How to Enjoy Doing Your Laundry

Present Time

'Does housekeeping interest you at all?' Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend. 'I think it really ought to be just as good as writing'. She could not see 'where the separation between the two comes in.' In her diaries, literary entries entwine with notes like a list of 'Linen left to be washed'. 'Made chair cover'. 'Eating our own broad beans – delicious'. In Mrs Dalloway, one of the most experimental novels of the time, a woman walks through London on an errand, planning a party, building a mundane, practical to-do list in her head. Home-making and writing, in Woolf's view, both offered the ability to try out new ways of being.

I liked the idea of framing domesticity as something creative, meditative, beautiful in my painting. Sadly modern washing machines are not nearly as picturesque or dramatic as the hand-washing of Woolf's era. (Another great writer of the early twentieth century, Laurie Lee, describes the 'thick steam of Mondays' – 'Bubble bubble, toil and grumble, rinsing and slapping of sheets and shirts, and panting Mother rowing her red arms like oars in the steaming waves. Then the linen came upon a stick out of the pot, like pastry, or woven suds, or sheets of moulded snow.') In the absence of servants to do my family's laundry for me, though – lucky Woolf! – I am deeply grateful to the squat, ugly washing machine, and have done my best to honour here it in paint.

The original of 'Present Time', and a few prints and cards, are in my shop. In other news, the reason I've been contemplating approaches to laundry so passionately is that just before Christmas I signed a contract with Hodder & Stoughton for a new book, on twentieth-century British home-making told through the eyes of writers and artists. I am very excited about this new venture – if you can think of any special candidates for inclusion, please let me know!

I'll leave you with two wonderful laundryish-themed paintings whose colours and compositions inspired me when I was working on my one. 

Félix Vallotton, Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901)

Gabriele Münter, On the Balcony (1933)

Thank you so much for reading, and very best wishes for January, 

Anna x