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More on Sylvia Plath's Drawings

Earlier this year we were pleased with a Plath doodle.  Then came the exhibit in London at the Mayor Gallery of "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings". This led me to "the Google" and I found the following drawing made by a very young Plath.

This comes from an article called "Some Relics of Childhood" by Rodney Phillips, which appeared in issue 9 of Cabinet Magazine and was published in Winter 2002/3.




The book Plath traced the cat and the dog from, Manners Can Be Fun, sounds like a great read and one that certainly could help me in life (though I'm not sure the book advocated eating all of Dido Merwin’s food in France in 1961 but we can hardly blame Plath for that).  The dog, too, came from this book. I found a cover online of a revised edition (1958), which features a very similar looking dog in the bottom left. For those that don't or won't see the interest in this kind of thing, remember that Plath's learning to trace drawings can be correlated to her apprenticeship in writing as she imitated writers she admired (Stevens, Auden, Thomas, etc.).

And, there is one more article to pass on to you today on the Plath exhibit in London. It is by Ann Binlot, appeared on 9 November on Artinfo.com and is titled "New London Drawings Show Reveals Sylvia Plath's Lesser-Known Lines."

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  1. Julia Gordon-Bramer13 November, 2011 23:27

    That's a very interesting observation you make about Sylvia tracing in the same way she learned to write from her idols. It is certainly something to think about!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous15 November, 2011 11:10

    I still can't believe these are for sale. Jess

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peter K Steinberg15 November, 2011 11:13

    Indeed, that they have all just about sold! As of last week all but one (study or sketch of a boat; the one described by some one as three lines) were sold.

    pks

    ReplyDelete

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