Author: Robjn Cantus

Thelma Annette Carstensen was born 6th September 1906, born to Norwegian parents in Edmonton, North London. Her father Anders Carsttensen (1876 – 1940) was a Norwegian timber agent in Great Winchester Street, London. Her mother was Olga Alice Carstensen nee Olsen (1878 – 1955). 

Thelma was educated at Crouch End High School and Hornsey School of Art under John Charles Moody. She was admitted to the Slade School of Art studying under Randolph Schwabe. In 1933 she won the Slade Figure Painting Prize. She married Alastair Phillips but continued to use her maiden name to paint.

She Exhibited at the Royal Academy many times in: 1931, 1937, 1939, 1952, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1964, 1966, 1967. She was also a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. In 1957 she exhibited at Walker’s Art Gallery, Bond Street with Valerie Thornton 27th March – 16th April, 1957. Other exhibitions can be traced to the Goupil Gallery, London. She was also a member and exhibitor at the Women’s International Art Club.

In 1939 is living in 2 Gurney Drive, Hampstead Garden Suburb. In 1990 was living at 8 Monks Mead, Brightwell, Wallingford, Oxford where she died in 1992. Her work is in the collection of UCL Art Museum. 

Thelma Carstensen showed drawings and gouaches of places as far apart as Norway and Tuscany. 

Rather more naturalistic, but equally successful at extracting design from landscape, is Miss Thelma Carstensen, whose work is also to be seen at Walker’s Galleries. She is a plein-airiste, and a sense of immediacy is evident in the restless rhythms of her vegetation. A passionate admirer of Samuel Palmer, she shares his feeling for forms that curve and undulate, and although she does not disdain the starker wintry aspect of nature she somehow always manages to convey the sense of sap rising and roots stirring. 

† Studio International, Volume 157, 1959 p189
‡ The Tablet – Volumes 209-210, 1957 p352 
The Year’s Art, 1940 p309
‘By The Observer’ – Hendon & Finchley Times – Friday 05 May 1939 p20

In one of these collages by John Piper is a tiny little scrap of paper in the bottom left building. It’s a piece of Edward Bawden’s Curwen patterned paper.

Piper used all sorts of bits of paper in these works, there is a piece of musical score right in the middle of the hill with some shading. The clouds are made of blotting paper.

Shortly after Mark Rothko’s tragic death in 1970, the art writer, lecturer and broadcaster Bryan Robertson gathered together artists who had known Rothko and held him in high regard, proposing that something should be done to honour his life and work.

As a result the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust was established in 1973 to raise money to enable artists working in the UK to travel to the US. The portfolio contains thirteen prints by thirteen artists: Patrick Caulfield, Merlyn Evans, Adrian Heath, Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, John Hubbard, Paul Huxley, Allen Jones, Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, Bridget Riley, William Scott and Richard Smith.

It is always interesting to me to see how people interpret an artists work, so this portfolio of prints is a wonderful resource and moment in time.

All these prints are nice enough but then it comes to the contribution from Allen Jones, what the hell is it? The colours are of a Rothko painting but I can not imagine who would want this on their wall.

This Sunday I will be selling some pictures and studio pottery at the Newmarket Antiques Fair at the Rowley Mile Racecourse Newmarket. September 8th. 8AM to 4PM.

On September 11th I shall be giving a talk on Edward Bawden and my book Looking at Life in an English Village. The event will take place in Cambridge at the David Parr House Study Centre on Gwydir Street.

For more information please see their website here.

I thought it would be interesting to look at a set of studies at different stages to make up the Mill in Essex Contemporary Lithographs print by John Aldridge in 1938,

Below is another view of the mill painted in Oil by Aldridge as a plein air sketch.

Here is also another study of the mill with the same trees in the print. It might even have a swimming in the ground, or just some mud banks. I find the abstraction of the lithograph to be so controlled and the balance of colours is so charming.

Jean Marchand was born in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1902 through 1906. He had supported his artistic ambitions by designing fabrics and jewellery as well as opera sets and book illustrations.

Marchand had met Roger Fry in Paris. Fry had an active social life in the Parisian artistic sets through the friends he made there like Picasso and Andre Derain, the latter who with his wife Alice held court in the cafes with a group of artists known as la bande a Derain; These included George Braques, Andrew Salmon, Joan Oberle along with Jean Marchand, Moise Kisling and Louise Marcoussis.

Marchand’s style was plain air and naturalistic in the post-impressionistic circle of Cezanne. In Paris he came to the attention of Roger Fry who invited him to submit work to Fry’s now famous 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism  and the Second show in 1912. He later had an exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in 1915.

Fry intended to show the ways in which impressionism had expanded from its French origins and taken root in other countries, specifically Russia and England. In the second exhibition, the French works of art by Cézanne, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Marchand, and others that Ottoline, Desmond, and Duncan had helped Roger select in Paris were juxtaposed with Russian and English paintings. The Russian paintings were chosen by the mosaicist Boris Anrep, husband of Helen.

Mary Ann Caws – Bloomsbury and France

From his exhibitions in London Marchand became respected by a series of artists, including Frances Hodgkins, St. John and Mary Hutchinson, Hilton Young, and Percy Moore Turner and the members of the Camden Group who invited him as a guest exhibitor.

In Paris Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell got to know Marchand too, buying his pictures that still hang in Charleston Farmhouse today and visiting Jean and his wife in Cagnes. Later Quentin Bell would study under Marchand at the Academie Moderne in Paris in 1928. Jacques and Gwen Ravarat hosted Marchand at their home in Vence in 1924 where Roger Fry would visit and paint alongside him. Marchand stayed with the Ravarats supporting Gwen when Jacques died.

Jacques died in the early hours of 6 March 1925. It was a Friday morning. Gwen rested a little, then broke the news to the children when they woke, Marchand stayed all day and by degrees made Gwen feel sane again. … Markhand together with the town Mayor, as was then the custom, signed the death certificate.

Frances Spalding – Gwen Raverat

Roger Fry and Clive Bells respect for his work also bought him to the attention of Samuel Courthauld who bought and collectors like Frank Hindley Smith, the mill owner who left a painting to the Tate, and prints and drawings to the British Museum.

Marchand was renowned for his still lifes, but his “tight modelling” impressed Duncan, and Roger liked him for his simple and serious character.

Mary Ann Caws – Bloomsbury and France

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His work is represented by the Crane Kalman Gallery who also held his memorial exhibition in 1967.

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Also, if you want drawings etc. an art representative. Lewis, Wadsworth, John, Roberts, Sickert ought to be glad to have their drawings used. There are of course important people in Paris too: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Marchand etc.- T S Eliot to Scofield Thayeron artists to feature in Dial.

Letters of T. S. Eliot

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Recently a series of wood engraving blocks by Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood, John O’Connor and John Nash turned up on eBay. This was a bit of a sensation as most of the blocks are in museums or with the family estate, so how did so many blocks end up for sale in one go?

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Many of these blocks were created during the 1920s and 30s. Some were used in the Fleuron Press series The Woodcut, an Annual printed by the Curwen Press. (The image below was the frontispiece for the limited edition copy of the II volume) and others where in books the Curwen Press printed.

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The most curious thing about the Ravilious blocks was how quickly they disappeared from the eBay. The family had reported them as Stolen / Missing some time ago, when it appears that the blocks where given to a publisher and not returned. Ella Ravilious (Eric’s Grand-daughter) got in contact with the seller and they returned them to the family.

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This leaves an interesting question for the provenances and ownership of the other blocks. John Nash’s estate was run by Ronald Blythe, and I don’t know who is in charge of it now. John O’Connor’s estate was with his wife, but it is unclear who is in charge of that now too. Joc’s artistic estate was being managed by the Rocket Gallery but I also think that is no longer the case.

Because these woodblocks where not returned after the production they were loaned for, the ownership of them is in limbo. Technically they should have been returned to the estate and there might be the demand back from the family or estates still.

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The other problem with the blocks is that where sold belonging to John Nash and John O’Connor is that these estates are still under copywrite. So even if you own the block, it doesn’t mean you have the right to make reprints without the estates permission.

The three John Nash blocks were of Sheep, Spurge Laurel (from his book Poisonous Plants) and A Rustic Seat Beneath a Tree Canopy.

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Julia Ball is a name known to most interested in art in Cambridge. Her home off Newmarket road has been the site of various Open Studios over the years. The scheme was started by a group of artists in the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors. Over the years a series of potters and other local painters turned it into the Cambridge Open studios, Julia being one of these.

Ball was born in Devon in 1930, and studied at the School of Art at Reading University where she studied printmaking. A lot of her early career was in printmaking and illustration. She then moved to Cambridge, teaching at the school of art and then became an examiner in the 1970s working with Warwick Hutton marking work. There were a large amount of prints made during the 1960s, of abstract architectural details and seascapes and she would also let other local artists use her printing presses to produce their work.

Julia Ball’s linocuts and relief prints for the most part are strongly architecturally structured interpretations of Byzantine and Greek churches, in muted colours and most pleasantly done. They are drawings done with self-assured skill, and while not in the least profound, they are intellectually satisfying and highly decorative. The Oxford Magazine, 1965

Ball illustrated Dildrum King of the Cats for Frederick Grice and Julia did illustrations for the Cambridge literary magazine, Delta in 1969. Over the years she would illustrate many poetry books too, from Harriet Tarlo, Peter Riley and The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle by John James.

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Her move to Cambridge also signalled a move into painting when she was in her forties inspired by various painters such as Sonia Delaunay. In the early 1970s she travelled to Iran where a series of dome paintings were made in abstract vivid colours.

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In Cambridgeshire Ball became friends with Nan Youngman and joined the Painters and Sculptors society. Early members where Cecil and Elisabeth Collins, Bettie Rea, and Elisabeth Vellacott. In this company and with Nan’s natural talent as a promoter from her years running the Pictures for Schools exhibitions, she helped make many of the local artists well known.

Many of the Cambridge artists would holiday and paint plein air on the North Norfolk coast and Youngman used to take painting holidays there with friends. Some of Balls early painted works can be seen of beaches and dunes around Brancaster and Titchwell.

Ball then started to use the flatness of the landscape around Cambridge in a series of abstract colourful landscapes, partially in the fens. Into the 1980s, these landscapes were focused on the fenland waterways of Wicken Fen and Quy Fen showing the long ditches and fields in all weather conditions throughout the year. Ball would work painting watercolours and then taking them to her studio to be worked up into larger pieces. Throughout her career she has always used a very similar palate of colours that are mixed when painting.

In 1983 she visited the Greenham Common anti nuclear women’s camp. When asked many years later about her feelings she said “It was also a place where I think … you didn’t talk about it very much unless people asked you. It wasn’t something that you could personally claim pride in. I mean, I know, I thought I had to be careful, not careful, but I was aware that it was something deeper than that. You weren’t just being a heroine, or hero, it was more fundamental. And that sort of boasting about it would be detrimental to the whole thing. It wasn’t boasting, it was just part of your life.

Over her life she had many exhibitions, most notably including at the Bluecoat Gallery – Liverpool, 1978; Kettle’s Yard – Cambridge, from 1980 with the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors; Karen Wright’s Hobson Gallery, 1982, University of Nottingham, 1986; New Hall College, Heffer’s Gallery and the Lynne Strover Gallery, Fen Ditton in 1994.

Her studio sale in 2024 was a celebration of her work.

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