200 Years of Pride and Prejudice
My friend Jess and I years ago started referring to each other by our Austen handles, aka Misses Jessica and Eliza. In the spring of 2013 I texted Miss Jessica wondering what she would like for her birthday and she had an idea. It just so happened that 2013 was the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. As you now know over a month into my Bicentenary Ball I am not one to let a two hundred year celebration slip by! Miss Jessica's suggestion was that instead of doing run-of-the-mill birthday presents we do a crafting exchange where we each make Jane Austen themed gifts for each other. Being both crafty and artistic and at that moment taking an introductory letterpress course, I was all in. I was ready to make a piece dedicated to "Two Hundred years of Darcy and Dancing!"
Madison College has a wonderful selection of wood type and when pursuing the drawers I found these stunningly large "P's" and was only sad for about half a second that there wasn't three of them, Miss Jessica being one of the co-creators of P, P and P, which is the Pride and Prejudice Colin Firth miniseries watched while eating Pizza. But in all honesty P and P works better. Because this was a quick one-off and not class work, where I was actually doing only two prints, one for me and one for her, I did this during open lab time. I didn't even do a full lockup, I just used some magnets and the showcard press, which is basically a proofing press. Funnily enough I had to do this twice, because I'm not the best at spotting typos when they're backwards. There might have been two "S's" at the end of "Misses" because I was going crazy that day apparently. So, on my second attempt I think I nailed it.
I originally went for too strident a color, a kind of spring green, and went all out metallic gold the second time around, because if gold doesn't say big two hundredth birthday celebration, I don't know what does! For those who do letterpress you might notice that there is actually more texture to the print than just from the wood type. I shall now impart a trick my teacher Beth showed me which I absolutely adore. What I did is I first printed the piece on a heavily textured paper. You pull the paper off and instead of re-inking you print again on a crisp clean sheet of perfectly flat paper. The impression of the textured paper remains in the ink on the wood type and transfers onto the new paper. I use this technique a lot because it just adds something extra, also ironically the textured paper is some of the paper I've used for my Jane Austen series I've been talking about. So this was the first non-illustrative piece I did in tribute to Jane. This was also the first piece for the gift exchange between me and Miss Jessica. Don't worry, there's more to come on that front!
One of the best scenes in Pride and Prejudice is Lady Catherine de Bourgh's smack down of Lizzy that doesn't quite go to plan. She had intended for Lizzy to meekly agree to all her demands with regards to her nephew, therefore it is quite a shock when Lizzy doesn't play ball. Yes, Darcy's declaration of love might be the most loved, and the opening line the most quoted, but to me, NOTHING beats this scene. What Lady Catherine says flows off Lizzy like water off a duck's back and this makes her incensed, crying out "This is Not to be Bourne!" Lady Catherine can not believe her words are insignificant to Lizzy, yet they are, which lead to how I handled the treatment of this piece. I used the same paper stock as I did for my first piece in this series, "Every Savage Can Dance." Yet I reversed the treatment of the figures. In "Every Savage Can Dance" I used pencil over a ground of gesso. This lead to the figures popping out of the background and having definition with the line work on top. Here I didn't want the figures to pop. I wanted them kind of ghosted, to show that Lady Catherine's words will not impact Lizzy's decisions one bit. Therefore I laid down the pencil first and laid the gesso over it, obscuring the lines. Lady Catherine might think she has impact, but she has left no impression at all. While I admit that this piece might not be the most dramatic that I made in this series, I do think that it went exactly to plan with getting the meaning across. So shall I call it a success?
Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia
Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries and Lore edited by Paul Guran
Aunt Dimity and the Widow's Curse by Nancy Atherton
The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry
"It is Enough to Know They are Discovered" captures that moment when Lizzy and Jane finally learn that Lydia and Wickham have been found in London and, for that moment, "it is enough to know." Whatever else happens in the uncertain future must be tempered by the fact their location is no longer unknown in that vast and teaming metropolis. The original illustration by the brothers Brock includes Mr. Bennet as well, but I felt like he didn't fit. He added a domineering presence, at least in the illustration, and I thought that this was far more of an intimate moment between two sisters regarding their concern for their youngest sibling. Which is why I decided to render the image in watercolor. This is a medium that girls of the Regency period would have been familiar with, and though the Bennet sisters don't have any pretensions or inclinations in the direction of non-musical talents, they would be familiar with it nonetheless. As for the paper choice, I used paper that had flowers in it. The reason for this is twofold, one of the things that stuck me about Pride and Prejudice is the amount of time spent out of doors. Lizzy always has a healthy glow of exercise and exertion about her. But more importantly, they read this letter out in the little copse near there house. Most likely it's to keep away from the prying eyes of Mrs. Bennet, but I still feel that this intimate moment needs to be in the context of the vastness of nature. 
When I was working towards my BS in art at the UW-Madison I had an assignment to do a series of pieces, all the same size, that were interconnected. At the time I was heavily playing tabletop card games like Steve Jackson's Munchkin, so I envisioned the project as a set of playing cards that explained my personality. There was "A Vicious Feline of Extreme Loyalty" at plus three points that cancelled out my "Inability to Figure Out Your ID," existential angst being a college prerequisite. There was a good fairy balanced by a bad fairy, and physical traits like back problems and corrective vision. But it was my "Jane Austen/Darcy Obsession" at minus one point that captured my imagination. Is it any surprise? I was admittedly an addict. But I viewed it as a gentle and genteel addiction, hence it only encumbering me to a factor of minus one. Yet in creating this piece inspiration stuck and I had this need to continue on, to re-interpret famous Jane Austen illustrations in new mediums that captured the emotion behind the image. Jane Austen had sparked my sensibilities to create and create I must!
Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton
The Only Child by Andrew Pyper
Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare
Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan
Jessica Jones: Uncaged! by Brian Michael Bendis
Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love by James Runcie
In honor of the return of Twin Peaks, I thought it would be fun to post an old paper I wrote in undergrad for my Forestry Class, I give you, from 2002: Diane: These Trees are Really Something! And yes, there are footnotes! Oh, and spoilers!
If one were to walk in the footsteps of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice I think we can all agree that when one thinks of Pride and Prejudice there is only one destination possible, and that's Pemberley. This is especially beguiling to American readers where we seriously don't have grand manor houses or even castles strewn about the countryside protected by a National Trust. But as Lizzy and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner clearly show, these great houses were just as beguiling to Brits over two hundred years ago. Because who doesn't like to wander around big beautiful houses seeing famous works of art in a setting that isn't strictly speaking a museum? But the question becomes, where is Pemberley? You could go to Lyme Park, which was the house used in the BBC miniseries, but to me, more known for being used in a season three episode of Red Dwarf, and yes, I know I have weird priorities. Or you could have even bought Wentworth Park fairly recently, where they were claiming that the house's notoriety came from the fact it was the basis for Pemberley. A "fact" that no one has really ever agreed on. But to me I think Pemberley as Austen saw it is most likely 
It's not just that Austen knew of the house and compares Pemberley to Chatsworth that makes Chatsworth a good contender, as well as both real and fictional houses being in Derbyshire, it's also actually been used as Pemberley in the P.D. James continuation Death Comes to Pemberley as well as in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Matthew Macfadyen. In fact they have the Matthew Macfadyen marble bust still there, though they request that you don't buss the bust. They have a Regency Ball there every summer which I long to be invited to! But even if that doesn't get you excited there is a deal breaker in my mind that makes this great house a must stop, and that's the connection to the Mitfords. Deborah Mitford, one of the famous Mitford sisters, was the Duchess of Devonshire and the family seat is Chatsworth. She not only spent her life surrounded by the literary, but she helped save the house after the tragic death of the heir and went on to make it a thriving business that allowed her to extensively expand the house's art collection with modern masters. So go for your Darcy dream, stay, and you can literally 
