Mary Webb: Journeys in Colour by Mike Jefferies

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ 27 September–4 December 2011 www.scva.ac.uk www.marywebb.co.uk Exhibition curators: Sarah Bartholomew, Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner Exhibition design: Joe Geitner and Monica Brower, George Sexton Associates Catalogue essays by Alastair Grieve and Mel Clark Interview with Mary Webb by Sarah Bartholomew

All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The catalogue contributors assert their moral rights to be identified as the authors of their texts.

Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images and text in this catalogue whose copyright does not reside with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and we are grateful to the individuals and institutions who have assisted us in this task. Any omissions are unintentional – details should be addressed to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

List of lenders: Collection of the artist Collection of ART 18/21 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Gwen Hughes Modern British Art UEA Collection of Abstract and Constructivist Art, University of East Anglia Private lenders who wish to remain anonymous

All works by Mary Webb © Mary Webb 2011 and all photography by Pete Huggins, Camera Techniques except as listed below: Linda Clark, 32 Richard Hamilton, 56 John Hinde, 8, 54 Andi Sapey, front cover and pages 52, 62

Journeys in Colour is dedicated to John Hinde for his love and support.

ISBN 9780946009619 Printed in the United Kingdom by Gallpen Colour Print Printed on paper from mixed sources, including FSC-certified forests, FSCcontrolled woods and eligible recycled fibre

Catalogue design by East Publishing, Norwich

Front cover: San Filippo IV (version 2), 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm. Collection of the artist

Page 1: Val D’Elsa IV, 2008, oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm. Collection of the artist

Archive photographs courtesy of Mary Webb.

Page 2: Red, Green and Blue, 1969, screen print, 40.5 x 40.5 cm. Collection of the artist The Sainsbury Centre is supported by

Contents Foreword, by Paul Greenhalgh, Director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Colour, place and memory: the art of Mary Webb, by Alastair Grieve

Mary Webb and Mel Clark: a background on collaborative working, by Mel Clark

A conversation with Mary Webb, by Sarah Bartholomew, Assistant Curator, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Chronology

List of exhibitions

Public collections

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Colour, place and memory: the art of Mary Webb At first sight Mary Webb’s work seems very simple. Easily recognisable geometric forms – the square, the half-square, the right angle and the diagonal – define flat planes of colour.1 But look longer. We become involved in her subtle and exact balance of shapes, colours and tones. First impressions have to be checked and revised. The works become focuses of exploration and contemplation. Their overall format is always square. Planes of colours are laid evenly, exactly abutted or contained within black or white boundaries. The planes are in most cases, though not always, locked together in horizontal-vertical relationship, but this grouping is often broken assertively by dynamic 45-degree diagonals. Overlapping of some planes implies shallow layers of space, although the emphasis seems always on the flatness of the support. There is no sense of bravura spontaneity but rather of finely pitched control. As Tim Hilton has remarked, “Everything is perfectly judged. Nothing is irrelevant and every part of the painting helps every other part.”2 This calculated balance of coloured planes is achieved entirely by eye; there is no use of ratios such as the golden section, or of mathematical systems of ordering as employed by Swiss concrete artists such as Max Bill or Richard Lohse. Rather, Webb looks to the free colour orchestration of French and Russian artists. Colour has always been of major importance to her. As an undergraduate in the School of Fine Art at Newcastle University, she wrote her dissertation on the French painter Robert Delaunay. Shortly before the First War, he and his Russian wife Sonia had developed a language of pure colour in the face of the greys and browns of cubism. Webb headed her dissertation with the following statement by Pierre Francastel from his book on the Delaunays: “Colour alone gives the depth, meaning and movement of everything. Felt space which is the domain of the painter is essentially coloured.”3 And from the late 1960s she often visited Sonia in Paris, admiring the forms and colours of her fabric designs in particular. Talismanically, one of Webb’s first silk-screen prints is entitled Hommage à Sonia Delaunay, a homage in more than name for its restriction to red and black, and its stepped composition, acknowledge the Russian artist’s example. This print was made in 1969 with the technical help of Mel Clark, the master printer at Norwich School of Art, signalling the start of a long and fruitful collaboration. Webb’s prints are an important part of her production. They are closely related to her paintings, but because of their relative cheapness are available to a wider audience.

Above right: Mary Webb in her studio, Suffolk, 1971. Photo: John Hinde; Opposite: Hommage à Sonia Delaunay, 1967–9, screen print, 46 x 46 cm. Collection of the artist

As an undergraduate at Newcastle she was aware of Victor Pasmore’s and Richard Hamilton’s revolutionary ‘basic course’ for abstract artists, but she was not ready for it, rather spending time in the life-room. Later, the exercises developed for this course, in abstract colour, form and techniques such as collage, became important for her. By the time she moved to a postgraduate course at Chelsea School of Art, in 1963, she was making abstract paintings, encouraged by Richard Smith, and when she moved to teach at Harrogate she had space in the school studio to produce larger abstract works. In 1966 she started teaching part-time at Norwich School of Art, but lived in Streatham, South London. On becoming full-time at Norwich in 1973, she moved to East Anglia. In 1968 her parents had bought an isolated farmhouse in Suffolk, and in 1973 she converted an outbuilding there into a large, well-lit studio where she continues to work. The farm is surrounded by arable fields bordered by hedges and is approached by a long, straight drive that opens at a right angle from a Roman road. Her childhood ambition had been to farm and here in rural Suffolk she is able to ride, garden, keep animals and, above all, to paint in deep, dedicated seclusion. Studies are made in watercolour and collage of papers that she has prepainted. In her oils, layers of colour are applied with the brush until the surface is evenly flat. Straight lines are achieved by masking with rectangular strips of paper. Everything is exactly proportioned by eye: the grids, the planes of colour, are adjusted so that they relate perfectly together. In October 1970 she stated, “I like making two or more colours work very hard together to make a lot of things happen. At the same time there are a great number of things I wish to avoid. One of the hardest is avoiding having a centre, or part of the picture that claims attention more than the rest. Rather I want the colour to set up a process of renewal where relationships change with the looking. First assumptions are confounded the longer the painting is contemplated and this is how I like to think of them, as objects for contemplation.”4 The large untitled painting of 1967 in the University of East Anglia’s collection is a good example of how she spreads attention over the whole canvas, up to all four of its edges, despite the fact that it has a central axis.

Opposite: Untitled, 1967, oil on canvas, 198 x 198 cm. UEA Collection of Abstract and Constructivist Art (UEA 31242); Top right: Corsica Grey Study II, 1970, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm. Collection of the artist; Bottom right: Painting no.7, 1967, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm. Collection of the artist

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

San Luis VIII, 2002, screen print, 33.5 x 33.5 cm. Collection of the artist

San Luis X, 2004, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm. Collection of the artist

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

A conversation with Mary Webb Recorded by Sarah Bartholomew, assistant curator at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, on 21 July 2011 at Mary Webb’s studio in Fressingfield, Suffolk. For the purposes of this catalogue, the original recorded interview has been edited and supplemented with further information taken from previous conversations where appropriate.

The studio Sarah Bartholomew: Mary, we’re sitting here in your studio in Suffolk. It would be interesting to hear how you came to be here, in quite an isolated part of the countryside, and whether you feel the studio and its location have informed your practice in any way. Mary Webb: My parents retired and bought this farmhouse in ’68. I had started teaching at Norwich [School of Art] in ’66, so I used to stay with them and I made a studio to use in the summer in one of the outbuildings. And in ’73, when John and I got married and moved into a new extension to live here permanently, I decided to make another much larger area that had been used as a milking parlour my studio. It was a pretty good space, 30 feet by 30 feet. And after a great deal of work I got it finished and it was a wonderful space to work in, and also because of its scale it’s quite useful for showing work in from time to time, so I would every few years have studio showings. The ’70s was a very productive period, John was a very supportive presence, and I did a lot of large work.

Right: Mary Webb and John Hinde, 1986. Photo: Mary Webb; Opposite: Mary Webb’s studio, Suffolk, 2011. Photo: Andi Sapey

SB: I think what struck me when I first arrived here was the light, which obviously is very important to you, and the view that you have across the countryside is stunning. MW: I love that feeling of uninterrupted space outside through the windows. One isn’t really aware of other buildings, you’re just aware of landscape, and that informs my work I’m sure, because that’s what I am always trying to do, to define space. SB: Like you say, that obviously does inform your practice in a way that allows you to just be with the landscape. It’s just right there on your doorstep isn’t it? MW: Yes, and it’s always changing. Every day I’m out in it with the dogs. And in the studio there is always a different picture through the windows. And also having one wall that is incredibly high does allow me to work on quite a large scale.

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Early memories and influences SB: I am interested in when you first began drawing or painting, and particularly when your fascination with colour began. MW: I started at a primary school at the end of the war where we did a lot of painting and drawing, and I got interested then. I suppose I always painted and I liked coloured papers. I remember making paper chains with the coloured papers they provided us with. I loved the colour. And at that time everything was a bit austere, there weren’t any magazines with coloured illustrations or photographs, or very few. There were magazines like Picture Post with its wonderful black and white photographs, Illustrated and John Bull. I had a friend who had a source of American comics, and I thought they were absolutely marvellous because of their slightly bleached colour. The other thing that I used to relish was before firework night one would slowly amass fireworks in a box, and I used to turn them over and enjoy the coloured papers they were wrapped in. A neighbour used to pass the National Geographic magazine through the fence.... That was something of a revelation, really the only brightly coloured photographic journal that one had access to, and I found the places fascinating that they’d photographed, as well as the actual colour reproductions. SB: At that age, had you travelled much? MW: My holidays were with my parents, and they took farm holidays. I think my first memory of that was at the age of eight going to a farm in Devon, where I was in absolute heaven because I was allowed to help with everything. I fell instantly in love with the countryside and was quite determined to be a farmer. We did go back there for several holidays, so that really initiated my love of the English countryside. That was the beginning really. SB: So you have an early love of the English landscape along with the images you’re seeing in the National Geographic, which must have seemed quite exotic and vibrant. It’s interesting to see how at quite a young age these influences are starting to take shape in a way that would inform your practice later on. MW: Yes, and the other thing I loved doing was going to the cinema, which was an absolute joy. One always hoped that the film was going to be in Technicolor, and then one sat looking at this incredible other world. And of course when it was about America it seemed so far away and exotic. I loved westerns for the landscape and the horses.

Above: Mary Webb in her studio, Suffolk, 1993. Photo: John Hinde; Opposite: Brancaster V, 1991, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm. Collection of the artist

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Travels and working methods SB: A significant number of [your] works relate to places to which you’ve travelled. I’m interested to hear how you translate the experience that you have when you’re travelling into the work that you then make back in your studio. MW: I like to call on the feelings I’ve had about a place over a period of time. Usually if I’ve been somewhere it’s made a fairly big impression because it’s very different from here. This landscape that I see out of the window and walk in every day is so much in my bloodstream; it’s so familiar that when I go somewhere different it’s a terrific visual shock. Frequently I’m trying to make sense of that difference, what I’ve seen and felt about a place over a period of time. It isn’t just what one felt at one moment, but the layers of feeling that accumulate over a period of reflection. One struggles to find the language, the vocabulary appropriate to that accumulation of thought and feeling. So I’m often doing things quite a bit after I’ve actually been somewhere. It’s about finding a language that’s appropriate to what one feels about something retrospectively. SB: So your language is in a way through the use of colour. MW: I find if I have photographs I’ve taken or things that impinge on my memory, if I make lots of coloured papers relating to them, that’s a good starting point. Then I can start to play with them and use them and organise them. I mean, I know the photograph isn’t going to be an accurate rendition of the colour, but I know that it’s going to jog me. And sometimes I quite like the fact that it’s at one remove from the original. SB: You’ve spoken [to me] before about the use of photographs being once removed from the actual place. I think it was your work that you did on the Isle of Manhattan, where actually that was an important part of the work, because that’s the way you’d always known of New York – through photographs. MW: I eventually came across postcards and photographs that I’d taken. That’s when I really first started making coloured papers related to photographs, and I thought this is possibly the way I ought to be going, because I’ve always known this place [Manhattan] through film and magazines and photographs. I’ve always known it at one remove. The reason why I called it the Circle Line series was because I did a trip on a ferry that goes around the whole of Manhattan called the Circle Line, and it’s wonderful because it goes past all these buildings and they slide past like a huge collage. They’re made of the most beautiful, sometimes reflective, materials, and I think that really is what kick-started the collages. I wanted to do something about that.

Top and bottom right: New York, 1980. Photos: Mary Webb; Opposite: Circle Line Series: The Isle of Manhattan 18, 1984, collage, 30.5 x 30.5 cm. Collection of the artist

Working in series, the square and music SB: A lot of your work is in series. Could you talk a bit about what you are hoping to achieve by working in series, and why the square format is important to you. MW: I always feel I can’t say enough in one piece about something that’s really made a big impression on me so I keep on thinking, ‘What would happen if I did this or that?’ Each one prompts another possibility, so they usually run their course. And I use the square format because I want the colours to set up the diagonal movements. I don’t want any kind of implication of a horizontal movement, which might be given if I used a rectangular canvas. SB: I know that you’re very aware of not having any one part of your work stand out more than the other. That must be quite hard to achieve. MW: It’s very difficult sometimes. There are a lot of things I want to avoid. I’m always trying to get a sort of uniformity of surface, so that you do keep looking and as you look more things reveal themselves to you. It’s a kind of slow motion going round the canvas. SB: Could you tell me whether you are influenced by music, because you talk about movement within your work. MW: Not actual music, although I like all sorts of music. But I did go to a master-class at Snape given by Ann Murray. It was during the Handel season and she had six students from the Royal College of Music, and they each sang an aria and she helped them to get the best out of themselves and the music. It was absolutely fascinating because she was talking about intervals and pauses, where to put the emphasis, and I thought, ‘I can relate to this.’ This is very much what I’m trying to do in the painting, so I do quite enjoy hearing musicians discussing what they’re trying to do.

Opposite: Spring Colour Study 5, 1991, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm. Collection of the artist; Top right: Spring Colour Study 6, 1991, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm. Collection of the artist; Bottom right; Spring Colour Study 1, 1991, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm. Collection of the artist

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Sainsbury Centre exhibition

Current and future work

SB: Let’s talk a bit about your exhibition, Journeys in Colour, at the Sainsbury Centre.

SB: I’m looking at your current work on the studio wall, which is based on your trip to Utah last year. Could you talk a bit about the work?

MW: It was 2008 and Amanda Geitner [head of collections and exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre] contacted me. She’d seen my work in the [University of East Anglia] collection and was wondering whether I would do a poster to commemorate 40 years of the collection, and that’s how we met. She came to the studio and she liked the work and subsequently suggested that I might like to have a show at the Sainsbury Centre, which was a wonderful opportunity to see all the work together. And so she and I have worked together on this, meeting regularly and going through the work, and she has been incredibly supportive and enthusiastic.

MW: I always wanted to go and see that red-rock landscape that I’d seen in westerns and imagined from reading the novels of Zane Grey, and three years ago I actually went to Arizona and stayed on a ranch near the Mexican border. I rode out every day, and just seeing the vastness of the landscape was awe-inspiring. I have a friend who knows the area around Kanab in Utah, which was used for making westerns, and she offered to go with me and act as a guide. So we went last year and based ourselves in Kanab. I went off on a four-day tour to see the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion and Lake Powell, and it really was amazing, so outside one’s experience, the colour and the scale of it. But the overriding feeling I had when I was there was that I was confronted with edifices. I was looking at these stunning rock formations and range of colours that exist in the rock. And also because there’d been this huge seismic shift in the landscape millions of years ago. It’s like a staircase – the Grand Staircase, Escalante – so when I was thinking about how am I going to make work about this place, I thought I must start using a grid which implied a staircase.

SB: I know that it was Amanda and yourself who actually made the selection of work. How did you know which works to choose? MW: We worked together, we had a lot of photographs. I have two big albums of photographs of all the work, and we just went through them and sometimes got work out, and so it was a sort of joint decision. Sometimes she wanted things in that I perhaps wouldn’t have had in, and other times I was fairly insistent that I had things in that perhaps she wasn’t as keen on as I was. On the whole we were in agreement generally about what we would show.

SB: What are your plans for future work? Do you have an idea of what you would like to do next? MW: I’ve got a wide-ranging language which I’ve accumulated over the years, and I like the idea of mixing the vocabulary up and bringing things that are opposite together in one context. Pushing the vocabulary around, raiding different contexts to see what will happen. But not based on a place necessarily, but just working with colour and taking from the library of colours that I’ve built up from different places.

Left: Bryce Canyon, Utah, 2011. Photo: Mary Webb; Opposite: Mary Webb working on Utah II in her studio, Suffolk, 2011. Photo: Andi Sapey

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

Chronology 1939

Born in London

1979

Visits Provence

1958–63

Studies in Department of Fine Art, University of Newcastle, and gains BA (Hons) Fine Art

1980

Visits New York

1985, 1986

Visits Crete (Heraklion, Knossos, Phaistos)

1986, winter

Visits Moscow and St Petersburg

1987, spring

Visits Mycenaean sites in the Peloponnese

1987, winter

Second visit to Moscow and St Petersburg

1990

Retires from Norwich School of Art

1997

Travels in Portugal with an Eastern Arts award

2004

Travels in Italy with an Arts Council award

2007

Travels to Arizona

2010

Travels to Utah

Present

Lives and works in Suffolk

1961

Meets Sonia Delaunay in Paris while researching dissertation on Robert Delaunay

1962–63

Hatton Scholarship, University of Newcastle

1963

Postgraduate course, Chelsea School of Art, London

1964–66

Head of pre-diploma studies, Harrogate School of Art

1966–73

Part-time lecturer in painting, Norwich School of Art

1969

Starts to make silk-screen prints in collaboration with Mel Clark, master printer at Norwich School of Art

1970

Visits Corsica

1973–1990

Senior lecturer in painting, Norwich School of Art

Opposite: Utah I, 2011, oil on canvas, 180 x 180 cm. Collection of the artist

Mary Webb Journeys in Colour

List of exhibitions Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

2009

Paintings and Prints, Fermoy Art Gallery, King’s Lynn Art Centre, Norfolk

2009

Northern Print Biennale, Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle

2008

Studio show, Fressingfield, Suffolk

2008

East, King’s Lynn Art Centre, Norfolk

2007

Mary Webb, The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk

2008

1996

Paintings and Prints, Mace Ltd, Shoreditch, London

Constructed: 40 Years of the UEA Collection, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA

1996

Paintings and Prints, Fermoy Art Gallery, King’s Lynn Art Centre, Norfolk

2007

Mixed selected shows, New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, Surrey

1994

Celebrating 25 years of Printmaking 1969–1994 with Mel Clark, studio show

2007

Mixed selected shows, Elm Hill Contemporary Art, Norwich

1994

Recent Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours, Martha Stevns Gallery, Suffolk

2002

Five Abstract Printmakers, Flowers East, London

1990

Work from the Eighties, studio show, Fressingfield, Suffolk

1985

Templeton College, Oxford

1984

Staithe Gallery, Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk

1984

Paintings, Collage and Prints, The Showroom, Bethnal Green, London

1982

Gallery 49, Norwich

1979

Heffers Gallery, Cambridge

1977

Heffers Gallery, Cambridge

1976

Recent Paintings, studio show, Fressingfield, Suffolk

1971

Christ’s College, Cambridge

1971

Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Norwich School of Art Gallery

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London 2004, 2005, 2007 2000, 2001, 2002

Mixed selected shows, Elm Hill Contemporary Art, Norwich

1999, 2002

Art Futures, Contemporary Art Society Market, London

1998, 2000, 2002

Gallery of Modern Art, Barmouth Road, London

1997, 1998

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London

1995

Kettle’s Yard Open, Cambridge

1994, 1996

Flowers East Print Show, London

1992

Realism to Abstraction, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery

1992

From Geometry to Gesture, Figure Eight Gallery, London

1991

Selected by Tim Hilton for the Discerning Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

Public collections

1991

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London

Apax Partners

1989

Colour and Construction, Wingfield College, Suffolk

Archant

1986, 1990, 2000

Drawings for All, Gainsborough House, Sudbury, Suffolk

Bedfordshire Education Authority

1981

Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk

1974

John Moores Liverpool Exhibition

1974

Summer Show 2, Serpentine Gallery, London

1971

Proposition Pour un Jeune Collectionneur, Gallery Regency, Paris

Leicestershire Education Authority

1970

Northern Arts Association Print Exhibition, Middlesbrough

Lucy & Henry Cohen Charitable Foundation

1970

Salon International de la Femme, Nice, France

Norfolk Education Authority

1969, 1970

Galerie Varenne, Paris

Northern Arts Association

1969

Five Norwich Artists, University of East Anglia, Norwich

Paintings in Hospitals

Arts Council England Credit Suisse First Boston Deutsche Bank Ernst & Young Kettle’s Yard Collection Lincolnshire Arts Association

Smith & Nephew PLC Sonia Delaunay Collection, Paris St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington Suffolk Education Authority University of East Anglia University of Newcastle