Mary Newcomb Exhibition by Crane Kalman Gallery

SHC16073 Crane Kalman Mary Newcomb catalogue.qxp_Layout 2 21/03/2016 14:10 Page 1

CRANE KALMAN GALLERY LTD MARY NEWCOMB

178 Brompton Road, London SW3 1HQ Tel: 020 7584 7566 Fax: 020 7584 3843 e-mail: ckg.ltd@virgin.net www.cranekalman.com

APRIL – MAY 2016

CRANE KALMAN GALLERY LTD

SHC16073 Crane Kalman Mary Newcomb catalogue.qxp_Layout 2 21/03/2016 14:10 Page 2

FRONT COVER:

The Fish Pond, 1984 Oil on canvas, 50 x 36 inches / 127 x 91.5 cm Signed and dated lower right, signed, titled and dated verso Exhibited: Galerie XX, Hamburg, 1984 Mary Newcomb Retrospective, Abbot Hall, Cumbria, October - November 1996

BACK COVER:

Country Chapel Oil on board 30 3⁄4 x 28 3⁄4 inches / 78 x 73 cm

MARY NEWCOMB

April 7th – May 21st 2016

CRANE KALMAN GALLERY LTD 178 Brompton Road, London SW3 1HQ Tel: 020 7584 7566 Fax: 020 7584 3843 e-mail: ckg.ltd@virgin.net www.cranekalman.com

Every now and again if you’re lucky, exploring a wood, sitting by a river or looking out of a train, you may experience what a friend of mine calls ‘a Mary moment’. Such minor epiphanies, often apparently unremarkable in themselves, will lodge in your memory and may be recalled in their essentials long afterwards.They are the distinctive subjects of the Suffolk painter Mary Newcomb: a flock of goldfinches dispersing, a magpie flying up from a wet road, a football match seen through a hole in an oak leaf eaten by a caterpillar. These are all actual titles of paintings by Mary Newcomb. Such poetical vignettes are essential to the particular effect of these deceptively modest pictures. Mary Newcomb belongs firmly in the greenwood tradition, peering unnoticed from behind leaves like the Green Man at things that are very often half hidden themselves. In the Newcomb world, people and plants sometimes surreally hybridize, as in Girl at the Garden Centre in the Rain, in which a woman, mostly hidden beneath an outsized green-and-black striped umbrella, has grown into an umbellifer. And in Lady with a Bunch of Sweet Williams, a woman standing in an exuberantly flowering meadow, hidden from the waist up by her giant posy, seems to have burst into full bloom in sympathy. Such chameleon impulses in many of the paintings come close to a visual expression of Girl at the Garden Centre in the Rain Andrew Marvell’s lines in ‘The Garden’: ‘Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade’.They have a notable affinity with poetry. Mary is an admirer of John Clare, whose words ‘I found my poems in the fields and only wrote down what I saw’ describe very well how she paints, and the connections she notices between, say, pylons and cobwebs, or butterflies and bits of torn paper. Indeed, the notes in her diaries are very often written without punctuation in a style that strongly suggests Lady with a Bunch of Sweet Williams that of Clare as well as the stream of consciousness she wants to express. I appreciate Mary’s pictures in a way that must be informed and biased by my affection for the part of the world where we have both lived through the poignant closing years of what might be called the old rural Suffolk: the northern stretch of the county broadly defined by the valley of the River Waveney. In her evocation of the natural, mainly rural life of Suffolk, Mary Newcomb is comparable with two other artists of the borderlands, John Nash and Ronald Blythe, whose work is based on their relationship with the Stour Valley along the southern margins of the county.The setting of some of Mary’s work in Ronald Blythe’s book Borderland seems an entirely natural collaboration. She delights in simple, vernacular structures or machines: rowing boats, bicycles, weather- vanes, telegraph poles, bird boxes, lighthouses, windmills, church towers. ‘They serve a purpose. They have a point,’ she writes in her diary. She also loves to travel, in the old, unhurried way on trains, steamers or on foot, and records her excursions in paint. When Mary and Godfrey first came to Suffolk, they lived at Needham so close to the Waveney that one night two dog otters fought each other right under their window. ‘They were on their back legs, teeth in each other’s necks, and balanced by their tails,’ Mary wrote to me in a letter. ‘In the morning I saw their bloody trails in the dew on the marsh, going in different directions.’ They farmed in a small way along a stretch of river bank with goats, hens and cows. Mary would get up early and paint from five until seven and then do farm work for the rest of the day, scrubbing eggs clean with cold water or milking goats. Now they had moved to Peasenhall, a few miles inland from Walberswick, where they also lived for a while, and I have driven over with the East Anglian painter Jayne Ivimey, an old friend of Mary and Godfrey, for tea. The house is at one end of the village, with a walled garden and a homemade wooden aeroplane on a pole as a weather vane.The first thing that strikes you about Mary is the calm depth and steadiness of her clear blue eyes. She walks and stands stoutly, with definite steps and great certainty about everything she does, looking remarkably young for a woman in her eightieth year. She wears her rich dark-brown hair, which has never turned grey, neatly cropped.

Mary Newcomb bears the air of someone who has worked hard, and to some purpose, all her life. Everything about the house suffuses it with a lively spirit of curiosity and inquiry.There is something of or by Mary in every room of the house except Godfrey’s, which houses his beloved Philip Suttons. Godfrey, says Jayne, is a man of sudden strong enthusiasms: the saxophone, the penny whistle, the spinning wheel. Mary has been painting rooks. A Brooding Rook in it’s Heaven is the working title of her new work in progress. On the floor beside the canvas are half a dozen of the birds drawn in charcoal on sheets of paper, and on the wall is another one, standing confidently, bald beak raised aloft, about to caw.The poetical titles always come first. They are like haiku.And there is something Japanese about the clarity and profound simplicity of Mary’s work.This has not come about through any deliberate study of such things. Mary has simply arrived quite independently at similar conclusions through her own original route. Every so often, as we have our tea, a live inhabitant of the rookery beside her garden comes down and pecks about on the lawn. Mary generally places her paintings on the floor and sits on a low stool, bending over them to work. This accounts for the close focus. Sometimes the picture is propped against the wall, and she uses a small step that enables her almost to walk right into the work. At one point in the diary, she describes herself as ‘so tired I almost fell into the canvas’. Unlike most artists, Mary keeps not a sketchbook but a notebook or diary. She fills it with handwritten thoughts and observations that often find their way into the work verbatim. ‘Be sure to put it down,’ she writes in one diary entry, ‘be it squirrel in a woodpile, men with white-toed boots working on a mountain railway, caterpillars hanging stiffly and staring from a laurel bush, the magnitude of the stars — there is no end.’ A Brooding Rook in it’s Heaven

That reference to the stars inevitably suggests one of the best-known Newcomb pictures, the beautiful watercolour Ewes Watching Shooting Stars: three ewes on a clear, cold night, invite you to identify with the animals inside their warm coats. The painting reminds me of Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Warm and the Cold’, an evocation of the animal world on a freezing, starry night in terms of the particular form of shelter each one takes, including, by contrast, the ‘sweating farmers’ who ‘Turn in their sleep/Like oxen on spits’. Newcomb and Hughes share an acute awareness of the minutiae of life in the wild, and a deep, affectionate understanding of the lives of farm animals and all creatures. In another picture, Very Cold Birds Where One has Flown Away it Knocked the Raindrops Off the raindrops are drawn very nearly as big as the birds on a tree, so the three drops in mid fall suggest the absent bird. Proportion is very often skewed like this in a way reminiscent of children’s art or ‘naive’ painting, in order to represent the thing that looms large in the artist’s mind at a particular moment. Years before she eventually began to write in a series of red-bound diaries from W. H. Ewes Watching Shooting Stars Smith’s, Mary instinctively preferred writing or drawing on separate sheets of a favourite A5 paper, torn from a book and carefully kept in the folder she carried with her. She was well aware that this was the medium that best suited her mode of thought and sudden, crystalline perceptions. To write in a notebook or diary implies a burden of narrative, of things unfolding in sequence through time, which Mary was temperamentally reluctant to take on. Entering one of her paintings, like entering a wood, alters your sense of time.The act of drawing, as John Berger points out in a recent interview, ‘is a way of learning to leave the present, or rather, of gathering the past, the future and the present into one’. At the head of a jotted list of projected ideas, Mary writes, ‘The lady in her landscape, her rightness, her industry, her involvement, respect and pride.’ It has the ring of a self-portrait. There is a certainty about Mary Newcomb that includes an absolute belief in the importance of the clear-sighted moments that engender her paintings.The impression

you often have, looking at one of her paintings, is that ‘Suddenly there it was, and Mary painted it.’ But, in fact, each painting evolves slowly in the studio. Mary paints a first version, blocking out the main elements, then stands it against the wall. Over a period of weeks or months she will then begin to tear out bits of colour or texture that catch her eye in magazines and arrange them on the floor beside each picture. As we move through the house we step carefully around these pools of colour. At the end of each day’s work Mary also paints out all her brushes on to pieces of hardboard and stands them near the painting in progress. ‘Just now I’m still stuck on green,’ she says. A particular colour will preoccupy her for weeks, and the painting out of the brushes is much more than ‘a good way to use up spare paint’, as she deceptively claims. It is the gradual preparation of the underpainting that gives the pictures such depth and mystery, and often pushes them to the edge of abstraction. Turner did something similar in his ‘colour beginnings’. It is the most profoundly unconscious part of the painting: the music of the song. I notice a predominantly blue work from an earlier phase, a back view of two figures sitting in the garden. Mary often paints people from behind, perhaps shyly, in a way that suggests that they too are lost in their own private worlds. Another example hangs across the room: three female figures leaning over the railings of Southwold Pier, looking out across a sparkling sea with a pair of distant sailing ships on the horizon. One wears a black-and-white harlequin-patterned dress.Wind catches her hair. The people in these paintings seem to be part of the landscape.They do not dominate it, but take their place in it like any other being. Mary’s Man Cycling Madly Down a Hill seems airborne on his bicycle in an abstract ‘green shade’, his arms and elbows akimbo over the handlebars like wings, cloth-capped head leaning forward like a bird’s. Mary’s Man Cycling Madly Down a men often appear in the cloth caps worn by Suffolk farm labourers or fishermen until Hill recently: a badge of belonging to the land or sea. These anonymous figures are in some ways Green Men, emerging through deep layers of foliage. The just-visible Lady in an Unsprayed Field Seen in Passing, an after-image, might be a corn spirit. Mary Newcomb seems attracted to paint what is half hidden, invisible even. In The Last Bird Home, the small figure of the bird, in a slight halo of warm amber dusk light, descends into a long smudge of dark-grey hedge we know is crowded with concealed birds, all singing. ‘After a long wet evening,’ Mary wrote while she was working on this picture, ‘the birds must sing. They have to get it out and shout insistently.’ Birds are everywhere in the work, yet they are often half concealed, hard to spot, as in a wood or a hedge. A cock pheasant in a field is actually a half pheasant submerged in Lady in an Unsprayed Field Seen in Passing grass, and in the diary there is a reference to ‘half men’ as subjects for pictures: ‘half men in hollows, in fields, in dips in the road, in long grass’.This is how it is in the fields, hedges and woods: things heard but unseen, or glimpsed, partly hidden. Seen collectively as hedgerow or wood, trees are abstracted by nature into a mass of colour and texture. The experience is distinct from the architectural look of a single tree. And this is what you see in The Last Bird Home a Newcomb painting.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin. Copyright © Roger Deakin 2007. Reproduced by permission of the estate of Roger Deakin c/o Georgina Capel Associates Ltd., 20 Wardour Street, London,W1D 6PS

Parakeet with fresh cherries, 1991 Oil on canvas, 24 x 15 inches / 60.9 x 38.1 cm

Collared doves lifted by light, 1998 Oil on canvas 25 x 23 inches / 63.5 x 58.4 cm Provenance: The Estate of the Artist Exhibited: Mary Newcombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Odd Universe, A Memorial Exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 9th May - 28th June 2009, travelled to Crane Kalman Gallery, London 17th September - 31st October 2009

Chapel First Light, c.1995 Watercolour on paper 7 x 7 1â &#x201E;4 inches / 17.8 x 18.5 cm Initialed lower right

Welsh Chapel, 1979 Oil on board 22 x 29 1â &#x201E;2 inches / 55.9 x 74.9 cm

The Lord and Lady at their Gates, 1975 Oil on board 31 1â &#x201E;4 x 29 3â &#x201E;4 inches / 79.4 x 75.5 cm Signed, dated and titled verso

Study for Mullein Moth Caterpillar on Leaf of Buddleja Globosa, 2000 Oil on board 15 x 12 inches / 38.1 x 30.5 cm

Muntjac the rib-faced deer, 1998 Oil on board 18 x 13 inches / 45.7 x 33 cm

The Angel Marshes, 1992 Oil on canvas 38 1â &#x201E;2 x 38 inches / 100.4 x 96.5 cm Signed, dated and titled verso, signed lower right Exhibited: Two lyrical Painters,Winifred Nicholson and Mary Newcomb, 17th May - 24th June 2001, ill. p.24

The Evening River Trip, 1985 Oil on canvas 34 x 40 inches / 102 x 87 cm Signed and dated lower left Exhibited: Mary Newcombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Odd Universe, A Memorial Exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 9th May - 28th June 2009, travelled to Crane Kalman Gallery, London 17th September - 31st October 2009

Pony and Trap Drive Oil on board 19 1⁄4 x 23 1⁄2 inches / 49 x 60 cm

Cattle Wash and crayon on paper 9 3â &#x201E;4 x 8 1â &#x201E;8 inches / 24.5 x 21 cm Initialed lower right

Landscape, Suffolk, 1969 Oil on canvas 32 1â &#x201E;8 x 30 1â &#x201E;8 inches / 81.5 x 76.5 cm Signed & dated Mary Newcomb 69 lower right, titled and signed verso Exhibited: Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1970

The Last Bird Home, 1992 Oil on canvas 48 x 66 inches / 121.9 x 167.6 cm Signed and dated lower right, signed, titled and dated verso Literature: Mary Newcomb, Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 1996, pl. 110, ill. in col. p.129

The Apple Pickers Feast, 1971 Oil on board 28 1â &#x201E;4 x 30 inches / 72.5 x 76.3 cm Signed lower right Exhibited: Masterpieces, Art and East Anglia, Sainsbury Centre, Norfolk, September 2013 February 2014, ill. in colour p.246 Mary Newcombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Odd Universe, A Memorial Exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 9th May - 28th June 2009, travelled to Crane Kalman Gallery, London 17th September - 31st October 2009, ill. in cat. p.27 Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, November - December 2006, ill. front cover

The Swollen Stream, Feb 1981 Oil on canvas 28 1⁄4 x 28 1⁄4 inches / 71.8 x 71.8 cm

Church Tower Pencil and Wash on paper 6 x 7 inches / 15.2 x 17.7 cm

The Cockerel on the Church Pencil and Watercolour on paper 7 1â &#x201E;2 x 7 1â &#x201E;2 inches / 19 x 19 cm Initialed lower right

Sunset Setting,The Bowling Green Oil on canvas 27 7⁄8 x 23 1⁄2 inches / 70.5 x 59.7 cm

Horse Sheltering from the Wind, 1978 Oil on board 7 1â &#x201E;2 x 17 5â &#x201E;8 inches / 19 x 44.8 cm Signed, titled and dated verso

Garden above the Sea, Le Lavandou, 1990 Oil on canvas 28 1⁄2 x 21 1⁄2 inches / 72.4 x 54.6 cm

The Shell Pink Wife, 1963 Oil on board 30 x 30 inches / 76 x 76 cm

Hay Newly Cut, June 1998 Oil on board 28 x 23 3â &#x201E;4 inches / 71.1 x 63.3 cm Literature: Mary Newcomb, Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 1996, pl. 101, ill. in col. p.120

Duck Pencil on paper 7 x 11 1â &#x201E;2 inches / 17.8 x 29.2 cm

An outing to see the Seals, Blakeney, 1994 Oil on canvas 40 1â &#x201E;2 x 45 inches / 103 x 114.5 cm Provenance: The Estate of the Artist Exhibited: Mary Newcombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Odd Universe, A Memorial Exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 9th May - 28th June 2009, travelled to Crane Kalman Gallery, London 17th September - 31st October 2009 Mary Newcomb, Piers Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, June - July 1995

Out on the Marsh, 1998 Oil on board 27 1⁄2 x 21 1⁄2 inches / 69.8 x 54.6 cm Signed, titled and dated verso

Pylon in the Rain, 1989 Pencil and wash on paper 7 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 inches / 19.1 x 24.1 cm

Cork Harbour, 1968 Oil on board 30 x 30 inches / 76 x 76 cm

Moths flying into the light of the barge Oil on board 23 1â &#x201E;2 x 27 1â &#x201E;2 inches / 60 x 70 cm

LIST OF PAINTINGS The Fish Pond, 1984

The Apple Pickers Feast, 1971

Oil on canvas, 50 x 36 inches / 127 x 91.5 cm Signed and dated lower right, signed, titled and dated verso

Oil on board 28 ¼ x 30 inches / 72.5 x 76.3 cm Signed lower right

Parakeet with fresh cherries, 1991

The Swollen Stream, Feb 1981

Oil on canvas, 24 x 15 inches / 60.9 x 38.1 cm

Oil on canvas 28 x ¼ x 28 ¼ inches / 71.8 x 71.8 cm

Collared doves lifted by light, 1998

Church Tower

Oil on canvas 25 x 23 inches / 63.5 x 58.4 cm

Pencil and Wash on paper 6 x 7 inches / 15.2 x 17.7 cm

Chapel First Light, c.1995

The Cockerel on the Church

Watercolour on paper 7 x 7 ¼ inches / 17.8 x 18.5 cm Initialed lower right

Pencil and Watercolour on paper 7 ½ x 7 ½ inches / 19 x 19 cm Initialed lower right

Welsh Chapel, 1979

Sunset Setting,The Bowling Green

Oil on board 22 x 29 ½ inches / 55.9 x 74.9 cm

Oil on canvas 27 7⁄8 x 23 ½ inches / 70.5 x 59.7 cm

The Lord and Lady at their Gates, 1975

Horse Sheltering from the Wind, 1978

Oil on board 31 ¼ x 29 ¾ inches / 79.4 x 75.5 cm Signed, dated and titled verso

Oil on board 7 ½ x 17 5⁄8 inches / 19 x 44.8 cm Signed, titled and dated verso

Study for Mullein Moth Caterpillar on Leaf of Buddleja Globosa, 2000

Garden above the Sea, Le Lavandou, 1990

Oil on board 15 x 12 inches / 38.1 x 30.5 cm

Muntjac the rib-faced deer, 1998 Oil on board 18 x 13 inches / 45.7 x 33 cm

The Angel Marshes, 1992 Oil on canvas 38 ½ x 38 inches / 100.4 x 96.5 cm Signed, dated and titled verso, signed lower right

The Evening River Trip, 1985 Oil on canvas 34 x 40 inches / 102 x 87 cm Signed and dated lower left

Pony and Trap Drive Oil on board 19 ¼ x 23 ½ inches / 49 x 60 cm

Cattle Wash and crayon on paper 9 ¾ x 8 1/8 inches / 24.5 x 21 cm Initialed lower right

Landscape, Suffolk, 1969 Oil on canvas 32 1⁄8 x 30 1⁄8 inches / 81.5 x 76.5 cm Signed & dated Mary Newcomb 69 lower right, titled and signed verso

The Last Bird Home, 1992 Oil on canvas 48 x 66 inches / 121.9 x 167.6 cm Signed and dated lower right, signed, titled and dated verso

Oil on canvas 28 ½ x 21 ½ inches / 72.4 x 54.6 cm

The Shell Pink Wife, 1963 Oil on board 30 x 30 inches / 76 x 76 cm

Hay Newly Cut, June 1998 Oil on board 28 x 23 ¾ inches / 71.1 x 63.3 cm

Duck Pencil on paper 7 x 11 ½ inches / 17.8 x 29.2 cm

An outing to see the seals, Blakeney, 1994 Oil on canvas 40 ½ x 45 inches / 103 x 114.5 cm

Out on the Marsh, 1998 Oil on board 27 ½ x 21 ½ inches / 69.8 x 54.6 cm Signed, titled and dated verso

Pylon in the Rain, 1989 Pencil and wash on paper 7 ½ x 9 ½ inches / 19.1 x 24.1 cm

Cork Harbour, 1968 Oil on board 30 x 30 inches / 76 x 76 cm

Moths flying into the light of the barge Oil on board 23 ½ x 27 ½ inches / 60 x 70 cm

Country Chapel, 1973 Oil on board 30 ¾ x 28 ¾ inches / 78 x 73 cm

MARY NEWCOMB 1922 1933 1940 1944 1950 1971 1980 1984 2008

– – – – – – –

40 44 50 71 81 81 99

Born in Harrow on the Hill Attended Trowbridge High School Reading University, B.Sc. Natural Sciences, and an Education Diploma Taught science and maths at Bath High School Married Godfrey Newcomb, Lives in Norfolk, Two daughters (born 1954 and 1955) Lives in Suffolk, Received an award from the Eastern Arts Association Lives outside Norwich, Norfolk Died in Suffolk

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: 1970 1972 1973 1975 1976

1977 1979

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

1987 1988 1992 1995 1996 - 97

1999 2001 2003 - 04 2006 2009 2013

First one man show at Crane Kalman Gallery, London Vaccarino Gallery, Florence, Italy Crane Kalman Gallery, London Galerie Delpire, Paris, France Crane Kalman Gallery, London Crane Kalman Gallery, London Crane Kalman Gallery, London Galerie de Beerenburght, Eckonwiel, Holland Galerie Kusten, Gothenburg Galerie de Beerenburght, Amsterdam Fermoy Art Gallery, Kings Lynn, England LYC Gallery, Cumbria, England (with Winifred Nicholson) Atkinson Museum, Southport, England Annexe Gallery, London Crane Kalman Gallery, London Galerie de Beerenburght, Amsterdam, Holland Fermoy Art Gallery, Kings Lynn, England Galerie de Beerenburght Crane Kalman Gallery, London Bath Contemporary Art Fair, Bath, England Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland Galerie Nanky de Vreeze, Amsterdam Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, England Galerie XX, Hamberg Graham Modern Gallery, New York Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath, England Crane Kalman Gallery, London ‘The Rural poetry of Three English Women Artists’ (Mary Newcomb, Winifred Nicholson, Mary Potter), Crane Kalman Gallery, London Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney Islands, Scotland Mary Newcomb a Retrospective, travelled to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria 1st October 10th November 1996, Schoolhouse Gallery, Bath, England, 15th November - 31st December 1996, Kings Lynn Art Centre, Norfolk, 15th January - 25th February 1997, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1st March - 1st April 1997 Djanogly Art Gallery, The University of Nottingham, England Two Lyrical Painters, Winifred Nicholson and Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London 18th November 2003 - 17th January 2004 Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 17th November - 23rd December 2006 Mary Newcomb’s Odd Universe, A Memorial Exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 9th May - 28th June 2009, travelled to Crane Kalman Gallery, London 17th September - 31st October 2009 Mary Newcomb, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 25th April - 1st June 2013