In the Frame for December 2010

For December 2010, the Friends Secretary has decided to highlight Marion Patrick’s Sad Child With Yellow Clothing. Personally, I find Patrick’s paintings particularly expressive; many visitors, children and adults, can probably identify with the extreme emotions represented here. The muted colours of the isolated children – even in this, one of the most colourful of her works in our collection, the child’s face is tinged with grey – provide an overwhelming sense of desolation, reminiscent of inner city desolation or the ruined landscapes of war (for the environment is most certainly represented as man-made, rather than natural). Yet the grey backgrounds are also evocative of the school playground, a location in which almost all of us, at some point, can remember a sense of loneliness and loss which, for perhaps just one brief moment in time, seemed to colour the entire world.

What I find especially significant in these paintings, however – and why I’ve chosen this one in particular, with its unusual splash of bright colour – is that the isolation is never entirely complete; the viewer him or herself provides an inkling of hope. For, almost always, the child (or at least one in a group of children) is staring directly out of the painting, catching the eye of the observer. Here, one eye is hidden behind the child’s hair, suggesting caution, a fear of exposure. The other eye, however, is wide and clear, almost appealing. Although, as Patrick herself suggested, the isolation of the individual might be inevitable in life, while somebody is looking at the painting the child will never be truly alone.

Click on the image to see more of Marion Patrick’s work

In the Frame for November 2010

This month the Archivist has chosen to highlight My Thoughts, My Dreams, My Fears, painted by Allan Beveridge as a sequel to an earlier work entitled Me, Myself, I in order to depict the consequences of what the artist calls “the rush for profits and pleasures that seem to characterise humanity”.

The exclamations at the foot of the picture are clear enough pointers – as if any were needed – to the Creation and Fall narrative of the Book of Genesis, a rich and enduring source for artistic reflection. The current fashion is for this narrative in particular (containing as it does the concept of human ‘dominion’ over the land) and Christian tradition in general to be blamed for laying the foundations for human degradation of the earth. However, recent scholarship suggests more plausibly, and less comfortably, that it is the technological project of Western modernity rather than the religious worldview of pre-modernity that has brought us within sight of environmental catastrophe (see Richard Bauckham’s God and the Crisis of Freedom, 2002 and Bible and Ecology, 2010); and such appears to be Beveridge’s reading.

While My Thoughts, My Dreams, My Fears contains some visual references which are autobiographical, as a sequel to Me, Myself, I it illustrates a clear shift in preoccupation outward from the life of the mind of the artist to a (dystopian) vision of a shared future. Both perspectives have a necessary place in human subjectivity – in this respect these two paintings form a ready pair – and who can say which is the more pressing?

In the Frame for October 2010

This month the Archives & Museum’s Collections Administrator, despite protesting “I am not much of an art critic or one for waxing lyrical”, has chosen Margery Penfold’s “Despair II”, painted in April 1936. He writes:

“The picture is painted using watercolours on paper, and depicts an avenue of black leafless trees which form a tunnel, and it appears to lead the viewer into an ever darkening space. The artist has inscribed the painting with its title “DESPAIR” in large red capital letters in the bottom left corner of the picture.

To me the artist has perfectly illustrated the picture’s title, the emotion of despair. I can easily believe anyone, as I do, can relate to this picture, especially those who have experienced and journeyed through a particularly desperate time in their life, regardless of whether or not they suffer from mental illness.”