Financial Times: Collective Thought

The Financial Times commissioned me to produce an image for their Life and Arts piece looking at Essays.  Why novelists write essays? And why we read them?

Within the article Carl Wilkinson refers to the similarities he finds between the writings of Virgina Woolf and the present day author Hanif Kureishi, in particular their views on 'social taboo's' Woolf's being Class, and Kureishi's Race.

Within my illustration I wanted to portray these two great writers in the what seems to be the same room, however they are actually in different periods in time. Both Woolf and Kureishi share similar expressions as they look out of their windows pensively, their writing materials to hand and paper spread out on the writing desks infront of them.

Woolf holds her recognisable cigarette pipe as she looks out through her window. Infront of her are her fountain pen with ink pot and two of her novels 'a room of one's own' and 'Mrs Dalloway'. Her thoughts are expressed through the glass of the window, and her idea that war will bring about a change in the barriors of class, and who can write novels. Depicted through the silhouettes of an upper class novelist and a soldier at war both standing on a book.

Kureishi similarly looks out of his adjacent window, on his desk sits his laptop with a sticker referencing the screenplay he wrote for 'My Beautiful Launderette'. Infront of this sit his novels 'The Black Album' and 'The Buddha of Suburbia'. Outside of his window, Kureishi sees views of Pakistan referencing the idea he poses in one of his essyas that coming from a mixed race background the idea of being British in today's society is not what it was, it is now a much more complicated thing.

The final link between the two authors, is their love of reference and collection, embodied by the large bookcase which spans their places in time.

Financial Times: Collective Thought