During a family house clearance, my mum discovered a few things which belonged to my maternal great-grandmother, and it sparked a small artistic project of mine.
Born on 1st May 1899, Elizabeth May Denholm Dunn became a teacher of dress-making and millinery in Glasgow, as well as a talented artist and an award-winning bobbin lace-maker. I remember her from when I was a very small child, as she was long-lived and resided with my grandparents until her death.
I mostly recall an old lady in a bed, almost unable to believe, as children do, that ‘old people’ were once young. But the walls of the house bore evidence of her earlier life. My favourites were the pictures sewn so intricately that, from across a room, they looked like oil painting. One of those pieces now hangs in my own home and I have a small box of her delicate lace too.
But it wasn’t those which gave me the inspiration for this project; I also inherited her sketch book from 1919, when she was 20 years old. Flicking carefully through this narrow portable book, and seeing the way she captured the landscapes and people in her life, gave me an odd sense of connection.
The way she sketched felt familiar – the way she indicated to herself the detail of the different types of trees, the crooked lines of a jaunty skeletal figure. I could sense one of those silvery threads of time tugging from her hand, through the years on the page, to me.
In a move that I am describing as ‘ancestral inter-generational art’, I used my favourite two sketches as the basis for a couple of little watercolour paintings of my own – bringing a little colour to what she quickly captured in 1919, over a century later.
I imaginatively called these ones ‘Boat’ and ‘Pond’.
I also made a celestial version of the vaguely-cryptid skeleton creature, using white gel pen to pick out the shape as if it were the lines of a constellation. I know I will now think of her whenever I look at Orion on a dark night.
‘Osteon Constellation’ and the insert page of the sketch book.
The familial connection between us is also apparent in these photographs of us both concentrating on a creative project. The one of her is from the Ayrshire Post in 1971, when her bobbin lace-making was the subject of a feature article. Compare it with this quick sneaky shot my husband took of me sketching the view from our hotel balcony on holiday this year – that jowly concentration face is something we share! And a love for portable sketchbooks apparently.
And here are the finished pieces as scans for detail/because I just figured out how to use the scanner on the work photocopier…
