'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the RWA

I shook off my post-Christmas torpor and went to two fascinating exhibitions in Bristol today: The Staffordshire Hoard at Bristol City Museum, of which more anon, and 'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the Royal West of England Academy. 

You'll find far better photos than mine of the exhibits online, but I'll share some anyway.

'Castle' by Sarah Woodfine, right and above

Any exhibition with paintings by Leonora Carrington, Marc Chagall, Stanley Spencer, Holman Hunt, Dame Laura Knight, Paula Rego, Karl Weschke is going to grab my attention, but the more modern pieces easily hold their own. 

'Women's Place' by Juli Haas, above

As Carman Callil writes in the preface of the excellent accompanying publication, Carter was herself an accomplished artist, so it's not surprising that her writing should conjure fantastical images in the minds of these artists. 

'The Fairy Tale' by Di Oliver, above

Some of it is really quite creepy. 

This - 'The Shipwrecked Bride' by Katarina Rose - struck a chord and made me shudder. 

'Not waving but drowning' by Wendy Mayer

Heather Nevay's The Murder ...

... and 'The Lesson'

Details of Tessa Farmer's 'The Perilous Pursuit of a Python'

I was disappointed to see that the writing workshops associated with this exhibition are being on held on weekdays, which means I've no hope of getting to them; still, the exhibition itself runs till 19th March so and I hope to return to the RWA to see it again. 

'Blue Circus' by Marc Chagall

'The Pomps of the Subsoil' by Leonora Carrington 

'The Banquet' by Ana Maria Pacheco

Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer : At War and Peace, Bristol Festival of Ideas, November 11, 2014

Here's a short review I wrote for the local rag about the above lecture at Bristol University.  

Swan Upping at Cookham : Stanley Spencer 1915 - 1919

The first time 17 year old Stanley Spencer made what would become a daily commute between his home in Cookham and the Slade School of Fine Art, his father, William, accompanied him to see him safely across Euston Road.  

Within a few years, Spencer turned his half-finished painting, Swan Upping at Cookham, to the wall and enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving first as an orderly in Beaufort Hospital, Stapleton (‘that vile place’) and later with the 68th Field Ambulance Unit on the front line in Macedonia.   

Under the Hill : Paul Nash, 1912

In the latest lecture in the series entitled The Artist at War, put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Paul Gough sought to explore the visual language of conflict by contrasting Spencer’s work with that of his friend and peer, the landscape artist Paul Nash, who enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and served on the Western Front before becoming an official war artist in November 1917.  
                                        
Both artists were profoundly affected by their experience of battle.  ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious,’ wrote Nash to his wife, ‘I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’ 

We Are Making A New World : Paul Nash, 1918

Nash went on to produce some of the most iconic and searing images of the battlefields of Belgium and France and, in Gough’s words, ‘introduced a new language of devastation to the genre of landscape.’  

Having returned to Cookham at the end of 1918, Spencer managed to finish Swan Upping but struggled to assimilate his recent past into his work, often stating ‘It is not proper or sensible to expect to paint after such experience.’  It was only when he received the commission from his patrons, the Behrens, for a memorial chapel at Burghlere to Mary Behren’s brother, Lieutenant Henry William Sandham, that he had the opportunity to undertake his astonishing and moving ‘re-membering’ of war, based on his time in Bristol and Macedonia. 

Life, Death, and Bread and Jam at Sandham Memorial Chapel

And so to London to see Leonard Cohen at the O2, but first a stop en route to see Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire - a return trip for me, having paid homage there a few Octobers ago, but a first visit for my companion.

Sandham is a 1920s Grade 1-listed chapel built as a memorial to Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who died in 1919 from malaria contracted during the Macedonian campaign of the First World War.  It houses a

series of paintings by Stanley Spencer, inspired by his own war experiences as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, in Beaufort Hospital in Bristol and in Macedonia.  It's forbidden to photograph the paintings because the low light levels in the Chapel would require flash photography, but no matter, I've pinched a few of the National Trust's photos off t'internet.

This is a view of The Resurrection of the Soldiers behind the altar, in which dozens of soldiers  bring their white wooden crosses to a Christ in white sat in the middle distance of the picture.  I especially like this scene because as well as men, it shows animals as part of the resurrection - specifically, mules - quite a controversial  viewpoint at the time of its painting.  

I also love the altar cloth which is woven with the words 'I am the Resurrection and the Life' horizontally and 'We are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On' vertically.

There are quite a few heart motifs in the paintings and my favourite is in the picture Tea in the Hospital Ward (look at the plate in the foreground).  Spencer's favourite food was bread and jam.

Another favourite thing of Spencer's at Beaufort Hospital was to hide between the huge baths 'to escape tiresome duties or simply to work alone and undisturbed'. 

The paintings are full of allusions - orderlies who resemble angels, one with buckets for wings, patients in Christ-like poses, mosquito nets like chrysalises.  

I feel a bit of a connection with Sandham, in part because my grandmother, Hilda Hill, worked as a volunteer in a war hospital during WWI.  Like Spencer hiding between the baths, Hilda was a free spirit - for instance, she once smuggled apples in her apron for the wounded soldiers and had to hide behind a curtain when the sister came into the ward, only to drop the apples and send them rolling over the floor.    

Beryl Cook Exhibition at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

My friend Julie and I had intended to go for a walk this afternoon, but the weather was grim so we had a last minute change of plan and went to the City Museum to see the exhibition of paintings  by Beryl Cook.

Cook was a self-taught artist who was given a child’s paint box for her 40th birthday and embarked upon a career painting 'ordinary people enjoying themselves'. Her early efforts failed to satisfy her. 'I expected to paint like Stanley Spencer. It was a great disappointment to me when I realised that I didn’t.' 

The Art Establishment never thought much of her output either. 'I know there are some artists who look down on my work,' Cook said, 'and when you compare mine with some of the others, I can see what they’re getting at.'

Wandering around the gallery, I found myself wondering whether Robert Lenkiewicz, a fellow Plymouth artist whose work was exhibited in the RWA a couple of months ago, and Cook knew each other.  They were contemporaries, both figurative painters, both deeply unfashionable in artistic circles, but popular with the public.  Their work also shares a distinct sense of humour, although Lenkiewicz's is far more profound.   

And yet I liked Beryl Cook's best paintings.  For all that they lack subtlety and nuance, they achieve the artist's aim of making people feel more cheery for looking at them.   I even found myself coveting 'Dancing Couple' with its stylised symmetry (which definitely reminded me of Stanley Spencer) and 'In the Snug' which was painted in the historic Bristol harbourside pub, the Nova Scotia. And following a post-exhibition mug of tea and shared slice of coffee and walnut cake, even this wash-out of a summer Sunday didn't seem quite as dreary.