Rather Run Wild

'I wish you'd leave Wissett, and take Charleston,' wrote Virginia Woolf to her artist sister Vanessa Bell in May 1916. 'Leonard went over it, and says it's a most delightful house... It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.'

I suspect Virginia Woolf could make any place sound entrancing, even a house lacking hot water and with wallpapers that were, by her own description, 'awful'.

Vanessa took her sister's advice, not because of any great love of Charleston but, in large part, because her lover Duncan Grant faced a difficult choice. He had to either go to war or farm; to work the land or go to prison. Theirs was a move forced by circumstances.

Yet, Charleston would go on to become a well-loved, bohemian and artistic centre; a meeting place between the art of the Omega workshops and the broader world of the Bloomsbury group of thinkers and writers. The awful wallpapers would be quickly erased by Omega designs and stencils. The rooms peopled by a who's who of the Bloomsbury circle: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, and others.

Charleston, as a creative opportunity, has been very much on my mind of late. The last three weeks have been fully occupied with the task of house-hunting, packing, and moving. A move forced by our landlord deciding to sell at short notice, I wish I could say I'd received a letter about a rundown country house to lease. Instead we found the new place rather more prosaically searching on the internet.

Moving house doesn't come easily for me - I'm not a natural nomad. I like planting a garden, putting down roots. But moving is a direct result of how I've chosen to labour: to leave the illusory stability of one well-defined career track in favour of the flexibility of cultivating my own direction; to move a couple of centimetres off the certain road, with all the uncertainty that entails.

Investing in myself in this way means that my creative labour feels more valuable, to myself and others, but it isn't ever likely to ever pay a huge mortgage. Like most others who choose a creative life - without the expectation of a huge inheritance or generous benefactor - renting is simply part of the trade-off.

And this is why Charleston is such an important symbol for me. It translates what I see before me. It means using a different eye for look at the rental market. To see past the gloss of floorboards and new bathrooms that require sacrifice of time to pay for. To stop upturning my nose at old carpets, vertical blinds, and the unknown wilds past the greenhouse. To see the 'large rooms,' through Virginia's eyes, to pay attention to the 'one with big windows fit for a studio'.  To ask myself: Will I be able work and create things here?

(Vanessa Bell painting source: Little Augury Blogspot)