Portrait | Kate McCalmont-Woods

Dora The Explorer was one of my daughter’s favourite TV programmes when she was a toddler. I don’t know how they did it, but Nickelodeon managed to give Dora the most irritatingly grating voice possible. Anyway, thankfully, this is not the Dora the Explorer who is the subject of this post.

I went to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester yesterday morning to have a look at the Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury exhibition. I had heard of her, and had a vague recollection of having seen some of her work.

Dora Carrington certainly was an explorer of sorts: associated with, but not a fully paid up member of, the Bloomsbury Group, she explored her art as well as her relationships and sexuality. To be honest, I couldn’t quite keep up with the complexity of it all. At the heart of it was her enduring love for the gay writer, Lytton Strachey, who was 13 years older than her and with whom she set up home. At one point they lived with Ralph Partridge who Carrington (whilst studying at the Slade, she dropped the name ‘Dora’ preferring to be known by her surname) married in order to keep their ‘triangular trinity of happiness’: Partridge was enamoured with Carrington, Strachey fancied Partridge, and they all had relationships with each other (apart from Carrington and Strachey whose relationship was only ever platonic) as well as others of the same or opposite sex. It seems all and sundry found themselves hopelessly in love with Carrington, not least the artist, Mark Gertler, with whom she had a moment, but otherwise whose long-lasting passion was unrequited.

Portrait of a Girl in a Blue Jersey (Carrington), 1912, Mark Gertler (image: http://www.emuseum.huntingdon.org)

Dora Carrington, 1917, by Lady Ottoline Morrell (image: http://www.wallpaper.com)

Alas, it all ended tragically in 1932 with Carrington shooting herself in the chest shortly after Strachey died. She was 38 years old.

The last exhibition of her work was 30 years ago at the Barbican. During her life she rarely exhibited, and her work, many pieces of which she destroyed, seems to have been overshadowed by her adventurous private life and tragic death. She has been described by a former director of the Tate as being’ the most neglected serious painter of her time’.

It was a mixed bag, but there were a few pieces which caught my interest. Her early drawings and paintings of nudes were very good, but I found myself lingering in front of these.

Larrau in the Snow, 1922

Perfect Christmas card material, I really like the simplicity of this painting; its muted colours and, in particular, the composition with its recurring curved shapes of the stone walls and the use of verticals in the posts and trees in the foreground, the large tree and the church with its spire punctuating the sky in the middle ground and the mountains in the background. The positioning of the trees leads the eye up through the painting in a zig zag pattern.

Farm at Watendlath, 1921

Again, I like the composition: the path leads across from left to right, up through the farmhouse along the rear stone wall to the large ominous trees, up to the huge hills in the background which seem to squeeze out the sky. The three areas of white – the figures in the foreground, the farmhouse (and what look like sheets on a washing line) in the middle ground and the clouds in the sky in the background – break up the large areas of green preventing them from becoming too overpowering, but leaving enough areas unbroken to give a sense of being overpowered: the tall trees and hills seem to be bearing down on the woman and child, creating a feeling of foreboding, and the stillness (if they are sheets on a line, they’re not moving at all) and claustrophobia created by the tiny sliver of sky adds to the mood.

It was suggested by the blurb accompanying this piece, that its unsettling atmosphere might have reflected the turmoil which Carrington was experiencing at the time: she had gone to Cumbria on holiday with Partridge and his friend, Gerald Brenan, and they had stayed at the farm. Whilst there, she began a relationship with Brenan.

Spanish Landscape with Mountains, 1924

I was drawn to the surreal nature of this painting. Carrington made it from memory, after visiting Brenan in Andalusia, where he lived. According to the blurb, she built up the colour by layers upon layers of glazing on top of what was already a vibrant underpainting. She painted it on a cold day in March, which may have been a contributing factor to her use of colour and the sense of heat and aridity which she manages to create. There are menacing looking succulents in the foreground and a few token olive trees just behind, and these, together with the slight greenish tone to the area in from of the background mountain range, cleverly break up the large areas of warm reds and yellows which form the undulating hills in the middle ground. There is the lovely detail of the figures on horseback moving towards the viewer along the ridge on the left hand side. It has an otherworldly quality to it: apparently Carrington felt transported to another world when she visited Spain.

Lytton Strachey, 1916

“He was everything to me. He never expected me to be anything different to what I was.” This was how Carrington described Strachey, and it is apparent in this portrait of him which she painted towards the beginning of their relationship which was to last 16 years, and which survived numerous relationships on both sides. It shows Strachey deep in concentration reading a book which he is holding in his delicately painted hands, which Carrington has strangely elongated. Maybe his hands were her favourite feature, because she captures them in a detailed way, down to the highlights on his nails, even their white tips, particularly on his little finger. Or maybe she used them as a compositional device to create a dynamic and bold vertical marking the final vertical third of the painting. The image wouldn’t have the same impact if his hands were sized more realistically, and the book he is holding didn’t go off the top of the panel.

Carrington had a fascination for Victorian ‘treacle’ paintings and from 1923 began making her own which were called tinsel paintings. They weren’t very large and involved making a painting on the reverse of a piece of glass using foil from sweet wrappers and cigarette packets together with inks and oil paint. She sold them through Fortnum & Mason as a way to earn an income in the winter months to finance her serious art making. She also made them for friends: the ones below were made for Augustus John’s wife, Dorelia. Very few of the tinsel paintings survived, and one of them sold 4 years ago for £57,000.

Spanish Woman

Lily

I’m strangely drawn to them as I’ve never seen anything like them before. They have a strange luminescent quality to them and I particularly like the textures in the sky in Lily – the combination of the resplendent lily in a barren landscape reminds me of Georgia O’Keefe.

Anyway, I’ve done some further research: Dora Carrington’s life was made the subject of a film in 1995 – ‘Carrington’ – starring Emma Thompson and some other notable actors. I watched it last night. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s a film about her, based on a book about him. I’m not sure that it managed to truly capture the complexities of her life and certainly only touched on her relationships with men, and not women. It was a tearjerker.

Whilst I was starting to write this post yesterday evening, I looked up and saw the most amazing sky through the kitchen window and had to go outside and take a photo of it. As usual, the image doesn’t really do it justice.

It was a colourful day yesterday.

It started with a bracing dog walk, first thing. It was the best start to the day.

Then a train ride to London to visit the Michael Craig-Martin exhibition at the Royal Academy before it closes in a little over a week. I have to say that going into a gallery has the same effect on me as going into a church – a sense of wonderment and contemplation comes over me: people even speak in hushed tones.

It was joyously colourful, but for me, that was just about it. I was left wondering to myself, if it wasn’t for the painted walls and the sheer scale of some of the works, would they still have been so impactful? If they had been A3 in size and hanging on a bare white wall, would I still have experienced chromatic overload? I used to be attracted to the graphic simplicity of his work, elevating everyday objects to something out of the ordinary, but I’m sad to say that I don’t think it does it for me anymore. I’ve changed. If anything, I was more intrigued by his earlier conceptual work.

The Oak Tree (1974) is a small glass filled with water to a specific level and mounted on a wall at a specific height of 253cm. It is accompanied by the text of a conversation in which Craig-Martin explains how he has changed the glass of water into an oak tree without changing the physical form of the glass – I don’t know whether it was meant to be amusing, but I certainly had a titter. In a short film for the RA, which I watched when I got back home, he explains that he was trying to find something that constituted the essence of art, in that art is based on the notion of transformation, and the most extreme proposition for transformation would be to have no transformation at all. Others have alluded to his Catholic upbringing and have suggested that it is to do with transubstantiation. I also read that it was seized by Australian customs officials on its way to an exhibition in the 1970s on the basis that it was illegal to import plants into Australia!

I was particularly drawn to ‘Conviction’, a series of mirrors on paper, as it directly relates to what I’m planning to explore.

’On The Shelf’ comprises 15 milk bottles positioned at a precarious angle on a shelf, but the varying levels of water create a level horizon. The four buckets on the table are actually supporting the table, rather than the other way round. Finally, ‘Box that never closes’ questions what makes a work of art: the box has lost all functionality, and does not even form something that is aesthetically pleasing.

I went into the shop but didn’t buy anything: instead I had a look at the wall which supports teaching art in schools. I put a post-it note up following on from our session a couple of weeks ago: ‘creativity will save the planet’, but I forgot to take a photo.

I was then going to nip into the National Gallery but the queue was half way down the street – probably caused by the extra security and bag searches. So I went round the corner to the National Portrait Gallery which I haven’t been in since its refurb.

I was pleased to see the portrait of zoologist and conservationist, Dame Jane Goodall, by Wendy Barrett, the winner of Sky’s PAOTY 2023. Compared to the photograph taken by Ken Regan, it gives the viewer so much more. I thought it was tremendous, and full of intelligence, sensitivity and humanity.

Lucian Freud’s letter to his grandparents, thanking them for the money they gave him, which he was going to use to buy a book of fairytales, reminded me of Miró with its coloured shapes and black lines. It took me back to a hot day in Sóller over the summer when we found relief from the sun in the train station, which happened to be exhibiting various ceramics by Picasso and works by Miró – can’t see that happening at Waterloo Station anytime soon. Freud’s self-portrait is a favourite: the way he applies paint and his minimal brushstrokes are lush.

Bearing in mind my latest experiments using a pen, I was fascinated by the mark-making in Eileen Agar’s drawing of the modernist architect, Ernö Goldfinger. Hockney’s portrait of Sir David Webster with Tulips is stunning: I was a bit perturbed by the size of his head at first, and the fact that the sole of his left shoe seems to be coming away, but I think I’m ok with it now. In any event, it’s all eclipsed by the beautiful rendering of the table and tulips, and the fact that the jacket hanging over the arm of the chair makes him look like he’s levitating.

Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony was moving: a collection of 18 large scale portraits of individuals who have all experienced loss in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, although it is also more generally about everyone who is left behind after conflict. They are impartial: there is no reference to the sitters’ religion or politics. What is striking is that none of the sitters are looking directly out of the canvas; they look off to the side as though deep in thought, as if they are remembering. There is a real sense of loss and pain, and contemplation – it is etched onto their faces, quite literally in some areas. They are painted in thick paint which seems to be weighing them down. But it’s all about the eyes. They are painted with a much more careful and detailed application of thinner paint. They almost look haunted.

And then I walked back to Waterloo Station, over the bridge, with Ray Davies crooning in my ear, although, let’s face it, his voice isn’t what it is used to be. All in all, apart from my break-up with Michael, a good day.