Noah Davis: Breaking the Spell

1975 by Noah Davis.Oil on canvas.
Image: Kerry McFate/Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

I recently enjoyed an excellent retrospective of the art of Noah Davis. (The Barbican Art Gallery, London until 11 May.)

‘Do I have to make it new and about hip hop and all this shit to get people interested? Or maybe there is something else?’
Noah Davis

Davis was an energetic, truly creative thinker, committed to making art accessible to all. In his work he sought to represent the normality of African American community life. His paintings of anonymous figures at rest and play, touched by the mysterious and uncanny, have a timeless, dreamlike, haunted quality. He seems to be asking us to imagine a better world. 

‘I wanted Black people to be normal. That was my whole thing. We are normal, right?’

Noah Davis, The artist is incomplete … Untitled, 2015.
Photograph: Kerry McFate/(c) The Estate of Noah Davis Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

Davis was born in Seattle in 1983, the youngest son of a lawyer and an educator. 
Having taken to painting as a teenager, his parents rented him his own studio to stop him ruining the carpets at home. He curated his first exhibition in a shopping mall.

‘I’d rather fail at painting than be successful in anything else.’

Davis studied film and conceptual art at Cooper Union, New York, leaving without graduating, so as to pursue his own education in LA. He clearly had a restless, curious mind. Employed at a specialist bookshop, he immersed himself in diverse works from art history. He bought vintage photos of Black life from flea-markets, and set up blogs in the early days of the internet. 

‘I’m fascinated with the instances where Black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide.’

Carefree children cavort in the azure open-air swimming pool, watched by a lifeguard in a red singlet. A group of young men relax by the lake. And two girls lie asleep on the cream sofa. There’s a businessman in a green jacket with a trilby hat, walking with a briefcase along the sidewalk. A teenager levitates on the front lawn, and a young lad rides a white unicorn. Karon stands in the yard in a gold leotard, with large yellow fan-wings at her sides - a contemporary Isis. 

‘I want it to be magical. I don’t want it to be stuck in reality.’

Davis was inspired by Egyptian mythology, daytime TV, historical art, modernist architecture, and photos that his mother took of Chicago in the 1970s. He was quick to paint and slow to contemplate. He rapidly applied rabbit skin glue beneath washes of diluted oil paint to give his images a vibrant sheen. And then he sat in front of his work for hours. 

‘Priorities: walker, painter, Black person, flaneur, all around wild and crazy guy, nice guy.’

The Pueblo del Rio housing project in LA, designed in part by African American architect Paul Revere Williams, was constructed in 1941 as a ‘garden city’ for Black defence workers. It subsequently became impoverished and run down. Davis reimagined how the neighbourhood could look. Ballet dancers practice their arabesques in a courtyard, musicians play by the roadside, and a man sits in sunshine with outstretched legs, engrossed in his newspaper. Images emerge from, and dissolve into, abstract streetscenes and landscapes. These are intimate everyday events, tinged with melancholy and mysticism.

‘I wanted to make anonymous moments permanent.’

Noah Davis - Isis, 2009,
Image: Courtesy ©The Estate of Noah Davis, David Zwirner, Mellon Foundation Art Collective

In 2012 Davis and his wife, fellow-artist Karon Davis, co-founded the Underground Museum on a site behind four storefronts in the historically Black neighbourhood of Arlington Heights. Their vision was to create an artspace that was free and open to all.

‘Mission Statement: To exhibit world-class art to a community that does not have access to such resources.’

Davis asked established museums to lend pieces to the new gallery, but none was forthcoming. And so he created his own versions of works by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Don Flavin and Jeff Koons, titling the show ‘Imitation of Wealth.’ Within a few years the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA had agreed to loan art from its permanent collection. 

Noah Davis - Pueblo del Rio, Arabesque, 2014
Copyright: The Estate of Noah Davis, Courtesy THe Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

Davis teaches us to pursue our own path with gusto; to persevere and find lateral solutions. He suggests that we should integrate the real and imaginary, the ordinary and fantastical; that we should ‘break the spell’ of convention and past practice.

‘These elements of fantasy may arise from my need to ‘break the spell,’ or the constraints of art theory, and move more into the realms of mysticism.’

In 2013 Davis was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. He carried on working from hospital beds and kitchen tables, right up until the end. He died at his home in Ojai, California in 2015. He was 32.

'When life seems full of clouds and rain
And I am full of nothin' and pain,
Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?
Nobody.
When winter comes with snow and sleet
And me with hunger and cold feet,
Who says, "Here's twenty-five cents, go ahead and get somethin’ to eat?”
Nobody.’

Bert Williams, ‘Nobody’ (B Williams, A Rogers)

No.510

‘Are You Together?’: Is Your Business Like a Team or a Family?

It was a busy Friday evening at the Fish Central takeaway counter. I’d made my usual order - cod, chips and mushy peas - and was waiting to one side for the fish to fry.

Next up in the queue was a track-suited man in his mid 40s.

‘Scampi and chips please, with a couple of onion rings.’ 

Behind him was a woman of a similar age, with a child alongside.

‘Just two small cod and chips for us.’

The Cypriot chap taking the orders at the till looked up at the man and woman.

‘Are you together?’

They regarded each other wearily. ‘Yes, we’re together,’ replied the track-suited man.

Then he retreated to where I was waiting by the window and muttered under his breath: ‘Just about.’

The woman could tell he’d made a sarcastic remark.

‘What’s that you said?’

‘Oh, nothing, dearest….’ 

This exchange prompted me to speculate on the nature of the family’s relationships. I imagined the couple had been an item for some time. They’d got past romantic gestures and displays of affection. They were now familiar with each other’s faults and foibles, and were enjoying subtle digs and droll remarks. The kid seemed entirely comfortable with their sharp words.

'The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.'
Dodie Smith, Novelist and Playwright

In corporate life we often see ourselves as creating high-performance sports teams. The leadership challenge is characterised as managing a diverse set of talents and personalities; organising them to function optimally, day-in, day-out; encouraging them to work towards a single unifying goal. We promote players who excel; drop them to the bench if they’re out of form; transfer them if they don’t improve. 

This is certainly a useful way of framing the task. But I sometimes find sport analogies a little clinical, somewhat two dimensional.

Real life and real commerce are, in my experience, a good deal more messy than this.

'Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible - the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.’
Virginia Satir, Clinical Social Worker and Psychotherapist

The best businesses also have something of the family about them. The core members have enjoyed the good times and endured the bad times together. They have rolled with life’s punches, learned to accommodate each other’s shortcomings and eccentricities; to acknowledge rivalries and accept differences. The relationships are complex and varied. The conversations are frank and open. The hierarchies are arcane and mysterious. They have been bound together by emotional ties of shared experience and values that date back years. They are fiercely loyal to each other.

Of course, analogies only go so far. 

Once home, I liberated the cod and chips from its paper wrapping, poured the mushy peas to one side of the heated plate and sprinkled the dish with salt, dousing it in vinegar. Alone tonight, I dined from a tray and watched football on TV. And I washed the feast down with a glass of cold Chablis. 

‘Haven't you noticed
A breakdown in the family tie?
Just not as strong as it once was,
Every time I see it weaken, it makes me want to cry.
Oh, what a shame,
Because another home's falling apart.
Oh, what a shame,
Another group of broken hearts.
It's not a secret,
We all know that it's slipping away.
Don't let it go, no, don't you let it go.
It is the only true foundation on which we can survive.
Don't be afraid,
Because you got to take it for a stand.
Don't be afraid,
You've got to try to understand.
Bring the family back, bring it back together.
Bring the family back,
Bring the family back, bring it back together,
Together.’
Billy Paul, ‘Bring the Family Back’ (F Smith / T Phillip)

No. 509

Molly Drake: ‘I Remember Firelight and You Remember Smoke’

Molly Drake

Molly Drake was born into English middle-class privilege, endured the vicissitudes of war, raised two gifted children, and suffered terrible family trauma. She was also a remarkable poet and musician who did not publish any of her work during her lifetime. 

For her, creativity was a private pursuit; a natural articulation of her thoughts and feelings; an expression of talent that didn’t need recognition or affirmation.

‘I sometimes think when it is time to die 
I may perhaps have learnt the way to live.
I may have learnt to sift from out the grain 
The chaff of littleness that blurs my eyes,
Small worries, little thoughts and little ways,
That creeping canker of insignificance
That eat away the very heart of life
And leaves behind the dull and flaccid shell.
I live hard, and oh, I hardly live
If living is become life’s only business.
And so I go stumbling and all perplexed,
Puffed on the dreary wind of little fears,
An eddied leaf jostled upon the tide
And seeing not the tide’s magnificence.’

Molly Drake, ‘Martha’ (Poem)

Molly was born in 1915 to military parents stationed in Rangoon. Educated in England, she returned to Burma, where she met and married Rodney Drake. With the outbreak of World War 2, Rodney enlisted and Molly made the gruelling trek on foot to Delhi with her sister Nancy. In comparative safety there, she formed a musical duet with Nancy, and worked as a co-host on All India Radio. Towards the end of the war, she was reunited with her husband, and gave birth to their two children, Gabrielle and Nick.

In 1952 the Drakes moved to England, to Tanworth-in-Arden, where Molly spent the rest of her life. As well as raising her children, she composed poems and songs, and played the piano for family and friends. 

‘I never thought I was glamorous,
Nor dreamed I could inspire
Feelings that were amorous,
Red-hot flames of desire.
But now the door has opened on 
A land of milk and honey.
It’s wonderful, it’s marvellous
But Lord! It’s terribly funny.’

Molly Drake, ‘Laugh of the Year’ (Song)

Molly was quiet, shy and somewhat reclusive, and her life was in many ways typical of a woman of her era and class. It was marked by conventional milestones; sustained by the usual hopes and disappointments; encumbered by the ordinary domestic duties. And yet it also saw terrible tragedy.

Gabrielle grew up to become an actor and Nick a musician. But Nick had poor mental health, and in 1974, aged 26, he was found dead due to an overdose of antidepressants. 

Molly dealt with her grief in the old-fashioned way. She didn’t complain. She kept busy. She wrote, composed and played. She carried on.

‘But time is ever a vagabond,
Time was always a thief.
Time can steal away happiness,
But time can take away grief.
So I won’t try to remember, 
For that way leads to regret.
No, I won’t try to remember
What I can never forget.’

Molly Drake, ‘Do You Ever Remember?’ (Song)

Molly Drake and Nick shopping

With Rodney’s help, in the 1950s Molly recorded some of her songs at home on a reel-to-reel tape machine. The recordings were later re-engineered by John Wood (who had worked closely with Nick) and finally issued in 2013.

Accompanying herself on the piano, Molly sings tunefully, mournfully, in a Home Counties accent. With precise phrasing and occasionally a wry smile, she tells of mercurial love and fleeting happiness; of consoling nights and sustaining dreams. She relates stories of birds and butterflies; wild winds and summer rains; of the pain of nostalgia and forced separation; of regretful recollections and the constraints of motherhood.

I was particularly struck by one composition, ‘I Remember,’ in which Molly recounts how a couple have completely different memories of the same events.

'We tramped the open moorland in the rainy April weather,
And came upon the little inn that we had found together.
The landlord gave us toast and tea and stopped to share a joke,
And I remember firelight,
I remember firelight,
I remember firelight,
And you remember smoke.

We ran about the meadow grass with all the harebells bending,
And shaking in the summer wind the Summer never ending.
We wandered to the little stream among the river flats,
And I remember willow trees,
I remember willow trees,
I remember willow trees,
And you remember gnats.’

Molly Drake, ‘I Remember' (Song)

At the conclusion of this recording, you can just make out Rodney’s quiet approval:

‘I should think that's really good.’ 

Memory is an elusive space, sometimes crisp and clear, sometimes vague and nebulous. Rarely consistent, often disputed, it binds us together and drives us apart. Some of us view the past through rose tinted spectacles; others see it through clouds of gloom. ‘Recollections may vary.’ 

And because of all this, memory is a prime source and subject for creativity. 

'To me a poem is not a forever thing, nor the statement of long held views, but the product of a moment so suddenly and hurtingly felt that it has to burst out into words.'

Molly died in 1993 and was buried in Tanworth-in-Arden, alongside her husband and son. Early on the morning of Christmas Day 1992, her last Christmas, she had written the following stanza:

‘Amid the unceasing starts and flurries
My heart is busy at its usual game,
The manufacturing of woes and worries
Lest the serene of life should seem too tame.’



‘We strolled the Spanish marketplace at ninety in the shade,
With all the fruit and vegetables so temptingly arrayed,
And we can share a memory as every lover must,
And I remember oranges,
I remember oranges,
I remember oranges,
And you remember dust.

The autumn leaves are tumbling down and winter's almost here,
But through the Spring and Summer time we laughed away the year,
And now we can be grateful for the gift of memory,
When I remember having fun,
Two happy hearts that beat as one,
When I had thought that we were we,
But we were you and me.’

Molly Drake, ‘I Remember' (Song)

No. 508

The Sisterhood of Mickalene Thomas: Create the Right Context, Then Focus and Celebrate

Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of work by the African American artist Mickalene Thomas. (‘All About Love’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 5 May.)

‘With painting you can manipulate time, shaping how it’s perceived. It’s about exploring fantasy, illusion and the creation of desire.’
Mickalene Thomas

Thomas creates paintings, photographs, collages and installations that celebrate her family, friends and lovers. Her portraits are big, bold, colourful and confident. Conveying a very human presence with intimacy and intensity, they stop us in our tracks, hold us in their gaze.

‘To see yourself, and for others to see you, is a form of validation. I’m interested in that very mysterious and mystical way we relate to each other in the world.’

Born in 1971, in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas was raised by her mother, a former fashion model, who enrolled her in after-school art lessons at the Newark Museum. 

‘It all began as a young child, when I recognised beauty and desire by the way the world responded to my mother’s beauty. My understanding of the complexity of desire began with how I perceived myself in relation to my mother. I became mindful of a desire to be the woman that she hoped I would be.’

As a teenager, Thomas moved to Portland, Oregon, and she subsequently studied at the Pratt Institute and Yale School of Art. She developed a particular interest in creating large-scale depictions of Black women. 

‘I grew up with a lot of brothers, and I don’t have any sisters, so for me it’s really important to develop my sisterhood. It’s something I’ve always coveted.’

Painting in oil, acrylic and enamel, sometimes employing collaged black and white photos to add a touch of realism, Thomas inlays her work with multi-coloured rhinestones. Her subjects, dressed in vibrant, glamorous clothes and located in bright domestic contexts, are in repose, relaxed, at leisure. They regard us directly, with assured stares, seeming both self-possessed and vulnerable.

‘The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go.’

Often the poses and compositions echo the works of historical European painters - Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Monet – as Thomas seeks to reclaim art from its traditional white male perspective.

‘My work is rooted in self-discovery, celebration, joy, sensuality, and a need to see positive images of Black women in the world.’

Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015,
Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel, 60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm)

I was impressed by Thomas’ process. 

She first photographs her subjects in bespoke sets built in her Brooklyn studio. These interiors, draped with vividly patterned textiles, suggest warmth, security, the comfort of home. 

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

At the exhibition you can see a couple of Thomas’ living room installations, recalled from her own childhood: mirror walls, thick carpet, Tiffany lamp and pot plants; Donna Summer and Diana Ross LPs leaning against the music centre. She seems to be suggesting that our identity is shaped by the spaces we inhabit, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to.

Having put her sitters at their ease, Thomas then finds deeply personal connections with them. She focuses on who they truly are, celebrates them, elevates them. 

‘Beauty has always been an element of discussion for Black women, whether or not we’re the ones having the conversation.’

In the world of commercial communication, we may recognise this approach: settle on the right environment; create an appropriate context; locate the brand in its own world. Then focus on, and amplify, its truth.

‘I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I’m Black and a woman. You don’t necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman.’

There’s much to see at the exhibition beyond Thomas’ portraiture. I was particularly taken with a video piece inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song, ‘Angelitos Negros.’ The artist reimagines original footage of Kitt singing, combining it with images of herself. The lyrics ask why religious painters of the past filled the heavens exclusively with white figures. 

It’s an absence Thomas seeks to address. She paints her own Black angels. 

'Painters painting saints in church,
How do you know that God is white?
Painter, if you paint with love,
Paint me some Black angels now.
For good Blacks in Heaven,
Painter, show us that you care.
Paint me some Black angels now.
Paint me some Black angels now.’

Eartha Kitt, 'Angelitos Negros’ (Translation) (M Maciste, A Blanco)

No. 507

If You Want to Survive the Rat Race, You Need to Learn to Enjoy the Ride

Researchers have discovered that rats can be trained to drive a car, and that they enjoy the experience. With practice, and the incentive of some Froot Loop breakfast cereal, a sample of laboratory rats steered a vehicle constructed from a plastic container, by grasping at a wire that propelled it forward. (Kaya Burgess, The Times, 19 November, 2024)

Writing on The Conversation website, Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Richmond, Virginia observed:

‘Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the ‘lever engine’ before their vehicle hit the road.’ 

The scientists then set about establishing whether the rats’ eager anticipation was for the Froot Loops or the driving. And so, they offered the rats a choice: they could either access the Froot Loop by making a short journey on foot, or they could climb into the car and drive the long way round to the treat.

‘Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.’

Perhaps the lab rats can teach us a lesson. 

Work shouldn’t just be about ends, goals and objectives. If we enjoy the process as well as the prize, we can be more fulfilled; we can make better teammates; and, over time, we can become more resilient.

'It’s not the destination, it's the journey.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson

My fondest recollections of advertising are not just of pitch wins and finished commercials. They are of deconstructing briefs and developing hypotheses; of sharing thoughts and shaping executions. The synergies of multi-disciplinary teams and the camaraderie under pressure. The diplomacy of client engagement and the theatre of presentation. The daft situations, wise aphorisms and witty observations. 

I found the journey as satisfying as the arrival.

As Lambert concludes:

‘Anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. Planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain.’

Useful advice if you want to survive the rat race.

'You're working at your leisure to learn the things you'll need.
The promises you make tomorrow will carry no guarantee.
I've seen your qualifications, you've got a PhD
I've got one art O level, it did nothing for me.
Working for the rat race,
You know you're wasting your time.
Working for the rat race,
You're no friend of mine.
You plan your conversation to impress the college bar,
Just talking about your Mother and Daddy's Jaguar.
Wear your political T-shirt and sacred college scarf,
Discussing the worlds situation but just for a laugh.
You'll be working for the rat race,
You know you're wasting your time.
Working for the rat race,
You're no friend of mine.’
The Specials, ‘Rat Race’ (R J Byers)

No. 506

Renaissance Drawing: Inspiration Needs Preparation

The head of a youth, attributed to Pietro Faccini, c.1590 King's Gallery

I recently attended a fascinating exhibition of Renaissance drawing. (‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ is at The King’s Gallery, London until 9 March.)

Drawing became widespread in Italy in the 1400s, as the cost of paper fell and as new materials like chalk became available. It was the basis for artistic study, a fundamental of preparatory practice and a means of exploring ideas. 

The exhibition features 160 drawings - by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many others. There are tender portraits of unknown sitters; fearsome sketches of imaginary grotesques; precise explorations of costume and drapery; of character, posture and attitude. There are designs for small devotional images, altarpieces and wall paintings; allegories and scenes from ancient myths. We can see Leonardo’s studies of horses, Parmigianino’s dogs and Titian’s ostrich. Here’s Michelangelo’s black chalk drawing of The Risen Christ, reaching in exultation to the sky; and Raphael’s sensitive sketch of one naked woman in three poses - preparation for a fresco of the Three Graces. He was one of the few Renaissance artists to work from female models.

We can also inspect large drawings known as cartoons (from the Italian ‘cartone’, meaning ‘large sheet of paper’), final designs to be transferred to an altarpiece or wall. This was done by pricking outlines and rubbing powdered charcoal or dust across the back of the sheet; or by working with a squared grid to enable further enlargement. Cartoons are particularly precious because they were made with poor quality paper and often discarded after use.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Studies of a horse, c 1490
ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

I was very much taken with Leonardo’s restless, curious mind. He sketched to develop his ideas on anatomy, botany, water and avian flight. He drafted a bird’s eye view of western Tuscany; a bear’s foot; a dog captaining a sailing boat with an oak tree for a mast. He drew human and animal dissections; filled pages with sketches of vivacious domestic cats, caged lions and sinister dragons. He was constantly looking to understand the physical world, drawing for pleasure as well as for research.

We learn that early paper was made from shredded clothing rags (linen and hemp). Artists could work in metalpoint, employing a lead or silver stylus. They could draw with black, red or white chalk, cut into small pieces and wedged into the end of a split stick – sharpening the chalk to a point for fine lines. Or they could employ charcoal (carbonised wood), less precise but more durable, soaking sticks in linseed oil to produce a richer colour. There was also black ink, applied with goose feather quills or a fine brush of squirrel hair. 

Bernardino Campi, The Virgin and Child (c.1570-80), which is in the exhibition at The King’s Gallery
CREDIT: © ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Shortly before his death in 1564, at the age of 88, Michelangelo ordered that many of his drawings be destroyed in two bonfires. Writing a few years after, the biographer Giorgio Vasari explained that the artist didn't want people to see the labour that had gone into his art. 

We may recognise this instinct in contemporary creative professions – the desire to suggest that inspiration is effortless and instinctive; that ideas arrive magically, fully formed.

But experienced heads know that success derives from exploration and experimentation; from trial and error; from drafting, planning and plotting; from hours of deep thought and hard work.

Inspiration needs preparation.

'Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.’
Louis Pasteur

Head of a Cleric c. 1448
Metalpoint on prepared ochre surface, heightened with white, 189 x 173 mm. Royal Library, Windsor

Of course, once we’re properly primed and rigorously rehearsed, we can afford to be more cavalier in our execution. One drawing by Paolo Farinati is inscribed with instructions. The figures, when transferred to the walls of the patron’s villa, should be roughly 3 feet high, but ‘You may do as you fancy when you are on the scaffolding.’

'I been reading my old journals,
Checking to see where my head has been.
And I been apologizing to some people,
Some bridges I needed to mend.
And I been eating more greens,
Getting my body out the line.
I'm gonna be super fine.
And I been letting some old ideas go.
I'm making room for my life to grow.
I just wanna be prepared.
I just wanna be prepared.
Getting myself ready
For what's comin' for me.
I just wanna be prepared.’

Jill Scott, ‘Prepared’ (A Harris / D Farris / J Scott)

No. 505

The Satirical Perspective of Tirzah Garwood: ‘Blessed Be the Eyes that See the Things that Ye See.’

Tirzah Garwood - The Crocodile

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the art of Tirzah Garwood. (The Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 26 May)
 
Garwood was a wood-engraver, paper marbler and painter, who approached her work with a sharp mind, a sensitive touch and a satirical eye. She prompts us to see the amusing, absurd and uncanny in the detail of everyday life.
 
Eileen Lucy Garwood was born into a military family in Gillingham in 1908. She acquired the nickname Tirzah as a corruption of Tertia, Latin for ‘third child’. Having grown up in the various towns of southern England where her father was posted, she studied at the Eastbourne School of Art. There she was taught wood-engraving by Eric Ravilious, whom she married in 1930. 
 
Garwood’s engravings were imaginatively conceived and precisely executed. They abounded in wry observations and witty juxtapositions. 
 
Here’s a young Garwood on a trip to Kensington High Street with her formidable aunt. The shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, pass comically posed mannequins in summer fashions. Back at home, in her comfortable dressing gown and slippers, an older Garwood stretches and yawns extravagantly, as her contented dog sleeps at her feet. Here a cloche-hatted Garwood, in a neat pussy-bow blouse, sits in a third-class railway compartment. She clutches her purse to her lap, wide awake and alert, as the two suited men opposite take a snooze. Meanwhile her bald, moustachioed father, concentrates on composing a letter at his desk, closely observed by a flat-capped window cleaner. And Ravilious stands enigmatically in the garden, in a trench coat and fedora, a marrow under each arm.
 
Garwood’s conservative parents were suspicious of working-class Ravilious and the influence he was having on their daughter. 

[My parents] ‘thought my subjects hideous, and that Mr Ravilious was perverting a nice girl who used to draw fairies and flowers into a stranger who rounded on them and did drawings that were only too clearly caricatures of themselves.’

Tirzah Garwood - The Train Journey 1929. Wood engraving. Private collection

Garwood’s theme was not just her family. More broadly it was mid-century English society. She shows us the domestic rituals, the complex relationships, the contours of class and gender. 
 
As a group of uniformed schoolgirls marches along the street in a crocodile, one pupil gives an affectionate pat to an attentive black terrier. Formally dressed partygoers conduct a séance, concentrating intensely as they reach out their hands in the dark. A lady marvels at her distorted reflection in the Hall of Mirrors. A young woman chats to her sister as she bathes. And granny plays an ace at the card table.
 
Garwood’s gaze is always acute, amused, affectionate. 
 
Garwood and Ravilious set up home in rural Essex, where they had three children.
Increasingly, her time was taken up with childcare and domestic tasks. Her art took a back seat.
 
‘I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.’

Tirzah, 1950, Photograph by Edwin Smith. Private Collection

Nonetheless, Garwood still found time to take up paper marbling for lampshades and books. This involved dropping blobs of thinned oil paint onto a ‘bath’ of gum-thickened water, and then teasing patterns from it with a stylus. Her nature-inspired designs were fragile, complex, harmonious, and became popular with London interiors shops.
 
‘Marbling gave me pleasure because I felt no-one else could do this.’
 
Garwood clearly had a restlessly creative mind. At the exhibition you can see a scrapbook filled with her fantastical cuttings and illustrations. There’s also a patchwork quilt, a design for a children’s counting book, a series of ‘portraits’ of local village houses, and some charming ink sketches - including one of a melancholy snow woman in the back garden. She effortlessly crossed the divide between art, craft and design.
 

Tirzah Garwood - Window Cleaner c.1927, pen, ink & watercolour. Private collection

While still in her thirties, Garwood suffered a double blow. In 1941 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had emergency mastectomy surgery. The following year, while Ravilious was serving as a war artist, his plane went missing off Iceland. His body was never recovered. 
 
Garwood later wrote that she endured ‘spasms of dreadful sorrow because Eric wasn’t there to share some joke, or some odd occurrence… and worst of all, to appreciate the children.’
 
Two years after her husband’s death, Garwood began painting in oils. She developed a style that was both sophisticated and naïve. A seemingly innocent world of toys, animals, flowers and insects is haunted by anxiety. A kitten looms over a toy castle by a row of black pansies. A goose in a field rears up as she senses a threat to her goslings. Seen from above, a group of children play hide and seek in a garden in deep shadow.
 
In 1948 Garwood was again diagnosed with cancer, and, with no hope of recovery, she was subsequently admitted to a nursing home. Often in pain from her therapy, she nonetheless completed some twenty small oil paintings. She described her last year as the happiest of her life. 
 
Tirzah Garwood died in 1951 and was buried in Copford. Her gravestone reads:
 
‘Blessed be the eyes that see the things that ye see.’
Luke 10:23
 

'Each little day is a world of its own,
Each little day is a tomb. 
Whenever the day has drifted away, 
It's back to the womb .
As I lie alone in the darkness, 
Waiting the next rebirth, 
I say for me what could very well be 
For everyone else on earth. 
Could be the first day of the best of my life. 
There could be sunlight, there could be rain. 
But losing or winning, this is beginning all over again.
This is the birthday of a brand new start,
Change of direction, change of heart.
When I think of today, I feel tempted to say, 
Destiny, do your worst. 
Of the rest of the days of the rest of my life, 
This is only the first.’
Molly Drake, 'The First Day'

No. 504

Late People Lose

Norman Rockwell - Girl Running With Wet Canvas

'One good thing about punctuality is that it's a sure way to help you enjoy a few minutes of privacy.'
Orlando Aloysius Battista

We were coming from another appointment. We were making some final changes. We were waiting for the boards to be mounted. We were running just a few minutes late… But then we missed the train and missed the plane and missed the meeting. And so we lost the client’s confidence, lost the pitch and lost the anticipated revenue. We were denied the celebration, the bonus and the promotion. And we fumbled the opportunity to make some great work.

All because we were just a few minutes late. 

'A Man consumes the Time you make him Wait In thinking of your Faults - so don't be late!’
Arthur Guiterman

I read recently in the Guardian (Hannah Devlin, 10 Nov 2024) about research into tardiness in business. The study, published in the journal ‘Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes’, surveyed thousands of executives in the US and the UK. Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as proposals, product pitches, advertising and news articles. But first, they were told that the work was submitted either early, on time or late.

Even though respondents were looking at the same stimulus, work introduced as ‘late’ was consistently rated as worse in quality than material presented as ‘early’ or ‘on time.’ Moreover, a perceived missed deadline prompted evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and made them less willing to collaborate with that person in the future.

‘Everyone saw the exact same [material], but they couldn’t help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was.’
Prof Sam Maglio, the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management (who co-authored the study with David Fang of Stanford University)

In the face of substantial work challenges, we may be inclined to procrastinate and delay; to plan optimistically rather than realistically; to hesitate and leave things to the last minute. We may plead for more time, for deadlines to be delayed, while we make the finishing touches, while we journey from good to great. We may convince ourselves that a superior end-product will justify the inconvenience and irritation.

But we would be wrong.

Punctuality may seem rather a modest professional virtue. But its absence leads to all manner of practical problems and negative perceptions. Tardiness taints relationships. It corrodes trust. And so, in the end, late people lose.

'It gets late early out there.’
Yogi Berra

'Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time.
There's something wrong here, there can be no denying.
One of us is changing,
Or maybe we just stopped trying.
And it's too late, baby, now it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it.
Something inside has died,
And I can't hide and I just can't fake it.’

Carole King, ‘It’s Too Late’ (C King, Toni Stern)

No. 503

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: The Motivational Power of Rivalry and Respect

Rubens, copy of The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo. The Battle of Anghiari, 1603

I recently visited a fine exhibition considering the artistic environment in Florence around 1504, when Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were all working in the city. (‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’ is at The Royal Academy, London until 16 February.)

The show illustrates how competition and rivalry, allied to a willingness to learn, can spur creative people on to achieve great things.

Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl, was born in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. A painter, engineer, scientist and philosopher, he worked for a time in Milan, where he created The Last Supper. In 1504, back in Florence, he was 52 and applying himself to his portrait of Lisa del Gioncondo, the ‘Mona Lisa.’ 

Sebastiano da Sangallo, copy of a section of The Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo - c. 1542. Oil on wood, 77 x 130 cm. Holkham Hall, Norfolk

Michelangelo came from a reputable Florentine banking family. He preferred to work as a sculptor and had carved the Pietà in Rome. In 1504, the 29-year-old had just completed his 17-foot-high marble statue of the biblical warrior king David, a commission from the Florentine state.

Leonardo and Michelangelo were quite different characters. Leonardo was sociable and outgoing. Michelangelo was grumpy and truculent. (He had smashed his nose in a fight with another sculptor.)

There was clearly no love lost between them. Michelangelo taunted Leonardo for his failure to finish the huge bronze equine statue assigned by Duke Ludovico of Milan. (Ludovico ended up giving the bronze away to forge cannons.) Leonardo, in turn, described Michelangelo’s representation of muscles as like ‘bags of walnuts.’ Invited, along with other artists, to advise the Florentine authorities on the appropriate location for David, Leonardo suggested an inconspicuous place at the back of the Loggia della Signoria – and that its genitals should be covered. 

Perhaps with an eye on exploiting the great artists’ rivalry, the Florentine government commissioned first Leonardo and then Michelangelo to create murals glorifying the republic in the newly constructed council hall of the Palazzo della Signoria. (The contract was witnessed by Nicolo Machiavelli, the council secretary.) Leonardo was allocated the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina.

At the exhibition, we can examine their preparatory drawings, in the original and in later copies. 

Michelangelo -Taddei Tondo  c. 1504–05 Carrara marble. Royal Academy, London

Sketching in red chalk and brown ink, Leonardo presents snarling cavalrymen on rearing horses. Swords fly, bodies writhe, soldiers tumble under foot. We are in the brutal heart of the hostility.
 
Michelangelo sets a completely different tone. The Florentine army has been resting, swimming in the Arno, when the Pisans attack. We see naked soldiers clambering out of the river, scrambling over rocks, looking over their shoulders, dragging their clothes onto damp limbs. The urgency is palpable.
 
The contrast in the approaches of the two great artists is striking. Leonardo is interested in the bestial face of war, contorted and grimacing. Michelangelo concerns himself with human contours, muscle and skin, the eroticism of the heroic body.
 
Late in 1504 Raphael arrived on the scene. The son of a court artist, he had been raised and trained in Urbino, and was renowned for his charm, a quality that came in useful when dealing with clients. He was in his early 20s and eager to ‘spend some time in Florence to learn.’

Raphael -The Bridgewater Madonna c.1507. Originally on oil and wood, but later transferred to canvasae

We can observe Raphael’s appetite for study. He drew Michelangelo’s David, making the hands smaller than they appear on the statue. He sketched Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan, and borrowed a pleasing detail from the work in his painting of Saint Catherine, pushing her left leg before her right. 
 
Raphael also copied Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, the ‘Taddei Tondo.’ In this marble relief (the only Michelangelo marble held in Britain) the infant John the Baptist presents the baby Jesus with a flapping goldfinch - a symbol of the Passion. Christ flinches, but also looks back at the bird, accepting his fate. When preparing for his own painting of the Virgin and Child, the ‘Bridgewater Madonna’, Raphael sketched a series of restless, twisting infants that were clearly inspired by the ‘Taddei Tondo.’
 
Raphael teaches us that, when we are young, we should study the greats, learn from our elders, analyse their technique and adapt it in our own work. Leonardo and Michelangelo teach us that, as we mature, we should embrace conflict and creative rivalry; measure ourselves against the best - because competition pushes us to be confident in our own distinctiveness.
 
In the event, neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo finished the frescos for the Palazzo della Signoria. Michelangelo was recalled to Rome by the Pope, Leonardo returned to Milan, and the fragile Florentine republic fell to the returning Medici. Sometimes life gets in the way.

'I used to worry because another fella
Tried to steal my girl away.
I used to toss and turn
All through the night,
The thought of it kept me awake.
Every time she walked by him,
She was all in his eye.
She set him straight, she told him
I had to be her only guy.
That's why I said:
Competition ain't nothing, y’all,
If you got a love that's true.
Competition ain't nothing, boy,
They just keep on loving you.’
Little Carl Carlton, 'Competition Ain't Nothin’' (L Hiram / W Webb)

No. 502

Vanessa Bell: ‘I Have No Intention of Confessing My Sins or Defending My Virtues’

Vanessa Bell - Self Protrait c1958. The Charleston Trust © Estate of Vanessa Bell

I recently took a trip to Milton Keynes to see a fine exhibition of the work of Vanessa Bell. (‘A World of Form and Colour’ is at the MK Gallery until 23 February.)

Bell was a painter and designer whose natural curiosity prompted her to experiment in multiple styles and media. A leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, she rejected the staid conventions of her middle-class upbringing and the art establishment, and enthusiastically embraced modern thought and practice. Hers was a truly creative life.

‘If you could say what you like about art, sex or religion, you could also talk freely… about the ordinary doings of daily life… Life was exciting, terrible and amusing, and we had to explore it, thankful that one could do so freely.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Stephen was born in 1879 into a wealthy Victorian literary family. Raised and educated in her Kensington home, she attended a local art school and then studied painting under John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy.

‘When I got into the grubby, shabby, dirty world of art students at South Kensington, I wanted nothing else in the way of society. They were separate entirely from my home life and so a great relief. They knew no more about my private life than I about theirs, and in their company one could forget oneself and think of nothing but shapes and colours and the absorbing difficulties of oil paint.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell - Iceland Poppies

Following the death of both her parents, in 1904 Vanessa moved, with her sister Virginia and her two brothers, to Gordon Square in unfashionable Bloomsbury.  The change of scene felt liberating.
 
‘It was exhilarating to have left the house in which there had been so much gloom and depression, to have come to these white walls, large windows opening onto trees and lawns, to have one’s own rooms, be master of one’s own time, have all the things in fact that come as a matter of course to many of the young today, but so seldom then to young women.’ 
Vanessa Bell

In Gordon Square Vanessa set up the Friday Club, where male and female artists were treated as equals and exhibited together. The house also became a focus for the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia and fellow writers Lytton Strachey and E M Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the civil servant Leonard Woolf and the critic Roger Fry. It was in this milieu that she met another critic, Clive Bell, whom she married in 1907. 

‘We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins – we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Bell at Charleston © The Charleston Trust

In 1910 Fry organised the first major exhibition of Post-Impressionist art in England. Having seen the work of Manet, Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, Vanessa’s painting turned toward abstraction, and she embraced simplified forms, flattened perspectives and bright colours.
 
‘Here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself.’ 
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa painted still lifes and landscapes; elegant interiors and floral displays. She depicted her friends and family relaxing at home - reading, writing, sewing and drawing.

Her two sons are having tea with their nursemaids, Saxon Sydney-Turner is playing the piano, and three women are deep in conspiratorial conversation. A housemaid with a broom surveys the study, a woman in a white shift leans over her washstand, and Virginia is trying on some fancy dress. 
 
Vanessa was endlessly experimenting. She painted Fry in a pointillist style (what she called ‘the leopard technique’). She created cubist-inflected landscapes that echoed Cezanne. She borrowed the dark outlines of Gaugin. She explored collage and pure geometric abstraction.
 
‘You have to try and express your feelings about things in line. It must be sensitive, everywhere – nowhere must it become mechanical.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961), A Conversation, 1913-16 © Estate of Vanessa Bell

In 1913 Vanessa, Fry and Grant founded an artists’ cooperative, the Omega Workshops. In defiance of the conventional barriers between the fine and decorative arts, and of traditional formality, they designed furniture, textiles, accessories and ceramics with simple forms and bold colours. Objects were presented anonymously and sold unsigned. 

Dorothy Parker famously observed that the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.' Certainly, their romantic ties were complicated. Vanessa and Clive both took lovers throughout their lives. In 1914 she began an enduring association with Grant, who was gay and continued to have relationships with men. The couple installed themselves, with her two sons and Grant’s lover David Garnett, in Charleston Farmhouse in the Sussex countryside. And in 1918 they had a daughter, Angelica, whom Clive raised as his own child. 
 
'I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think.'
Vanessa Bell
 
At Charleston Vanessa and Grant hung their own paintings and drawings, and added Omega textiles and pottery. They painted walls, doors, screens, tables and fireplaces – joyous, colourful designs, created with loose, spontaneous brushwork, combining flowers, nudes, circles and abstract elements. The house was a living art installation, a social experiment.

‘There is a language simply of form and colour that can be as moving as any other and that seems to affect one quite as much as the greatest poetry of words.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa’s creativity was boundless. She and Grant received commissions to decorate society homes. They worked together producing ballet sets, church murals and the Famous Women Dinner Service, which included 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history. She also designed an image of Alfriston village for a Shell-Mex ad, and all of Virginia's books jackets.

Though Vanessa had been born into privilege, her life was touched by tragedy. In 1937 her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 her Fitzroy Street studio was destroyed by a bomb – and much of her early work was lost with it. The following year Virginia took her own life. 
 
Nonetheless Vanessa continued to paint. In 1958 she depicted herself wrapped in a green shawl, wearing a broad-brimmed straw sunhat. She regards us through horn-rimmed glasses. She has lived a life of creative freedom and independent thought. Her relationships have been mocked, her work has been diminished, but she is unconcerned.

‘I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me… If you cannot accept me as I seem to you to be, then you must give me up, for I have no intention of confessing my sins or defending my virtues.’
Vanessa Bell

In 1961, Vanessa Bell died at Charleston and was buried in the Firle Parish Churchyard. 

 
'I won't try to stop you
When you speak of the past.
Doubt is over now
And I can join in when you laugh.
Fascination makes us ask for more
Than we'd like to know.
I needn't explain.
I think you know.
Reassure me when my heart's
Not bold enough to bear her name.
If you were in my shoes,
And scared, I would do the same.
And though I may ask,
There's no need for past details.
For though I may laugh aloud,
My courage fails.
Did you know?’

Everything But the Girl, ‘Fascination’ (T Thorn)

No. 501