Sir Stanley Spencer Archives | Carol L. Douglas

February 14, 2019

Reflections of a recovering coffee addict

Love may be an addiction, but it’s at the heart of everything we do. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Birthday, 1915, Marc Chagall, courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Yesterday I quit drinking coffee. This wasn’t my choice; it was on the advice of my medical professional. He’s loads of fun; this regimen also precludes alcohol, sugar, wheat and dairy. None of those other things caused me a moment’s trouble, but the coffee? I’ve been drinking it since I was nine years old. I like the taste, the smell, the buzz. Coffee is a very mild stimulant, I thought, and dropping it out of my diet should be no big deal.

Wrong. I have withdrawal symptoms in spades: headache, tremors, and the need to sleep forever. I looked out at the snow piling up in the driveway, said a bleary “fuggetaboutit” and cancelled my appointment for the afternoon.

Two Lovers Beneath an Umbrella in the Snow, color woodblock print, c. 1767, Suzuki Harunobu, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Clearly, coffee is a much bigger player in my biochemistry than I thought. It’s clearly a physical addiction, but it’s one I’ve never paid attention to. That got me wondering what other habits are running in the background, messing with the fine-tuning of my operating system.

When I’m on the road, I can be outside in the field painting by the time the sun clears the trees. My blog is written, I’m showered, my lunch—such as it is—is made, and my gear is set up. Why, then, does it take me until late morning to get into my studio at home? I’m not lazy; in fact, I’m pretty darned disciplined.

The Cradle, 1872, Berthe Morisot, courtesy Musée d’Orsay

It’s this infernal machine I’m holding in my hands. Much of what it shoots at me is chaff, but some things are important. Is there a way to quit my computer like I quit coffee? I don’t think so.

“Back when I first decided to become a painter, of my ‘art’ time, I spent 80% of it painting and 20% on marketing. Now, a couple of decades later, I spend 20% on painting and 80% on marketing,” lamented Michael Chesley Johnsonyesterday. I feel his pain.

That’s not all I do on this machine. I use my computer to ‘talk’ to my friends, read the news, and keep in contact with my adult kids and grandkids. But those are things I enjoy. Relationship is programmed into our minds; our systems rise to it like fish to a lure.

On the other hand, that’s what I said about coffee.

The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924–7, Sir Stanley Spencer, courtesy the Tate

Next week, I’m going to gum up my productivity still farther, by having my grandchildren here for the week. We’ll go see if Little Bear is still sleeping, take a twirl or two on our skates, and visit the beach. All painting will be with tempera on a very short easel.

Love may be an addiction, but it’s the heart of living. Happy Valentine’s Day!

November 9, 2018

We called them heroes

It’s the 100^thanniversary of Armistice Day and the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend.

Olympic with Returned Soldiers, 1919, Arthur Lismer, courtesy Canadian War Museum

I knew a World War I veteran. George Vanderhoek was elderly when I met him in 1980; he was a gentle, fatherly influence when I was in my first ‘grown up’ job. I feel now as if my memories of him reach into the mists of time. It saddens me.

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. This was the end of the “The War That Will End War,” as H.G. Wells mistakenly called it. Ironically, tonight is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, showing just how vain a hope peace can be.

Study for Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi, 1918, David Bomberg, courtesy Imperial War Museum

There have been some horrible times to be alive in human history. The period from 1918 to 1948 ranks among the worst for Europeans and Russians. It was an age of massive dislocation, death, war, and genocide. Asia eventually followed Europe’s lead in the next generation, with Mao Zedong and Pol Pot killing off their countrymen. In the modern era we’ve witnessed repeated African genocides. It’s enough to make you weep.

Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron, 1918, Alfred Munnings, courtesy Canadian War Museum

Can I draw any conclusions from this seemingly endless wave of terror? None other than that humans, in an unredeemed state, are capable of unimaginable cruelty. That knowledge is always tempered with the understanding that, at the same time, there are people of great compassion who intervene even when the fight isn’t their own. We called them heroes back then.

The Resurrection of the Soldiers, 1927–1932, Sir Stanley Spencer, courtesy Sandham Memorial Chapel

We entered the Great War late, because it wasn’t our fight. The Commonwealth countries, tied to Great Britain, were in it from the beginning. But in either case, soldiers were volunteering to fix a problem that had nothing to do with them or their country.

Prudence Heward, of whom I wrote this week, was one of many artists who dropped their brushes and went to the aid of Britain. A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris and Fred Varley came from Canada; Arthur Streeton from Australia. Of course, many British artists served as well, including Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Alfred Munnings. And American poet Joyce Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne.

Mount St Quentin, 1918, Arthur Streeton, courtesy Melbourne Museum

Some of these artists were attached as war illustrators (as Winslow Homer had done in our own Civil War). Some just picked up a musket and joined up. Their calling in art was subservient to their calling as human beings.

WW1 was the last of a particularly heinous kind of war, the kind where rulers used their citizenry in an elaborate game of chess. It was replaced by something worse. “After the ‘war to end war’, they seem to have been in Paris at making the ‘Peace to end Peace’,” wrote British staff officer Archibald Wavell in a sadly prescient comment.

Houses of Ypres, 1917, A. Y. Jackson, courtesy Canadian War Museum

Years ago, my Australian cousin Mary taught me to make Anzac biscuits. These cookies were made for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during the Great War, because they would survive the long journey around the globe. I could spend this centenary of Armistice Day thinking futile thoughts, or I can bake a batch of Anzacs and remember the heroism of men and women from around the globe. That, after all, is the second great lesson of the twentieth century.

December 29, 2017

Realism: the forgotten stepchild of the early 20th century

When abstract art became a worldwide phenomenon, great realist painters were marginalized and forgotten.

Hiking, 1936, James Walker Tucker, Laing Art Gallery

In the great pile of mail I collected yesterday were two packages. One contained a copy of Pictures, Painters and You by Ray Bethers. This belonged to the father of a friend.

The other was a catalog for True to Life: British Realist Paintings in the 1920s and 1930s. I’ve written about two of its artists before: Sir Stanley Spencer and Meredith Frampton.

Realism was a world-wide trend in the beginning of the 20th century. There were realists among the American Modernist movement—the Ashcan School, Georgia O’Keeffe and Rockwell Kent all come to mind. In Canada, the Group of Sevenwere turning out powerful, popular landscapes. And in Britain, a generation of fine painters were producing a lively, detailed record of the interwar period.

Dorette, 1932, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, courtesy National Gallery, London

The term “realism” is a wide net. It can include symbolism, magical realism, social realism, objects pared down to their absolute minimum, or the finicky detail of trompe-l’œil. All found their expression during the interwar years, but each nation had its own preoccupations.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst’s Dorette was a young model at the Royal Academy who went on to be his lover and ultimately his wife. With her portrait, Brockhurst was developing a style he would use with great success later in his career: adapting Renaissance technique to depict the hard-edged beauty of contemporary womanhood. Note the wispy background.

In fact, the British interwar artists were refuting trends in modern art. Their work runs a gamut of styles, but is united by careful drawing, meticulous craftsmanship, and controlled brushwork. They explicitly rejected expressionism and impressionism.

Elsie, 1929, Hilda Carline, courtesy Tate Museum

The show includes work by Hilda Carline, Stanley Spencer’s long-suffering wife. Her marriage was characterized by Alfred Hickling as “the most bizarre domestic soap opera in the history of British art.” That just understates her suffering. Elsie was the Spencers’ maid. Carline’s portrait of her shows just how much of her own talent was subsumed into her husband’s naïve drama.

The Conscientious Objector, 1917, is almost certainly a self-portrait by David Jagger. A hundred years on, we have little concept of the opprobrium heaped on “conchies” in Britain during the Great War; Jagger’s own brother referred to him as “that great hulking lout in his mother’s shop.”

The Conscientious Objector, 1917, David Jagger, courtesy Birmingham Mail

The paintings do not ignore the tensions of interwar Britain. James McIntosh Patrick’s A City Garden, Dundee is a portrait of his own home, purchased for a song because of its proximity to the Tay Bridge, which might be a bombing target. His wife and daughter are in the garden, hanging out washing. Meanwhile, in the corner there’s an air-raid shelter being built. This was a British reality, and it is one we Americans can only ponder from the outside.

A City Garden, 1940, James McIntosh Patrick, courtesy Dundee City Council

Still, it is the pictures of everyday life that I like best. Hiking, by James Walker Tucker, shows three independent, fresh-faced Girl Guides calmly considering their immediate plans. It’s part of the British mania for rambling and a lovely, un-self-conscious feminist statement at the same time.

With the second World War, abstract art escaped from New York and became a worldwide phenomenon. On both continents, great realist painters were marginalized and forgotten. It’s a pity, because so many of them were stunning virtuosos.

There will be no Monday Morning Art School on New Year’s Day. Have a blessed, restful, refreshing holiday, and I’ll see you again in the New Year!

January 17, 2017

Is love really too much to ask?

Sir Stanley Spencer did not paint violence often, but when he did, as in “Crucifixion,” he focused on our response to it.

Stanley Spencer didn’t paint violence often, but when he did, as in “Crucifixion,” he focused on our response.

Years ago I belonged to an anti-polygamy activist group. I broke with them when they published a photo of a suspected child molester sleeping with his infant granddaughter on his chest. Yank the troll’s chain all you want, I said, but keep the children out of it.

My friend’s nephew is going to be sentenced for a high-profile crime on Friday. Yesterday his picture was published on a racist website, with frequent bandying of the n-word. He’s an adult and can take it, but they also published photos of his two little boys. Their only offense was the color of their skin.

I sent the link to my programmer husband in the hope that he could identify the host. My husband overcame his revulsion and looked long enough to tell me that there wasn’t an open-or-shut identity. “There is some obfuscation employed,” he said.

Spencer’s “Christ Carrying the Cross,” 1920, is an image of bystanders ogling violence. It’s a very real response that spans history.

Spencer’s “Christ Carrying the Cross,” 1920, is an image of bystanders enjoying someone else’s misfortune.

Beyond that, all I can do is to pray that God strikes the server with lightning and counsel my friends to ignore it. That’s easier said than done, I realize.

I am blessed with many friends. They are, on the whole, civilized people. “I hate that guy” is empty verbiage to us. I’m always shocked when I hear about real hateful behavior. And yet, if you believe our crime statistics, it’s not only all around us, but it’s increasing.

This week’s incident is race-based, but it isn’t always. Several years ago, my friend’s son was arrested for second-degree murder. The lad was (rightfully) acquitted, but that didn’t stop him from receiving death threats. His family—innocent in every respect—had to sell their home and moved to a different town.

“Knowing (the Beatitudes of Love),” Stanley Spencer

In some cases, the dangerous places we live are physical. In others, violence is a mental climate, fed in part by media and the internet. It’s a pity that these have become vectors for lies and hatred, because they have been a boon in so many ways.

The people who published those little boys’ picture obfuscated their service provider because they have been reported before. They know what they’re doing is wrong. My friend would like them to creep back under the rock from which they crawled, but to me that is only a short-term solution. They’ll just crawl back out somewhere else.

None of this can be blamed on the election or any other outside force. People choose to hate, just as they can choose to love.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said.

Sir Stanley Spencer was a true naïf whose innocence was much abused. And yet his reactions to love and violence were very much along the lines of those suggested by Jesus. It’s why he is one of my favorite painters.

“Gardening,” Stanley Spencer

“I love them from within outwards and whatever that outward appearance may be it is an exquisite reminder of what is loved within, no matter what that exterior appearance may be,” Spencer said.

Is love really too much to ask?

December 19, 2013

Six Days of Advent: The Mystical Nativity

The Nativity, 1912, Sir Stanley Spencer. Joseph is off to the right, doing something to the chestnut tree.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Raphael, Rubens, Tiepolo, Correggio, and the other great painters who’ve painted exquisite Nativities. But there is something arresting about the mystical nativity, where reality is somehow subsumed in spiritual fervor.

Sir Stanley Spencer painted the Nativity, top, as a student at Slade in 1912. He later explained:

The couple occupy the centre of the picture, Joseph who is to the extreme right doing something to the chestnut tree and Mary who stands by the manger… Joseph is only related to Mary in this picture by some sacramental ordinance… This relationship has always interested me and in those early works I contemplated a lot of those unbearable relationships between men and women.

The embracing couple represents physical love in contrast to Mary and Joseph’s spiritual connection. That goes with Spencer’s amazingly messed-up attitudes toward women and sex. Spencer’s strict separation between the spiritual and the physical is the neo-Platonic trap into which many of the mystic painters fall. The whole point of the Incarnation is that God becomes man, sharing our joys, sorrows, and, yes, the messy realities of our births and deaths.

Nativity, 1310, Giotto. Joseph seems to be sleeping.

Giotto is generally considered the first Renaissance painter, but he was firmly in touch with his medieval self. That gave him a leg up for mysticism. The pre-Renaissance world was able to see in a non-literal way that is almost completely lost to us. This allows the infant John the Baptist to sit at the bottom of the frame while Jesus is being born, and the almost-disembodied angels that arch across the top of the painting like a Byzantine architrave.

The Nativity, 1492, Domenico Ghirlandaio. You have to zoom in to see her laser-beam prayer. What is it with poor Joseph? Asleep again.

Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Virgin Mary sending laser beams of prayer down to the infant Jesus while a heavenly choir sings above. The columns and one-point perspective point us that much farther along the Renaissance. All that gold leaf you’re seeing in the Italian paintings of this time is supposed to remind you of the untarnished nature of the story.

The Mystical Nativity, 1500-01, Sandro Botticelli. Believe it or not, Joseph is sleeping.

Sandro Botticelli described the Nativity as the moment when heaven and earth touch. He was painting at the apogee of the Italian Renaissance, which accounts for the more concrete nature of his visionary angels—he couldn’t throttle back on the realism like Giotto or Ghirlandaio . In his later years, Botticelli fell under the influence of a fanatical Florentine preacher, Savonarola. There is something almost manic in the earthly action in this painting that points to the spiritual oppression of the time.

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, 1434-36, Jan van Eyck. Joseph doesn’t even show up for this one.

By the fifteenth century, the idea of the Virgin Mary as intercessor for the sinful had gained traction. Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna with Canon van der Paele shows the donor beseeching the Virgin Mary and Sts. Donatian and George. The intense realism and the fine architectural drawing contrast with the unreality of these four figures sharing a common space.

The Nativity, c. 1810, William Blake. At least Joseph is actually present.

William Blake painted the above panel, on copper, concurrently with his Europe, a Prophecy, from which comes his wonderful Ancient of Days painting. At about the same time, he also painted a series of watercolors illustrating Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:

It was the winter wild,
While the Heav’n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies…

But Blake, as usual, strayed off into his neo-Platonic world-view. Here the soul of Jesus leaps fully formed toward the soul of John the Baptist. No encumbrances such as the messy reality of childbirth or our imprisonment in our fleshly bodies gets in the way.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

November 11, 2013

Love, death and remembrance

The Resurrection of the Soldiers, 1929, Sir Stanley Spencer (Sandham Memorial Chapel)

How Sir Stanley Spencer’s gentle, ascetic, visionary soul endured the infantry experience beggars one’s imagination. “When I left the Slade and went back to Cookham, I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My ideas were beginning to unfold in fine order when along comes the war and smashes everything,” he wrote. “The war changed me. I no longer have that assurance and feeling of security I had before.”

Tea at the Hospital Ward, 1932, Sir Stanley Spencer (Sandham Memorial Chapel)

Sandham Memorial Chapel was designed by Lionel Pearson and painted by Spencer as a memorial to Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham and the “forgotten dead” of the First World War. (It is now run by the National Trust.)

Spencer’s paintings were inspired by his own wartime experiences. He served as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Bristol and then in Macedonia, where he was subsequently transferred to the infantry.

Dug-Out (Stand To), 1929, Sir Stanley Spencer (Sandham Memorial Chapel)

The Sandham paintings were commissioned in 1923 and completed in 1932. They are dominated by a Resurrection in which there is no Last Judgment. In it, ordinary foot soldiers and horses return cautiously, confusedly to life, as if the horror of battle were merely a play or a bad dream—rather as the veterans of the Great War returned to their everyday lives. The details of Spencer’s imagined eternity are as homely and real as those painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 400 years earlier. The divine is in the ordinary, as it is in Spencer’s great masterwork, The Resurrection, Cookham, which he painted concurrently with the Sandham paintings.

Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, Sir Stanley Spencer (Imperial War Museum)

In both the Sandham works and his other war art, Spencer concentrated on the soldier’s everyday experiences, pointedly eschewing any sense of grandeur. R. H. Wilenski is widely quoted as saying that “every one of the thousand memories recorded had been driven into the artist’s consciousness like a sharp-pointed nail.” But these are the nails of the Cross, the nails of a transformative suffering, not the nails of mere human experience.

The chapel is closed right now for renovation, so it will not be holding its annual Remembrance Day service this year.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

April 26, 2013

Fool for love

Stanley Spencer, Self portrait with Patricia Preece(Fitzwilliam Museum, London), 1936

I would hate to have anyone thing that only women are hoisted on the petard of sexuality. Today, I am writing about the loveliest—and perhaps the strangest—of 20^th century painters, Sir Stanley Spencer.

Spencer has three distinct bodies of work. They are so unlike each other that the uninitiated would be forgiven for not realizing they’re by the same artist. First are his religious paintings, to which I will return later, but which range from the austere beauty of the Sandham Memorial Chapel to the Botero-like figures of his Biblical narratives (except, of course, that he was doing these figures before Botero was born). Second are his landscapes, which are perfectly drafted, intimate views of the English countryside. But today I want to talk about his destructive obsession with the artist Patricia Preece.

By 1925, when Spencer married fellow artist Hilda Carline, he was already a respected British painter. The couple had two daughters, Shirin and Unity and by all appearances seemed happily married. In 1929, Spencer met Preece, and became infatuated with her. Divorced by his wife in 1937, he married Preece a week later. Preece continued to live with her partner, Dorothy Hepworth.

While she frequently posed nude for her Spencer, the marriage was unconsummated. Despite this, Spencer signed his house over to Preece.

Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece by Stanley Spencer, 1935. Is it obsession, loathing, or what?

Spencer remained, in his way, devoted to his ex-wife, Hilda Carline, visiting her during her mental breakdown and writing her letters after her death from cancer in 1950.

I’ve never decided what was driving him in this relationship. Was it obsession, loathing, self-loathing, or what? Regardless, the paintings themselves are brutally honest, and brilliant in that honesty.

Have a wonderful weekend. I promise to get off the subject of figure painting before next week.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in joining us for a fantastic time in mid-Coast Maine this summer, check here for more information.