Lorna Binns, watercolourist (READ!)
Hyfler/Rosner
Another fascinating, beautifully researched and written obituary. And when
you read the last line, you'll know why.
The Independent is now my favorite source for obits.
Lorna Binns
Watercolourist who relearnt her art
19 September 2003
Lorna Emily Harrison, artist: born Wadsley Bridge, Yorkshire 23
October 1914; married 1940 John Binns (died 1980; two daughters); died
Lancing, West Sussex 10 September 2003.
Lorna Binns used to say that a tutorial spent with the artist Paul Nash at
the Royal College of Art was the most important half-hour of her life.
Although she herself was studying fashion at the college, she had entered a
drawing for a competition. Nash, who was an external assessor, had spotted
it and sent word that he liked the picture and wished to see her. She was,
she said, "very inarticulate and very shy, and so was he". Nash had been
badly gassed during the First World War and used a throat spray all the time
he was talking and did not look up while he spoke but only concentrated on
her watercolour sketch. Using a strip of neutral paper he demonstrated that
she should not divide colour with black lines, as she had done in the
drawing. "Colour on either side changes the colour in the middle," he said.
Binns was insistent: "That was the most important thing ever, ever, said to
me."
It was all he discussed, knowing that it was the key to her future, and the
remark coloured, literally, her own creative work for the rest of her life.
It had not been her intention to do so but she became an artist. She worked
in watercolour, the medium which was natural to her, for she never used oil
or even gouache; she painted with an exquisite poetic instinct and her
pictures are full of movement and light and shimmering with colour.
She was born Lorna Harrison in the village of Wadsley Bridge, near
Sheffield, the youngest of three children. Her paternal grandfather had been
head engraver for the Manchester Guardian but, with the decline in
engraving, the family had lost money and moved to Sheffield to find work.
Her father set up a firm making decorative leaded lights for new houses, and
he also made furniture with stained glass. (An uncle was the glazier for
Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.)
The family home was full of her father's and grandfather's watercolours, and
Binns thought them very old-fashioned until she herself began to paint, and
then she understood how good they were. At the age of 10 she won a
scholarship to the Abbeydale Grammar School for Girls in Sheffield - the
teachers insisted that she be called "Laura" because they thought the name
Lorna pretentious.
Naturally talented, she had drawn all her life but her art mistress did not
believe that she could be so good and accused her of tracing drawings from
Ivanhoe: this, she said, was her first experience of injustice in life, and
she glowered at her teacher for the next four years. From school she went to
Sheffield College of Art. Although the teaching was rigid and unimaginative,
at the end of four years she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.
The School of Design, in which she had won a place, obliged her to study
architecture for a year (she won a prize for a plan for a penguin pool) but
at last she was able to study her great love - fashion. Even after half a
century Binns could describe with an almost sensual pleasure the clothes she
had made, recalling how they had been cut and stitched, the texture of the
fabric - some of which she had spun herself, and how they had hung from the
body. To design, make a pattern, cut, sew and fit a dress might take about a
fortnight; the clothes themselves were bought by the fashionable London
ladies who paid for the material.
In 1938 she was awarded a fourth-year continuation scholarship, at the end
of which she would have gone to Paris to pursue a career as a fashion
designer. However, war broke out. For a short period she taught fashion
illustration at Tottenham Technical College but, with no money and in order
to avoid the Blitz, Binns returned to Yorkshire. Instead of being in a Paris
fashion house, she found herself on a farm near Skipton.
At the beginning of 1940 she married John Binns, a fellow student - of
industrial design - at the RCA, but it was impossible for the couple to live
together, and Lorna's career in fashion seemed over before it had started.
While he was sent to Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire to make models from
reconnaissance films of northern France, she was conscripted to work as a
clerk for a firm of leather workers in Keighley. Here, she said, she learnt
how the working women lived, and it seemed to her too that, although many of
the factory women were practically illiterate, in communal singing they sang
like angels.
At the end of the war the couple went to live in Chelsea and then to
Kingston upon Thames, where John Binns was Head of the Design School at the
College of Art. They worked together as artists for the taxidermist Roland
Hill (for whom they designed paper and leopard-skin hats) and made a mosaic
for the Weymouth Theatre which had been built by Oliver Hill. They also
designed candlewick bedspreads and Viyella fabric for the Ideal Home
exhibition.
In later years she felt that she had accepted all too readily the
traditional role of willing partner and housewife and this had been to the
detriment of her own creativity. It was only as her children began to grow
up that Lorna Binns herself began to paint for herself, finding time in the
evening after high tea. When she began again she discovered that she did not
even know how to mix colours and had to teach herself to paint afresh.
Her early academic training having led to a hatred of still life, most of
Binns's work is concerned with landscape, although she also painted
architecture and intense, intimate studies of flowers. Together with her
artist friend Joan Vernon-Cryer she travelled widely in Europe. Venice was a
particular delight: "When I am looking for a subject, I see something very
beautiful which excites me and in that moment the reason for working and the
final feeling of the painting is born."
Perhaps because her natural manner was so fluid and so simplified, she had a
particular talent for painting water. The flashing, darting shapes and
colours of koi carp which she watched in Kew Gardens inspired a series of
watercolours which she regarded as a highlight of her career. A painting she
made of the runners in the first London Marathon "massed like dahlia petals"
was used as a cover for Reader's Digest. Her pictures are in collections
worldwide.
In 1973 Lorna Binns was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society. Membership
gave her enormous pleasure and she enjoyed the friendship, companionship -
and gossip - which the society offered. It also gave her recognition as an
artist, which was a matter she took seriously.
A short, slim figure (she said she had been tiny as a child), and always
beautifully dressed, by nature she was kind, modest, shrewd, principled,
always generous in her praise. A religious background had influenced both
her views and her art. Many things amused her and she had a fund of
stories - often told against herself - which she related with peals of
laughter. The National Sound Archive at the British Library holds recordings
of Lorna Binns in conversation.
After her husband's death from a stroke in 1980, Binns moved to a small
house in Surbiton with its yellow curtains ("Something has to be yellow in
life"), shelves of teapots and her own paintings on her walls (those with
green spots on were for sale). In later years she suffered from ill-health
and moved finally into residential care in Lancing, although she was
painting until the end of her life - her last pictures were of beach huts.
For her funeral everyone was instructed to wear bright colours. She was also
very curious to know what any obituary of her might say.
Simon Fenwick