Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film. And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art. The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot.... The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
Snow over Scotland. In July.
Alright, the real white stuff isn't actually lying on the Pentland Hills at the moment, but there's a taste of winter in store if you go along to see Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It's a retrospective of the work of an artist who's originally English, but who settled in Scotland many years ago, and whose most memorable works, for us, are her haunting winter landscapes, a subject she's returned to throughout her career.
Winters are harsh in Scotland (let's face it, the summers can be pretty miserable too); the days are short, the trees are bare; there can be snow on the ground. It's Bruegel or Sohlberg. Crowe made her home in the Pentlands, not so far from the centre of Edinburgh, where she taught art, but when winter comes, the hills can feel remote. In Blue Snow, Fiery Trees, the wood is captured at twilight, the branches illuminated by the setting sun, the frozen landscape glowing blue in the dusk. Crowe wanted to capture the idea of "the cold, or blue, being so intense that it burns."
That's a picture from 2011, and in How the Snow Fell, from 2018, Crowe looks at the landscape from a bird's-eye perspective, with the sparse trees and snow-filled furrows of the fields rendered in a very restricted palette. Crowe's ability to evoke a winter's day though paint is remarkable.
As the exhibition demonstrates, these pictures hark back to Crowe's first encounter with Scotland in the late 1960s, when she was in her early 20s and had just finished her studies at the Royal College of Art. In the excellent accompanying video in which she talks through her work and career, she says that in a landscape she hadn't experienced before, she didn't see a hillside, but a pattern. Throughout the 1970s, she painted the scenery around her home, looking at the changing seasons and the effect they had on the land and its people.
This 1975 painting, Large Tree Group, shows sheep farmer Jenny Armstrong, already in her 70s, who makes a frequent appearance in Crowe's pictures from this time. Her small figure, made even tinier than it would have been in real life, helps convey the scale and bleakness of the landscape.
A number of Crowe's paintings look out through the windows of the farmer's cottage, with bits of landscape glimpsed through panes of glass and drawn curtains. Jenny's independent spirit is a theme of Crowe's paintings, but her ailing health as she aged meant she was forced to spend more time indoors. Here, though, on Christmas Day, she is just outside the cottage, captured tending to the sheep in the snow, framed by the curtains and the cards strung across the ceiling.
This is a big show at the City Art Centre, with about 150 pictures spread across three floors, and while we found Crowe's landscapes much the most compelling aspect of her work, there's a lot else to explore and admire.
Crowe visited Italy for the first time in 1992, and she became increasingly drawn to symbolism and greater abstraction as well as references to 14th- and 15th-century painters such as Giotto, Uccello and Piero della Francesca. Her palette became much warmer. Paintings such as Italian Reflections sought to meld portraiture, landscape and other imagery.
Forty Lilies for John uses a Venetian red damask for the backdrop of a painting intended as part of a series for an Italianate country house in the Scottish Borders, and it's a background that echoes the shape of the lilies' petals.
Crowe's flower paintings are really attractive, and this picture from last year, Between Two Windows, places this jug of what look like gladioli in the midst of an inside-to-outside view of the landscape. It's another twilight view, in common with much of her recent output.
We didn't make the show of Crowe's portraits at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery when we were in Edinburgh last year, but there's a fair selection of such pictures at the City Art Centre. Crowe incorporates imagery into these depictions that tell you something about the experiences and ideas of the sitters. Quite a few of those she has painted are academics, including Professor Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh physicist and Nobel Prize winner who proposed the particle known as the Higgs boson, an explanation of the meaning of which is beyond our scope or capabilities.
Professor Higgs is accompanied by several other equally erudite sitters around the walls of one large room in this show, but for us, the cumulative effect of these pictures made them feel a tad repetitive. Let's focus on one portrait we really liked, this image of art dealer Patrick Bourne,
He's painted in his flat, in front of a picture from his collection depicting soldiers in World War I. Crowe said that Bourne appeared to be thinking of other things, linking it in her mind to soldiers drafted abroad, illustrating "a palpable sense of vulnerability around young men at the beginning of their lives".
Which brings us on to this picture of Crowe's son Ben, painted in 1991 as the First Gulf War was looming. Planes and parachutists in Heroes and Villains recall a military exercise that took place nearby. "Ben, a young man on the verge of adult life, appeared so vulnerable, with that threat of warfare and an undercurrent of potential danger."
Ben was indeed a vulnerable young man; diagnosed with cancer in 1994, he died a year later.
Crowe's long career is really well illustrated in this exhibition. It seems to us she's rather better known in Scotland than south of the border, so if you are heading north to Edinburgh over the next few months, do try to make some time to fit this show in.
Alright, the real white stuff isn't actually lying on the Pentland Hills at the moment, but there's a taste of winter in store if you go along to see Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It's a retrospective of the work of an artist who's originally English, but who settled in Scotland many years ago, and whose most memorable works, for us, are her haunting winter landscapes, a subject she's returned to throughout her career.
Winters are harsh in Scotland (let's face it, the summers can be pretty miserable too); the days are short, the trees are bare; there can be snow on the ground. It's Bruegel or Sohlberg. Crowe made her home in the Pentlands, not so far from the centre of Edinburgh, where she taught art, but when winter comes, the hills can feel remote. In Blue Snow, Fiery Trees, the wood is captured at twilight, the branches illuminated by the setting sun, the frozen landscape glowing blue in the dusk. Crowe wanted to capture the idea of "the cold, or blue, being so intense that it burns."
This 1975 painting, Large Tree Group, shows sheep farmer Jenny Armstrong, already in her 70s, who makes a frequent appearance in Crowe's pictures from this time. Her small figure, made even tinier than it would have been in real life, helps convey the scale and bleakness of the landscape.
Crowe visited Italy for the first time in 1992, and she became increasingly drawn to symbolism and greater abstraction as well as references to 14th- and 15th-century painters such as Giotto, Uccello and Piero della Francesca. Her palette became much warmer. Paintings such as Italian Reflections sought to meld portraiture, landscape and other imagery.
Forty Lilies for John uses a Venetian red damask for the backdrop of a painting intended as part of a series for an Italianate country house in the Scottish Borders, and it's a background that echoes the shape of the lilies' petals.
Professor Higgs is accompanied by several other equally erudite sitters around the walls of one large room in this show, but for us, the cumulative effect of these pictures made them feel a tad repetitive. Let's focus on one portrait we really liked, this image of art dealer Patrick Bourne,
Which brings us on to this picture of Crowe's son Ben, painted in 1991 as the First Gulf War was looming. Planes and parachutists in Heroes and Villains recall a military exercise that took place nearby. "Ben, a young man on the verge of adult life, appeared so vulnerable, with that threat of warfare and an undercurrent of potential danger."
Crowe's long career is really well illustrated in this exhibition. It seems to us she's rather better known in Scotland than south of the border, so if you are heading north to Edinburgh over the next few months, do try to make some time to fit this show in.
Practicalities
Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting continues until October 13 at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. The gallery is open daily from 1000 to 1700, and standard tickets cost a remarkably reasonable £6. The centre is on Market St, literally just across the road from Waverley station on the Old Town side.Images
Victoria Crowe, Blue Snow, Fiery Trees, 2011, Private collection. © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, How the Snow Fell, 2018, Private collection. Photo: John McKenzie, © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, Large Tree Group, 1975, National Galleries of Scotland, Photo: Kenneth Gray, © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, December 25th, 1981, Collection Tanya Westinghouse Barker. Photo: Antonia Reeve, © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, Forty Lilies for John, 2010-11, Private collection. © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, Between Two Windows, 2018, Mr Christopher Bell. Photo: John McKenzie, © Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe, Patrick Bourne, 1984, Private collection
Victoria Crowe, Heroes and Villains, 1991, Artist's collection
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