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Here are two watercolours by the Great Bardfield artist Sheila Robinson. I bought them because I love both the architectural details in them, but also the typographic elements. Both of them are in St Pancras.

Sheila Robinson – 3 Leigh Street, London. High Class Shoe Repairs

In March, 1809, the Skinners’ Company built the streets around Sandwich and Leigh Street, the latter joining on to Judd Street.

Below is a painting of Sandwich Street. The building in the painting is now demolished for a set of flats. The horse drinking out of the metal bath makes me wonder if that is the home of the man who owns the cart.

Sandwich Street’s first house was built in 1812. Eighteen followed in 1813; by 1814 there were thirty and, by 1824, forty-seven.

Sheila Robinson – Sandwich Street, London.

George Mackie is a lesser known illustrator. He is mostly remembered today for his book of Alexander Gray’s translations of Historical Ballads of Denmark (1958), where he co-illustrated the job with Edward Bawden.

Mackie studied at Dundee College of Art from 1937–40, then after a break due to World War II he continued his education at Edinburgh College of Art from 1946–8. He worked as an inhouse graphic designer at Edinburgh University Press, allowing him to design dust jackets and title pages of their books. At this time he also was the head of design at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. his work appearing in a number of graphic magazines such as Graphis. Mackie was born in Cupar, Fife.

He was married to the artist Barbara Balmer. Many of his works were very pretty ink drawings made to look like wood-engravings, much in the style of Eric Fraser. This week I got a book on Crathes Castle where he had illustrated the booklet to look like a stained glass window on the front, the back of it looks not unlike Rex Whistler

This is a post about George Chapman just before he moved to Wales.

Kenneth ‘George’ Chapman was born in East Ham, London, the son of a superintendent on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. He studied at Gravesend School of Art, and worked as a graphic designer before deciding to become a full time artist in 1937.

Chapman was one of the young artists picked out by Jack Beddington to work on a Shell poster, giving him a public profile alongside Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Armstrong. At this time he was signing his work K G Chapman.

Chapman studied at the Slade for a year before Barnett Freedman recommended the painting school under Gilbert Spencer at the Royal College of Art, as the classes were freer from academic history at the RCA and also it was a college supported by the government, for artists to enter industry. Chapman then taught at the Worcester School of Art. He moved to Norwich in 1945 and married Kate Ablett, a student at Norwich School of Art, in 1947.

They moved to Great Bardfield in 1951 and lived in Vine Cottage and then moved to Crown House. Bawden cycled over to introduce himself and welcome them to the village. Chapman’s paintings, shown in the 1954 exhibitions, were of Welsh valleys and terraced mining towns; a contrast to the countryside around him. These early works were more expressionist, in the style of Robert Colquhoun, Keith Vaughan and other young artists.

Later he settled into a darker style of printing and etchings in dark colours, in a mood of art at the time that artists like L S Lowry were taking up. A social realism. He stuck to this style for the rest of his life.

Here are some photographs of Ipswich and Felixstowe. The trip was just a venture out, but I like the bleakness of the coast that this time of year.

For some time I have been working on an Audiobook of the Lucie Aldridge book, Before & After Great Bardfield – The Artistic Memoirs of Lucie Aldridge. You can get it by clicking the image below. There is an honesty box policy with it, you can download it for free or pay what you think it might be worth. Please note, this is only Lucie’s part of the book, not the postscript.

The Loan Collection of Contemporary British Art was a touring exhibition that was sent out to areas of the Empire to show the progress of British Art. The exhibition toured Australia and New Zealand in 1934.

Below is the text from the exhibition booklet, along with paintings from the exhibition. I think it is important to look at what was exhibited and presented to the world via the Art Exhibitions Bureau.

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Over five years ago the idea was conceived of bringing outlying
communities of the British Empire into closer touch with “a greater
field of Art” than they, in their isolated positions, could hope for.

Apart from the many excellent exhibitions of “Fine Art” provided from time to time by commercial enterprise, we, in these distant
parts, have been, and are debarred from the pleasure of seeing and
studying those Great Works which find their homes in Public Galleries
and Private Collections of the old world.

Impressed with the great number of surplus works in Galleries
in Great Britain which might be made available, as also the hope that
National pictures might be available on loan, and the fact that
there were many public spirited private owners and Trustees of
Galleries who would welcome the opportunity to loan their treasures
for view throughout the Empire, the sympathetic support of men high
up in the Art world at Home was enlisted, and through the able and
untiring devotion of Mr. J. B. Manson, Director of the Tate Gallery,
Mr. Ernest Marsh and Mr. C. R. Chisman, the Empire Art Loan Collections Society was formed .

The names of the original members of the General Committee are sufficient guarantee that the idea struck a note which appealed to those responsible for the promotion of Art in Great Britain, and that it is being pushed with vigour against considerable handicaps.

The standard design for pylons in Britain was chosen by a competition run by the Central Electricity Board in 1927. It was won by Sir Reginald Blomfield often gets the credit for the ‘lattice’ design. But the design was improved so it used less metal..

I used to have arguments with an ex, about Pylons. He saw them as majestic marvels that give us power. But I found them to be blots on the landscape. Anything man made on the landscape removes us from the beauty of nature. So this blog looks at artists who painted pylons as the marvels of the age.

Many years ago I planned to do a blog post on Constance Spry but never got around to it. I found the photos the other day. I think they may stand for themselves in how revolutionary her style was. From stripping a branch of fruit of the leaves and leaving; to her vases of traditional wild flowers.

In 1939 Vaughan left his job to become a full time artist. During the war he took on Neo-romantic styles head on with the Graham Sutherland inky thorned bushes and the John Piper cloudy, dull skies. Later American painters such as Nicholas de Stael would influence him to use colour in tonal ways. The Second World War for Vaughan was spent waiting for it’s end, so he could paint and be free of the menial work he was doing. I don’t think there is anyone who wished to be an artist so much and had so much fear as he, having no formal training.  He was like an actor, waiting in the wings to step on the stage and deliver his lines.

In 1944 he had his first solo show of Gouache paintings and drawings at the London Reid and Lefevre Gallery. These were all works made during the war time, for example, a hand-full of drawings and paintings of men from his unit cutting up trees in the parkland of Ashton Gifford House in 1942. This post is full of those images.

White and ochre branches plunging down into the oceanic surging of tangled nettles. People walking through the waist-high grass, through the aqueous leaf-green shadow, arms full of dead wood…and the wall running as an indefatigable horizontal, losing and finding itself in the jungle of weed and ivy…I wanted to capture this in lassoes of line and nets of colour, but it’s more difficult than writing about it.

Keith Vaughan, letter to Norman Towne, 12 October 1942

This is a favourite painting of mine. A view of St Ives Harbour from the window of a shop gallery painted by Fred Dubery. He was was master of perspective at the RA school and what better painting to own than one that tests the limits of perspective painting, with the items in the window, the boats in the reflection and the sunset; as well as the umbrella awning being a shadow giving you a view of the ceiling inside the gallery in the glass. Its a remarkable work.

Dubery was a teacher too, it was at Walthamstow Art School where he met the fashion tutor Joanne Brogden whom he would marry. She had trained under Christian Dior and would become a pioneering Professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art.