Audrey Pilkington, 2013, aged 91yrs. Audrey was born in 1922 at Heaning in the
Forest of Bowland on the. Yorkshire/Lancashire Border. Her father was land ...
AUDREY PILKINGTON
Audrey Pilkington, 2013, aged 91yrs
Audrey was born in 1922 at Heaning in the Forest of Bowland on the Yorkshire/Lancashire Border. Her father was land agent for several clients, including William Peel, who ran an experimental farm on his estate. It was an extraordinarily remote but beautiful landscape, steeped in folk-lore. Education Because of Heaning’s isolation , her parents sent her away aged only 7 yrs to board at the convent of N•tre Dame, Blackburn, Lancashire, and later at St. Hilda’s, Whitby, Yorkshire. Her parents were eventually asked to take her away as she refused to cooperate and was only interested in art, so at 17 she attended Lancaster School of Art, where she was much influenced by the dedicated teacher, artist and poet, Ronald Grimshaw. (1) The Slade Her intention had been to take the exam to go to the Royal College, but her father knew an art critic who advised him to send her to the Slade. Thanks to the War, the Slade had relocated to Oxford and was poorly staffed at that time. Randolph Schwabe (1885-1948) had agreed to come out of retirement to return as Slade Professor. Audrey remembers him sitting “by each student every day and sharpening their pencils”. He would make a little drawing beside the student’s life study, and that was that. Nevertheless, Audrey won prizes for lithography and design whilst at the Slade: her designs for textiles being particularly noteworthy.
Somebody else who had relocated to Oxford shortly after war broke out was Vorticist William Roberts LG, RA (1905-1980).
(3)
the
He remained there until 1945 and
Audrey recollects a particularly embarrassing moment when he took her out for a meal,
and she only discovered after having ordered that he had too few rations left to eat himself.
Gilbert Spencer R.A. (1892-1979), brother of Stanley Spencer, was a good
friend of her landlady and he and his wife were frequent visitors. Audrey got to know them well. Most of the male students were away fighting abroad but there remained a small group of serous students who for one reason or another were not able to enlist, and Audrey made friends with Bernard Dunstan R.A . and through him her husband-to-be, Patrick Heriz-Smith, who was Bernard’s flat mate. Patrick had been studying at The Reimann School
(2)
, where he was taught by Leonard Rosoman, McKnight Kauffer and Austin
Cooper, the Principal, but Reimann’s, run by refugees from Germany, was closed down when hostilities were declared and he had moved to the Slade.
His linear and
fractured style of drawing, influenced by futurism and expressionism, did not meet with approval, and he and Audrey were able to share any disenchantment they felt at that time with their studies. Audrey decided to return to Lancaster School of Art where she was given the opportunity to exhibit in Preston.
Patrick was then offered the post of Art Master at
Gordonstoun and she and Patrick got married. Wales and Scotland Gordonstoun was founded in 1934 by the German educator Kurt Hahn (1886-1974) on the Gordon estate near Elgin, Moray, Scotland. Formerly Head of Salem School in Southern Germany, Kurt Hahn had fled from the Nazis to Britain in 1933. (4)
The school was evacuated during the War when the estate was taken over by the army. It was relocated to Llandinam, Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales and it was whilst there that Audrey’s eldest children Saskia and Nicholas were born. After the War, Gordonstoun moved back to Scotland and old friendships could resume. Adrian Heath (1920-1992)
(5)
was a very close friend. He and Patrick had met at
Reimann’s before the war and he was a welcome visitor to Oakenhead, where Patrick and Audrey lived at Gordonstoun. Adrian, who had made friends with and taught Terry Frost in POW camp, returned to become a pioneer of abstraction and constructivism in Britain in the post-war period.
Another very close friend was Casper John, son of Augustus John, who was an Admiral of the Navy, based up there. During this period, Audrey taught art in the prep school and designed book jackets for Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape. She drew for Vogue and illustrated ‘After Bath’ by Vaughan Wilkins for Cape. Her third child, Toby, was born during this period in Scotland.. However, after the War, Kurt Hahn had gone to stay in Germany for six months to search out old friends and was devastated with what he found there.
He was
desperately busy trying to organise aid for the survivors and life became difficult at Gordonstoun. So it was opportune when Freddie Spencer Chapman turned up in 1947 recruiting staff for King Alfred School in Germany. (6) Germany Patrick was Head of the Art Department at King Alfred School from 1947-54. Freddie Spencer Chapman was a much-loved man and an inspirational educational progressive who had taken trouble to recruit a team of young, enlightened and creative people to teach in Pl„n.
Lasting friendships were forged within the progressive,
cosmopolitan set up that existed there and life was stimulating, happy and creative for both Patrick and Audrey.
Der Drachenfels, Bonn, pastel, 460x300mm
In spite of her fourth and fifth children, Bridget and Rupert, being born in Germany, Audrey’s artistic development flourished in Germany. She developed an original style in pastel and watercolour landscapes inspired by the enchanting Schleswig-Holstein lake country. She also began experimenting with collage, a technique she has explored ever since and the influence of which can be discerned in many aspects of her painting method. Her work was exhibited in Hamburg to critical acclaim.
Suffolk, England In 1954 the family moved to Royal Hospital School, Holbrook, where Patrick was again Head of Art. Their sixth and last child, Lindsey, was born in 1957. New friendships were made within the Suffolk and Essex art scene, including the Nash’s (cousins to the artists John and Paul Nash) and Bernard and Gwynneth Reynolds. Audrey had a studio at the bottom of the garden at Royal Hospital School and was able to continue developing her work in spite of her large family. She was a member of the Colchester Art Society and exhibited in Essex, Suffolk and London (including the Redfern Gallery and Heals). Much of her landscape painting was produced in oils during this period, when her experiments with texture and shape led to some early abstract works. In 1961, she and Patrick bought Clock House, Bruisyard, where from 1964 they converted areas into art studios for local and residential users. From 1979 she ran the studios with her daughter Bridget and the facilities were expanded to include an etching workshop, sculpture studio and bronze-casting foundry run by the sculptor Jane TruzziFranconi. (7) After the Clock House Association of Artists was founded in 1982, Clock House hosted an interesting variety of events organised by its membership of artists. The Association has since been taken on by Laurence Edwards at Butley Studios. The enchanting garden which Audrey created at Clock House figured in many of her paintings. She continued to produce abstracts in oils and collage as well as landscapes in oils, pastel and watercolour. From 1961, she exhibited widely in Suffolk in solo and mixed shows, also in London and with one-man shows in Italy and Switzerland. She showed regularly with Vera Delf at the Yoxford Gallery and with Iris Birtwistle, the maverick dealer based at that time in Walberswick. (8) Wales Audrey moved to Resolven in West Glamorgan in 1988. Her life there has been somewhat isolated from the art world, but the location has been a creative inspiration and this late period has been happy and productive.
She continued to create
landscapes in pen, ink and wash, gouache and pastels, but her major creative output has been invested in the Cauldron series, large abstracts in oil on canvas, exhibited in a one-man show at the Cut in Halesworth in 2007. Smaller works have been shown at
Swansea University Gallery. She also produced a particularly fine series of Scottish landscapes in pastel, which were exhibited at Neath Museum. But here was an opportunity to create another magical garden, be it on a smaller scale than Clock House, and this has been a continually developing theme in her imagery, finding its final crescendo in vibrant and structurally dynamic near-abstractions. The influences on Audrey Pilkington’s work are myriad and would be hard to pin down. She has refused to restrict her imaginative interpretation to any singular school or method. Yet, however diverse her work, her unique expression is always instantly recognisable. Her instinct to affirm and celebrate multiplicity and complexity is evident in her intensely constructed, often kaleidoscopic, picture surfaces. This sense of homage to the unknowableness of life, this cauldron of vitality that leaks through every fracture, is where she perhaps most differs from her contemporaries. There is no modernist need to discipline or harness doubt and uncertainty, whether through severity, reduction, protest or the very expression of anxiety itself: her most powerful works are more like mediaeval chant or ethnic textiles where the song of life is woven into ever shifting and ever resonant patterns, shapes and rhythms.
Cauldron, gouache, 530x395mm, 2008
Website: http://www.audreypilkington.co.uk Contact: Bridget Heriz, 145 Southtown Road, Gt. Yarmouth, Norfolk, NR31 0LA e:
[email protected] m: 07818557393
References (1) Ronald Grimshaw (1905-1982) was a visionary teacher at Lancaster School of Art. Other students of his who have spoken very highly of his gift as a teacher are Geoffrey Ireland, Geoffrey Clarke, Frankie Vaughan and John Waite. See http://www.ronaldgrimshaw.com.
(2) The Reimann School (existing1902–1939 or 1940), was a private school of German origin for practical design and the first commercial art school in Britain. Albert and Klara Reimann founded the Reimann School in Berlin in 1902. By 1914 they had developed a successful vocational curriculum that trained students not so much for the Arts and Crafts Movement, but for the design aspects of the commercial world. Graphics for printing, window display, stage design, fabric design, and fashion-related classes were offered. Driven from Germany by virulent Nazism the School was re-established in London in January 1937. Its teachers included a young Leonard Rosoman, Eric Fraser, Milner Gray and Merlyn Evans with the poster designer Austin Cooper acting as Principal. Occasional lecturers included E. McKnight Kauffer and a young Richard Hamilton later to become a famous Pop Artist worked for a time in the Display Department. Drawing, graphic design and photography were all part of the curriculum. Its alumni in Berlin included the photographers Walter Nurnberg (1907-1991) and Elisabeth Meyer (1899–1968) and in London the art dealer Annaly Juda and the illustrator, designer and sculptor in paper, Bruce Angrave who created paper works for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and Expo 70 in Japan. Also Dorrit Dekk and the TV Presenter Jon Miller. By 1940 the School had closed due to the commencement of hostilities and in 1943 enemy bombing destroyed the premises which were located in Regency Street, Pimlico.
www.artbiogs.co.uk/2/schools/reimann-school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reimann_School
(3) http://users.waitrose.com/~wrs/ (4) http://www.kurthahn.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordonstoun) (5) (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/adrian-heath-1260) (6) Freddie Spencer Chapman DSO & Bar, Ed (1907-1971) was a WWII veteran, famous for his exploits behind enemy line in Japanese occupied Malaya. After the War he was asked to establish a school for sons and daughter of British Forces and Control Commission civilians resident in the British Zone of occupied Germany. This was King Alfred School (1948-59) based at the Ruhleben Barracks at Pl„n in Schleswig-Holstein, which had been the German Navy U-boat training school in the War. Freddie Spencer Chapman was a maverick, visionary headmaster and King Alfred School was the first successful comprehensive, co-educational boarding school in the world. It has been described as a 1st Class Success Story. Pl„n is beautifully sited by the Great Pl„n Lake and several smaller lakes touching the town on all sides, with Pl„n Castle sited on a hill nearby. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie-Spencer-Chapman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pl„n (7) Jane Truzzi-Franconi: www.art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/the-collection/by/artist/id/2. (8) Iris Birtwistle (1918-2006) was a “Perceptive and demanding poet and gallery owner whose aesthetic gave her a cult status in the British art world” Peter Standford, Guardian Obituary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jun/23/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries She had a gallery in the coastal village of Walberswick in Suffolk, and later on the North Norfolk coast.
