The Mark On The Wall
Set Illustrations | June 2022 | Beijing
This is a picture book I created based on Woolf's novel The Mark on the Wall based on Woolf's stream of consciousness novel, using paper, which uses colored pen-cils, and watercolor as the main media. Based on the main clue spots on the wall in the novel, I tried to construct several juxtaposed psychological spaces in my pictureby breaking down the story clues in the text.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
1
material : colour pencil, water colou
rsize : 490*260
date : May 2021
If that mark was made by a nail ,....... and l think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next.
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
2
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 503*240
date : May 2021
But as for that mark, l'm not sure about it; l don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that.
let me just count over a few of the things lost in one life time. beginning for that seems always the most mysterious of losses-what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools?Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board the hand organ--all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure!
3
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 461*225
date : May 2021
The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.
4
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 278*282
date : May 2021
Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows
Yes that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard…
5
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 285*282
date : May 2021
helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? as time goes on, become more definite, become--I don't know what
6
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 474*230
date : June 2021
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance,
7
material : colour pencil, marker pen
size : 230*296
date : June 2021
want to think quietly, calmly spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair.
let me catch hold of the first idea that passes... Shakespeare. Well, he will do as well as another.
8
material : colour pencil, water colour, soft pastel
size : 500*250
date : June 2021
They were discussing botany.I said how l'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway.
Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer.
9
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 452*248
date : June 2021
10
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people
As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.
material : colour pencil, water colour, newspaper
size : 352*203
date : July 2021
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits
11
There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them,
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 503*240
date : May 2021
12
What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things?
the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists.. .
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 490*253
date : June 2021
13
What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy,
material : colour pencil,
water colour
size : 578*282
date : July 2021
14
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall.
which are, they say, either tombs or camps.
and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it.
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 480*162
date : May 2021
15
and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum
material : colour pencil, water colour
size : 380*250
date : June 2021
16
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known.
I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars?
material : colour pencil, water colour, soft pastel
size : 388*250
date : August 2021
17
Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen,
material : colour pencil, water colour, soft pastel
size : 290*250
date : August 2021
18
I must jump up and see for myself what tha mark on the wall really is--a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, 1 feel that I have grasped a plan in the sea; I feel a satisfying
material : colour pencil, water colour, soft pastel
size : 229*319
date : August 2021
19
Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers--all things one likes to think about.
I like to think of the tree itself:-first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap.
material : colour pencil, water colour, soft pastel
size : 229*319
date : August 2021
20
but something is getting in the way..Where was l?What has it all been about?
I can’t remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing…There is avast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—
l'm going out to buy a newspaper."
"Yes?"
All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.
material : colour pencil, water colour, newspaper
size : 565*260
date : August 2021