A lamp for delight, a well of peace
That is what I want from a painting
Dreams of the Everyday, paintings by Winfred Nicolson and Andrew Cranston
The current exhibition at the Pier Art Centre in Stromness, curated by Richard Ingleby and Jonathan Anderson, brings the work of two painters into conversation with each other across almost a century. Winifred Nicolson’s works from the 1920s and 30s are paired with paintings made by Glasgow-based Andrew Cranston within the last ten years.
In this particular dream of the everyday:
A posy of jewel-bright flowers in a jug sits on a sunny window ledge that opens onto a beach, where small boats are drawn up onto the sand, and white laundry snaps on washing lines like bright sails.
A plump baby with smooth porcelain cheeks, golden yellow hair and coral pink ears is held firmly on an adult’s lap at a table surrounded by a small family group drinking tea from a homely brown teapot, a cast iron range burning warmly behind them. On the table, a single, black-handled knife points towards the child.
A sweet little donkey looks over a fence at an adult and child who stand, side by side, gazing back at it, all of them seeming to float in an unearthly yellow light.
A woman takes a bath, submerging herself luxuriously in fragrant suds and hot water, her head flushed pink with the heat, the blue and yellow tiled bathroom suffused with the yellow-gold fog of sunlit steam.
To walk among these paintings of small domestic spaces drenched in luminous colour is a balm. But this is a delight that is complex. It has room for unease and uncertainty too. Silent conversations criss-cross the gallery rooms as the quiet dramas of family life unfold. The humble tabletop becomes a stage on which events and dialogues between gathered objects and people take place.
In Nicolson’s painting ‘Kate and Jake, Isle of Wight’ (1932) her two young children with Ben Nicolson sit at a table with a view of the sea and woodlands behind them. They wear colourfully festive party hats, and yet they look oddly sombre. Jake’s eyes are dark as a snowman’s chips of coal, gazing directly out at us. Kate’s are glaucous, staring blindly, as if milky with cataracts.
Backstory: their father, Ben Nicolson has just left them for the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and their mother has brought them here to the Isle of Wight to regroup. Money is short. There is heartbreak and misfortune at this table. And yet the little family gathers to celebrate something, a birthday perhaps. Two enormous oranges lie on a blue plate set upon a yellow and blue checked tablecloth. The black-handled knife puts in another appearance. Again, its blade points to a child.
And yet Nicolson wrote:
‘Orange is an open colour expressing prosperity and plenty, sunbaked universe, and laughter under the sun. Yellow is the atmosphere of wisdom, reflection and calm.’
Paint where you want to go. Paint what you want to feel. Paint orange and yellow. Paint delight, prosperity and plenty. Paint laughter and sunshine, wisdom and calm. The togetherness of a splintered family gathered around a table. The black-handled knife is present, but it lies unused.
Nicolson again:
‘The picture for today’s dwelling house must be an anchor of security, must be a lamp for delight, must be a well of peace, and when it has attained all that – and we are asking much of it – we shall ask something more, we shall ask it to be a ladder – not one of those realistic ladders made of wood, that reach as far as the ceiling, but one of those upheld in places of stones, that have no limit, not even the sky; and upon which translucent thoughts may travel up and far away and also down and back to the home a hearth-fire. This is what I want from a picture in my home.’
Nicolson’s ambition is inspiring. A painting is not mere decoration. It is not just a nice picture of a jug of flowers or a plump baby. It is an anchor, a lamp, a delight, a hearth, and a transcendent portal.
In the first big painting of Cranston’s that we meet, ‘(This infinitesimal twinkling of) tiny signs’ (2021) we find another tabletop, this time with a haphazard gathering of jugs, plates, fruit, Tunnock’s tea cakes, saucepans, a cat, a tape-measure that may perhaps be a spotty snake or discarded scarf. A child peeps over the table’s edge. Everything is dissolving in a field of delicious, cool light rendered in buffs, warm greys and soft creamy yellows.
Like Nicolson, Cranston is a storyteller, but there’s a laconic humour in his work (and, notably, in his accompanying wall texts) and a dream-like quality to his narratives that leavens the seriousness of his engagement with paint.
Cranston’s process is layered; collaging, bleaching, masking, varnishing, reworking his surfaces sometimes over long periods. These are paintings in conversation across time, with earlier versions of themselves, and with earlier writers and painters: ‘Cragie’s Return’(2019) refers to the painter Craigie Aitcheson. In ‘Elizabeth and John’ (2017), the painters and life-partners Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston are rendered as two pots stuffed with paintbrushes looking, side by side, at the Bass Rock. ‘Glasgow Scene, (second version)’ (2017), a small painting of jugs and cups on a ledge talks back to Morandi’s careful arrangements of dusty bottles. The domestic interiors of the Intimistes Bonnard and Vuillard are present as echoes throughout.
Many of Cranston’s works here are small, jewel-like pieces painted onto old book covers, found objects that already have a history. These offer the artist a prompt, something to respond to. He says:
‘Painting is an act of remembering and forgetting, covering and uncovering, tracing and retracing, getting lost and finding a way. Somehow, starting is a blank. A feeling of: ‘How do you do this again? And only by going through the motions can you get anywhere.’
Cranston has described one of his works as ‘a painting that came out of my brush one day’. The activity of painting becomes its own path, leading us forward. A lifeline, even. A grappling hook thrown out, by means of which we might haul ourselves up and out into the light.
One goes back out into the street feeling lifted, for a time, of the weight of the world’s ongoing horrors.
The black knife is still there, probably always will be, but for now it lies quiet in the cool daylight.
until next week,
Sam
I’m away travelling this week, so our weekly co-working session The Life Raft will remain in harbour. I’ll be back next week!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this Sam, always fascinated to understand a little of an artists thoughts and process. I feel the need for a gallery trip sometime soon, just need to work out where to find one not too far away!
I absolutely loved this post and it encapsulates so much of what I feel (and am needing to feel) about the home, family and teatime memories! I love the work of these two painters and although I am a photographer, I think I am now feeling inspired to experiment with paint as well! Thank you.