My Favourite Painting, Because As Soon As I Think of One, I Think of Many Others
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Pat Kemsley’s Favourite Painting Two Women in the Garden by Eric Ravilious. 1933 Like most of you I have many Artists and Paintings which I admire but Eric Ravilious’ work is a great favourite and this particular water colour is so interesting. I know the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden well and it is there I have seen so much of his work. He was born in London in 1903 but spent much of his early life in Eastbourne, going to school and the Art College there and later to the Royal College of Art in London. This painting is in the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. He met Edward Bawden at the RCA and together they rented Brick House at Great Bardfield for weekend painting in Essex and later they moved there when Edward’s father bought the house on his marriage to Charlotte. Eric was now married to Tirzah and this house became a haven for their many artist friends. The two wives are shown in the painting, one is reading and the other preparing vegetables from what looks like a very extensive kitchen garden. One can’t help feeling that they were a little fed up with each other or bored while sitting for Eric’s painting. Although this painting was probably done very quickly, there is such a lot of detail and I like I like the way the umbrella is just chucked down on the grass. In his short life, he was the most prolific artist, producing a mass of water colours, in Essex, the ancient Downland of Sussex and Wiltshire and his time as a War Artist. His style is quite unique and very recognisable. At his two exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery in the thirties, he sold two thirds of his exhibits, so he was recognised early in his career. At the RCA, he had studied under Paul Nash and learned wood-engraving, becoming very skilled and engraved more than 400 illustrations and lithographs for books and publications. He also did designs for Wedgwood China sets and Commemorative mugs. But for me, his water colours are almost all so unusual and captivating, and the one I’ve chosen is one of the best. Pat Kemsley. May, 2020 Joan Miller’s Favourite Painting I definitely can’t tell you which is my favourite painting, because as soon as I think of one, I think of many others. It’s mostly likely to be impressionist, perhaps a Van Gogh, but there again it might be a Dutch landscape or a Hockney. It depends on my mood. So I thought I’d bend the rules of this exercise and introduce you instead to a picture with which I identify perhaps the most. Lowry is a marmite artist, you might love him or hate him, and over the years art critics have done both. I would say I like him rather than love him, but at the same time I feel a connection to him. He paints the scenery and the scenes I knew growing up in Manchester. My father was born in a terraced houses like those in the middle of the picture and he went to work in one of those factories with the tall smoking chimneys. He started at age 14 as an office boy in F W Smiths copper wire drawing works, a highly industrialised place with large furnaces and chimneys down by the Manchester ship canal. They used to unload the raw copper straight into the furnaces where they melted the copper before drawing it into fine copper wire that was used in all the new electrical equipment of the 1900s onwards. My Dad loved his job and hearing him talk about the process and all the improvements they made was the nearest he came to poetry. But there was a downside and that was the pollution. This picture by Lowry, The Canal Bridge was painted in 1949, when my Dad had risen to be operations manager and just about the time I was born. The filthy smoke from the chimneys hung in a blanket over the whole of Manchester and used to leave its mark In smuts on the washing my Mum hung out in our garden. I remember going to my grandparents on the edge of the Peak District in the school holidays and thinking I’d come a long way because I couldn’t see the city any more. I only discovered on a recent return visit that I couldn’t see Manchester because it was hidden in the smog. Nowadays, with the clean air acts, from my grandparents house you can see the sprawl of the city spread out before you, but then it was completely invisible. Lowry’s paintings show clearly and plainly how the smoke killed the skies. F W Smiths bought this painting and hung it in their head offices in Queen Anne’s Gate, London. It showed the source of their riches magnificently in the days before we began to worry about the green environment. It was there in the early 1960s, when my Dad became Managing Director of F W Smiths, that I saw the painting. It hung in a wood panelled boardroom with grand mahogany board table and chairs. The picture had come, like my Dad, a long way from it’s origins! Lowry was a debt collector all his working life, working in the day time and painting by night. He went to art school in the evenings and was impressed by the impressionist school but came upon his own distinctive style. Some people think of him as a loner and a recluse, the people in the paintings showing no sign of connections or emotions. Judged in modern times, his factories loom like great monsters sucking in the souls of his stick men and depersonalising them. But I read this about Lowry and how he came to paint his unique pictures: “There is a story L.S. Lowry used to tell about how he came to paint the industrial north of England, which is redolent with the prosaic mystique he mischievously promoted about himself. It was on a grey day in 1916, having missed his train to Manchester, that he walked up the steps of Pendlebury station to be confronted by Acme Mill — ‘a great square red block with the cottages running in rows right up to it — and suddenly I knew what to paint’. What he saw was a landscape of factories, red-brick terrace houses and workers going about their days against creamy skies heavy with pollution. Seated on a campstool, hat pushed firmly down and his mackintosh buttoned up tight against the Lancashire chill, he sketched out this pedestrian world in a style so singular that he became known as ‘the matchstick man’ — and the unofficial artist of England’s northern working-class.” It made sense to me. Lowry was a product of his background, a proud hardworking man, at the centre of England’s industrial powerhouse. He painted the factories where the people were churning out the pollution that helped to make the rest of the country rich. Lowry depicted what he saw, the industrious pride and sense of purpose in production that made up the everyday life of the Mancunian. He painted in a non sentimental nor judgemental way. He saw the strength of purpose, perhaps a pride in just managing to make a living each day and the grit to just keep going. He painted the life that most Mancunians of that day knew very well indeed. That at least is what I see in his pictures. Joan Lucy Marshall’s Favourite Painting I first saw this painting, Landscape and the Fall of Icarus, to give it its full title, long thought to be by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels when I was living in Belgium and studying with the Open University. Brueghel has always been one of my favourite artists and this caught my attention because it was different from his other paintings in that it’s the only one in which he chose to portray a classical rather than a religious subject or genre scene. Most of us are more familiar with works such as his Massacre of the Innocents or Hunters in the Snow. This painting intrigued me because, were it not for the title, I probably would not have recognised it as a retelling of the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses about Icarus, who is so exhilarated by his newly acquired ability to soar through the air on wings attached with beeswax that he ignores his father’s warning about flying too close to the sun. Once I looked at the picture more closely, I saw the pair of legs waving in the air in the bottom right hand corner; the rest of Icarus is submerged beneath the waves. Not only that, but the other figures in the painting appear to have noticed nothing out of the ordinary to marvel at in the shape of a young man plummeting from the sky and falling into the sea, so engrossed are they in their various rural pursuits: the farmer concentrates on following his horse-drawn plough, the shepherd with his dog further down the vertiginous hillside stands in the midst of his flock with his back to the scene, gazing up at the sky – more about that later – and the angler by the water’s edge may be fishing, or pointing at something, but it definitely isn’t at the drowning boy. The suggestion seems to be that ordinary life goes on, regardless of any momentous happenings taking place and is reminiscent of a traditional Flemish proverb warning against excessive ambition.