Sylvia Plath's Drawings

agora à venda na The Mayor Gallery, à excepção de um retrato de Ted Hughes. a colecção esteve, até agora, na posse da filha, Frieda Hughes. para além de vir a ficar dispersa, esta colecção choca pelo contraste imagem-texto.

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"Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings

Plath’s extraordinary dedication to her writing can be connected to her particular ability to see things with a honed artistic eye, and her quest to accurately record this visual stimulus in a perfect form of prose. When the drawings are shown together, the viewer gets a strong sense of her story, focused eye and fastidious nature.

Students of Plath will pick up on the visual clues, which point to passages in her writing. Once such example is a drawing entitled “The Bell Jar’ which is also the title of her most famous written work. It is a sensitive image of a pair of shoes, which have apparently been discarded, and brings to mind the scene in Chapter 12 of the Bell Jar, which reads ‘I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on a silver log pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass after I was dead”.

Sylvia Plath’s younger student years at Smith were divided equally between her love of fine art and literature. Later when she arrived in Cambridge, her writing began to take precedence over her artwork and she developed her identity as a writer, though sketching still held great appeal for her. Drawing seemed to help her to focus her busy mind. She saw it as a stimulating and enjoyable leisure activity, though she tended not to draw from memory, often arranging household domestic objects as challenging still-lifes. Ted Hughes observed that nothing refreshed her more than sitting in front of an intricate pile of objects for hours, laboriously delineating each item.

She seemed to be drawn to refining her skills by sketching objects from the natural word, such as contented cows grazing in a field, meadow flowers, fruit, and sensual looking conkers and nuts. She also liked to make diligent studies of objects that interested her in the museums and architectural sites she visited on her travels.

During her two years at Cambridge, she sketched quite mundane local scenes, and individual objects and people. Her images of buildings are more atmospheric and seem to reflect her thinking processes. One such is a drawing that she herself mentioned as a fine example. It shows a quintessential winter’s day in Cambridge with a row of picturesque white cottages whose chimneys bellow hot smoke into the sky. One cannot help but feel Plath’s desire to escape the cold day and find comfort in one of the warm, inviting, little cottages. Perhaps the most haunting image in the show is ‘Wuthering Heights’. A derelict building in a state of disrepair is set against a sinister looking, jagged tree its roof falling apart, open to the elements.

For Plath this was also a period of exploration and independence. In the spring break of 1955, she made a journey with her first love Richard Sassoon by train from Paris to Nice. She hoped to meet him again in 1956 but ended up seeing the city alone. Her journals recount her walking five to ten miles every day and spending her afternoons sketching the city.

Her journal for 16 March 1956 reads: “Then, inspired, I took my sketch book and squatted in the sun at the very end of the Ile de la Cite in a little green park of Henri 4 du Vert Galant & began to draw the vista through the Pont Neuf; it was a good composition with the arches of the bridge framing trees & another bridge, and I was aware of people standing all around watching but I didn’t look at them - just hummed & went on sketching. It was not very good, too unsure & messily shaded, but I think I will do line drawings from now on in the easy style of Matisse. Felt I knew that view though, through the fiber of my hand”.

The show also features other Parisian mementos. She sketched restaurant interiors, bottles of wine, the roofs and chimney tops of Paris, a tabac, a colourful kiosk and the lemonade stand in the Tuileries.

Plath reserved her more ambitious ink drawings to accompany published essays, which appeared in Cambridge Vista, Varsity and The Christian Science Monitor. To this effect, a 1959 essay in Christian Science Monitor entitled ‘Explorations Lead to Interesting Discoveries’ shows one of her most complex drawings in the show, illustrating what she calls ‘ A colourful pattern of rounds and oblongs, knobs and wheels, legs and handles’. The accompanying narrative describes her delight at discovering, whilst walking in the country, an abandoned garage, overgrown with grass and weeds, strange objects piled up and jumbled together outside it.

She had also published “Mosaics - an afternoon of discovery”, in the same journal, an article with a sketch about the Spanish fishing village Benidorm, where she had spent her honeymoon with Ted Hughes. In 1958, Plath wrote “Wait till you see these of Benidorm - the best I’ve ever done in my life, very heavily stylized shading and lines: very difficult subjects too - the peasant market, a composition of three sardine boats on a bay with their elaborate lights, and a good one of the cliff – headland with the houses over the sea. I’m going to write an article for them and send them to the Monitor. I feel I’m developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of. Wait till you see - the Cambridge sketch was nothing compared to these”.
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