Everything on the Barrow: A London-Inspired Collage

“Anything and everything a chap can unload
Is sold off the barrow in Portobello Road”

A trip to London required a visit to Portobello Road, a street market made famous (to me) by the books of Mary Norton and a film released in 1971. And, as promised by the above song lyrics, a bit of everything was being sold to the thousands of people who packed the narrow street.

I found what I was looking for, near the end of the street, the barrow of The Old Printing Shop.

I purchased two unusual blocks for letterpress printing. One is a plastic reproduction of the front piece of an old book, attached to a wooden base to raise it to a suitable height for printing. The second piece was an ornate brass design that had been soldered onto lead spacers for use on a press.

Back from the trip, I was excited to see how these treasures printed and soon had a studio table covered in a mix of decent prints and experiments, most of which were on pages from old books, but some were on papers from a vintage Hallmark stationery set.

I decided to use them right away, so I chose a panel that was already prepped (read more about that process here) and covered the surface with the less interesting prints. Even as I began, I was thinking about composition, so I laid it out in a way that took advantage of the details of these (I suppose) failed prints, and also started to think about how I could set up the composition as I continued.

The base layer had a 50/50 split of quiet and loud areas, and this was my revision challenge.

I had a piece of linen that I had stitched with cotton thread on my Featherweight, and a book cover that I had been saving forever, which said "Library" on it. These became the anchor points of the composition and added some interest to the quiet half.

At my work table, I have a box of lovely book cover fabric, and I selected calm colors, and some abstracted text details.

Then, I ran out of ideas and could not figure out my next steps.

I needed to take a break. I had all these loose threads, the strong left-hand side, the strong right-hand side, and a middle that was a little bare.

I walked around for a while, had some lunch, and then came back down to the studio with my new stamps in hand, having spotted them on my desk while answering an email.

These were another purchase from London (from Present and Correct). I’m hesitant to add marks onto an almost finished piece for fear of making a mess, but I was wondering if I could add some circular elements to balance out the other circles already in the piece. Instead, I added squares and ended up covering most of them as they lined up too neatly with the stitched circles.

I had my pile of scraps from other projects on the table and went into the place where I move the same small pieces of paper around and around the composition without committing to anything.

These small final details are what bring the piece from almost done to complete. In the end, I covered the dark area on the left with more linen cloth, then added some of the good prints I had made earlier, working to balance the layers and introducing additional text elements.

Afterward, I brought it back upstairs and placed it with the other pieces in the series in the sunlight to let it dry and see if it holds as part of the series with the other collages in this series.

New series in progress (cat for scale)

Overall, I'm really happy with how it turned out. I think it has some interesting composition and some really nice details that will look good from a distance, with smaller treasures that viewers will discover when they look closely.