductions. I already feel that I want to pick it up again and I look forward to sharing it with many of you.

In the meantime, preparing for a discussion of Viriginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse this weekend – a full (light)house for this, I’m afraid, but I hope to see you another time – the same ideas of where to make the first stroke on the page, of a woman’s role in life, family and art, of a woman, a lighthouse, a beacon of safety and giving, to whom many are drawn from admiration and need, are all there. Here is Woolf’s fictional artist, Lily Briscoe, who seeks to ‘make of the moment something permanent,’ poised before her canvas:

‘For a moment [the brush] stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin? — that was the question; at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.

‘With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended.’

More next week on other brushes, pencils, lino and wood cutters which have descended in urgency, not to mention the pens that write of them, similarly bold in making their first marks.

To The Lighthouse begins by raising the hopes of the youngest of Mrs Ramsay’s eight children, James: they will go to the lighthouse tomorrow, if the weather is fine. To James, the trip is, if only for a moment, a certainty and ‘the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch.’

For those younger readers also aching for an expedition, Letters from the Lighthouse by Emma Carroll is quite the wartime adventure. When Olive wakes up in hospital after an air raid siren interrupted a cinema trip with her siblings, she has no idea what happened. She has acquired a lump on her head and a concussion and is declared lucky. Others have fared much worse. But her older sister is missing and her mother decides she must evacuate the two younger children. The train journey from London is anything but smooth and then, in Devon, they find themselves living with a lighthouse keeper and drawn into a mystery, with codes to crack…

May you keep a moment for the autumn light this weekend,
Lizzie