Before I write about the privelege of attending this event, I want to thank ALL MY FRIENDS (and a few strangers!) for supporting my gofundme campaign, which allowed me to attend the Dickens Universe at all.
The Dickens Project has been doing this incredible, week-long event at UC Santa Cruz for 46 years, so they’re certainly good at it! The Dickens Universe so far surpassed anything I anticipated that I am still gathering my thoughts, but I wanted to put something down before it faded, like some fantastic dream.
First of all, and most of all, everyone I met and talked to was an absolute delight. In a crowd of about 250 attendees, ages ranged from…actually, age seems a silly delimiter in this context, to be honest! What made everyone instant best friends was a deep, abiding and humble admiration for the work of Charles Dickens.
The entire week was themed on what most agree is Dickens’s greatest novel, BLEAK HOUSE. An awful lot of the crowd seemed to be Professors of English or Victorian Literature, or related fields, or college students, or teachers, or one of the above, retired. Someone who you chatted with at lunch turns out that afternoon to be one of the many wonderful and impressive speakers.
Needless to say, the incredible serendipity, or whatever it is, for this event to coincide with a book that has been the center of my artistic endeavors for the last six years, still leaves me somewhat stunned but happy.
Having analyzed BLEAK HOUSE from a purely visual perspective for so many years, the most interesting element of the week for me was to hear the language of the book analyzed so minutely. As well, many of the talks were on social issues related to the storylines of the book, such as slavery, counting (and dealing with) homeless populations, the servant class in Victorian England, and works in other media that have tried to mirror the success or story arcs of BLEAK HOUSE, with varying success.
I’m dressed up here for the fancy party on Thursday. The campus is filled with Redwoods!
I had a busy schedule: attending the various talks and events, selling prints and t-shirts in the outdoor vendor’s area for a couple of hours each day, and teaching my linoleum printing class, which was FABULOUS!
Seriously, it was fun selling and talking about my prints, but the lino-printing class was an absolute hoot. I had every intention of live-streaming from the classroom, but it was so intensely hands-on for me (and the students) that I never once even thought about taking out my phone.
Many were nervous about not being able to draw. I told them, “It’s not an art class, it’s a craft class!” which helped a little, I think. We didn’t have quite all the equipment I’d hoped for, but the fun thing was that once in class, everyone was happy to improvise and figure things out, and ultimately everyone who said they couldn’t draw, pitched right in and drew their own designs right on the linoleum!
Though almost everyone made the beginner’s mistake of getting excited and starting to cut before their drawings were finished, many students commented that the act of cutting linoleum has a sort of therapeutic, calming effect.
This is true! It’s one of the things I like about linoleum; carving a simple line causes you to slow down to a sort of meditative state, you think about each line, and how it works with the whole; about what you cut last, and what you’ll cut next.
By Wednesday of a four-day course, some folks were ready to print, which turned out to be even headier than the carving. Rolling the ink onto the cut linoleum caused audible gasps as each student saw their image emerge; then when I pressed the paper on and started pulling the prints, they were just ecstatic. I only demonstrated once or twice, then let each of them pull their own prints.
There was a videographer there who was shooting the week’s events. On Thursday he came into our classroom and shot for almost our whole class time – some detail shots over my shoulder while I demonstrated, shots over students’ shoulders, and then he got them all to line up, holding up their prints, for a group shot.
I asked him later if I could get a copy of the class footage, and he said he would put something together for me, which would be awesome. When I get it you’ll see it here!
My yellow T-shirt design shown here was an enormous hit at the Dickens Universe, in fact they completely sold out! Some of my new readers are my DU friends who may want a shirt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you would like one anyways!
They are eye-catching, nicely designed, and commemorate a unique event. The image of Miss Flite’s caged birds is one of the most powerful and recognizable images from this brilliant novel, as well as one of my most popular illustrations.
They’ll be $25 plus postage, which seems to be about $15 currently.
I’ll do a reprint of it if there’s demand! Let me know in the comments, or email me at dickens@mooneyart.com and once again thanks for reading all the way to the end!
