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The Fabric of Faith

We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de  Zurbarán  exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling.  It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure.  This is Casild...
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Doreen Fletcher's Streets of London

There's a really rather good exhibition of paintings by Doreen Fletcher on at the Nunnery Gallery. Who's Doreen Fletcher, you ask? And where's the Nunnery Gallery?

We're in Bow in east London, and we're looking at townscapes, virtually all of them of the local area. This is Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective, and this weekday lunchtime it's quite full of visitors, many of them from the East End, and clearly delighting in recognising landmarks that in some cases are now just history.
Doreen Fletcher has been painting the streets of east London since the 1980s, though she stopped working in the early 2000s for lack of recognition before resuming a couple of years ago after being rediscovered. And justifiably so.

She paints in a fairly precise documentary style that's full of detailed observation. Her pictures are by no means devoid of people, but they certainly don't play a central role. They might be in a car or at a bus stop, rarely taking centre stage.
There are echos of Edward Hopper, George Shaw, Ben Johnson, Dutch 17th-century city views and indeed the East London Group who recorded the capital between the wars.

"I am an artist interested in the pockets of life others ignore," Fletcher has said, and those words are inscribed high up on the wall of the main gallery here.
Rain-drenched tarmac, advertising hoardings, boarded-up shopfronts, a stray traffic cone, graffiti on railway bridges, a pink wheelie bin: There's a sort of urban poetry here.

Fletcher's more recent work continues in a similar vein. There's something very up-to-date about The Beckton Fox, on the prowl at the supermarket petrol station:
Hopper's Gas sprang immediately to mind!

This is a delightful show, even if you're not all that familiar with the East End. Doreen Fletcher's pictures are full of interest and anecdote. If you get the chance to head down to Bow in the next few weeks, it's well worth the trip.

Practicalities

Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective is on at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, east London until March 24. It's open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesday to Sunday, and admission is absolutely free. The Nunnery Gallery is just a few minutes' walk from both Bow Road station on the Underground's District and Hammersmith & City lines and Bow Church station on the Docklands Light Railway.
“
I am an artist interested in the pockets of life others ignore
”

Images

Doreen Fletcher, Commercial Road, Whitsunday, 1989. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Bus Stop, 1983. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Salmon Lane in the Rain, 1987. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, The Beckton Fox, 2019. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery

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