"Sunset by the Beira Lake - Sri Lanka" - Watercolour

 

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish author. He was one of the most versatile of writers. His romantic novels of adventure captured the public fancy as had no British works since Sir Walter Scott’s. Treasure Island (1883), a story of a search for pirate treasure, is the most popular of these romances and one of the best children’s books in English. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), an allegorical novel about man’s dual nature, is a suspenseful horror story that shows psychological insight. A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) is a classic.

Stevenson proved himself a master of the short story in such tales as the eerie “Marheim” and “Thrawn Janet,” the tragic “The Beach at Falesa,” and the fanciful “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.” His essays travel books, and letters are polished, witty, informative. Stevenson’s writings brought him great popularity during his lifetime, but after his death, his literary reputation declined for several years and he was thought of only as a competent writer of children’s tales. Toward the middle of the 20th century, however, a new critical evaluation of his work ranked him with the great writers of the 19th century.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, the son of a prosperous engineer who wanted him to follow the same profession. Instead, Stevenson studied law at the University of Edinburgh. He passed the bar examinations in 1875 but never practiced law. Since 1873 he had been publishing essays in various periodicals and he now turned all his attention to a literary career. Stevenson had never been robust and he began traveling early in life, partly for health and partly for pleasure. In 1888 he sailed to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, settling finally in the Samoan island of Upolu in 1890. There Stevenson bought a large estate he called “Vailima.” He took an active part in Samoan political affairs and wrote extensively.

Stevenson died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. He left an unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, that was published as a fragment in 1896. This novel, set in 18th century Scotland, contains some of Stevenson’s most powerful and realistic characterizations. Some critics believe it would have been his masterpiece. Samoan friends affectionately called Stevenson Tusitala (teller of tales). They carried his body to the top of Mount Vaea, where it was buried under this epitaph written by himself :

Under a wide and starry sky

Dig a grave and let me lie

Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will

This is the verse you grave for me

Here he lies where he longed to be

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill

H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres but is best known now for his early science fiction novels including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The War in the Air (1907) among many others and also his comic novels. Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. His science fiction novels revealed him as a writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas. He also wrote many short stories. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web.

John Higgs writes: Wells’s genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. Originality was Wells’s calling card. In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called “scientific romance” novels, This was a dazzling display of new thought, endlessly copied since. A book like The War of the Worlds inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that followed. It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us all forever.

Wells's earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathizing with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of a journalist. Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English Society as a whole.

Rough pen drawing

 

Pen Drawing

 

Oil Pastel

 

Oil Pastel

 

"Factories at Sunset" - Watercolour

 

Pen Drawing

 

Rough pen drawing

 

Rough pen drawing

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American author. Most of his work shows concern for moral issues. A deeply ingrained conscience seems to generate in him an obsession with the problem of sin, its nature, and its consequences. His strong sense of human guilt tinges most of his novels and short stories with a somber hue. Unlike some other puritans, Hawthorne apparently felt a keen sympathy for the erring and demon-driven people he pictures.

Hawthorne liked to call his novels “romances” because they deal with interior rather than outward phases of life. They explore the secret chambers of the heart, soul, and mind. He maintained that a writer of romances, unlike the realist who relies upon personal observation and fidelity of facts, need be faithful only to “the truth of the human heart.” Hawthorne frequently pictures people who are morbid and melancholy, but their gloom is mostly of an inner kind, unlike the physical horrors that are characteristic of Poe’s tales. His people ordinarily are more symbolical or allegorical than lifelike, manipulated by the author to make a moral point.

Rough Pen Drawing

 

Ethel M. Dell

It is difficult to talk about popular literature in the 1920s without talking about a particularly shy British novelist whom critics liked to hate with a passion but readers loved to read named Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939). So shy was she that she was never interviewed. But starting in 1911 she wrote over 30 popular romance novels and several short stories but remained quiet and almost pathologically shy. What the critics said didn’t seem to bother her for she considered herself a good storyteller – nothing more nothing less.

Dell whose father was a clerk grew up in a middle-class family and started writing at an early age. Her romantic stories which were said to be racy were set in India and other British colonial possessions. Her cousins would count the times she used the words: passion, tremble, pant and thrill. She worked on a book for several years but it was rejected by eight publishers. When it was finally published in 1911 it was entitled “The Way of an Eagle.” George Orwell in his novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” has his protagonist make several scathing attacks on Dell, reserving special venom for “The Way of an Eagle”. However, the book was incredibly popular and between 1911 and 1915 it had gone through 30 printings.

In 1922, Ethel married a soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Tahourdin Savage, when she was 40 and the marriage was happy. Colonel Savage resigned his commission on his marriage and Dell became the support of the family. Her husband devoted himself to her and fiercely guarded her privacy. For her part, she went on writing and made a lot of money eventually producing about thirty novels and several volumes of short stories.

Oil Pastel

 

RJX

The Scream

My favorite drawing medium is Oil Pastel. For me, it's the most direct way to paint landscapes, but in my country, it has a bad name. Almost everyone seems to think it is an amateurish way of painting, they say the colors fade with time, and the most professional way of painting according to everyone seems to be Oil Painting. It is such a strong belief held by so many that I believed them for many years and threw away almost all of the drawings I did. But one day I found that one of the most iconic images in the world of art "The Scream" done by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was done with pastel in 1893. This painting sold for nearly 120 million dollars in 2012.

The agonized face in the painting is said to depict "The Anxiety of the Human Condition", something that seems to have been always present in Munch's life. With a childhood of illness and bereavement, Munch always dreaded getting a mental condition that many of his relatives had. No wonder he drew such haunting paintings. He later described his inspiration for the painting as follows:

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature".

I liked this painting so much that I decided to draw it without copying it. Halfway into the painting, it went terribly wrong but I managed to salvage it to an extent. The result is given below together with the original painting.

RJX

Kumbuk Tree - Terminalia Arjuna

.

NaTree Leaves - Mesua Ferrea (Iron Wood Tree)

 

Kobolila Tree - Bauhinia purpurea

 

Bauhinia purpurea is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae, native to the Indian subcontinent and Myanmar, and widely introduced elsewhere in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. 

Rough Pen Drawing

 

Rough Pen Drawing

 

RJX

Trees - Oil Pastel

 

RJX

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was an American poet and educator. His works include “Paul Revere’s Ride”, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was one of the fireside poets from New England. He studied at Bowdoin College and became a professor at Bowdoin and later at Harvard College. His first poetry collections were “Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing.

 Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality. He was the most popular poet of his day. As a friend wrote, “no other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime. Many of his poems helped shape the American character and its legacy, particularly with the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride”. He was such an admired figure in the United States during his life that his 70th birthday in 1877 took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches, and the reading of his poetry. Longfellow had become one of the first American celebrities and was popular in Europe. The rapidity with which American readers embraced Longfellow was unparalleled in publishing history in the United States.

 

However, Longfellow’s popularity rapidly declined, beginning shortly after his death and into the 20th century, as academics focused attention on other poets such as Walt Whitman. In the 20th century, literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted: “Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow’s popular rhymings.” Poet Lewis Putnam Turco concluded that “Longfellow was minor and derivative in every way throughout his career…nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics. 

 

Poet Walt Whitman considered him an imitator of European forms but praised his ability to reach a popular audience as “the expressor of common themes - of the little songs of the masses. Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect. Toward the end of his life, contemporaries considered him more of a children’s poet, as many of his readers were children. A reviewer in 1848 accused Longfellow of creating a “goody-two-shoes kind of literature…slipshod, sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing”. However, an editor of the Boston Evening Transcript wrote, “Whatever the miserable envy of trashy criticism may write against Longfellow, one thing is most certain, no American poet is more read”. 

John Masefield

John Edward Masefield (1878-1967), was an English author and poet laureate. His reputation was established with “Salt-Water Ballads” (1902). “The Everlasting Mercy (1911), “The Dauber” (1913), and “Reynard the Fox” (1920), are representative of his long narrative poems. Masefield also wrote novels, short stories, and critical studies. 

 

In his 16th year, he sailed as an apprentice seaman on a windjammer, rounding Cape Horn. Illness sent him home from a Chilean port. He then became an officer in the liner Adriatic. In 1895 poor health caused him to stay ashore in New York City. For several years he lived as a vagrant, shifting between odd jobs before he found work as a barkeeper’s assistant. In 1895 he read the poem by Duncan Campbell Scott called “The Piper of Arll.” Ten years later he wrote to Scott to tell what reading the poem meant to him:

 

“I had never (till that time) cared very much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply and set me on fire. Since then poetry has been one deep influence in my life, and to the love of poetry, I owe all my friends and the position I now hold. 

 

Returning to England, Masefield began his literary career by writing poems, short stories, articles, and book reviews for magazines. In 1930 he succeeded Robert Bridges as poet laureate. It was not until 70 that Masefield slowed his pace. “In Glad Thanksgiving” his last book was published when he was 88 years old. In 1960 his wife Constance died aged 93. In late 1966 Masefield developed gangrene in his ankle. This spread to his leg and he died of the infection in 1967. His body was cremated and his ashes were placed in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. However, the following verse by Masefield was discovered later addressed to his “Heirs, Administrators, and assigns”:

 

No religious rite be done or read

In any place for me when I am dead

But burn my body into ash, and scatter

The ash in secret into running water

Or on the windy down, and let none see

And then, thank God that there’s an end of me. 

 

He wrote the following memorable poem:

 

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking

And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking

 

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied

And all I ask is a windy day with white clouds flying

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.