Mary Newcomb; painter whose art lay in the rhythms of nature and the rituals of rural life
Hyfler/Rosner
Passionate painter whose art lay in the rhythms of nature
and the rituals of rural life
Ian Collins
Monday March 31, 2008
Guardian
Visionary painter Mary Newcomb, who has died aged 86,
displayed an affinity with English folk art and a grasp of
natural science that was anything but naive. Although
falling into the tradition of Blake, Turner and Palmer - and
latterly of Winifred Nicholson, Mary Potter and Elisabeth
Vellacott - in making poetry from the rural picture, she was
an untrained and entirely intuitive artist who always
claimed she could not draw properly. Late in life she
thought she had finally understood the meaning of the word
"tone".
But this extreme modesty, coupled with an elusiveness some
wrongly thought fey, masked an inner resilience, a steely
quest to pursue an intensely felt vision. Ironically, work
by this outsider's outsider came to be collected by the
stars of a cosmopolitan world, including film directors,
television personalities, business magnates. In her
scintillating work all could recognise the truth of precious
things that may previously have gone noticed.
She was born Mary Slatford at Harrow-on-the-Hill, but she
developed a passion for the English countryside while
growing up in Wiltshire. After a general sciences degree at
Reading University, she taught maths and science at Bath
high school. Next to nature, art really was her mainspring
and, in 1945, she volunteered as a student helper in the
Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre being set up by bird
painter Eric Ennion on the Suffolk-Essex border. Lodging in
Willy Lott's Cottage, overlooking a favourite scene of
Constable, she learned the art of observation and of taking
copious notes and sketches to keep an image fresh in the
mind's eye.
On a trip organised by Ennion to boost bittern-friendly
reedbeds at Walberswick, she met trainee farmer Godfrey
Newcomb, who had been raised in India. After their marriage
they lived on small farms in the Waveney valley where a
fledgling painter would find everything she needed for her
art.
But her first creative venture was in clay, having earlier
taken evening classes at Corsham Court, the Wiltshire arts
school and bucolic idyll run by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis.
She and Godfrey then turned out decorative slipware which
harked back to medieval pots and was popular with a new wave
of craft shops.
Within a few years Godfrey was running the farm and pottery,
as Mary finally found her vocation in painting while also
raising daughters Hannah and Tessa (the latter now a
distinguished artist in her own right).
She became a stalwart of the Norwich Twenty Group (where
lucky buyers secured her pictures for £20), before daring to
take a bag of work to London dealer Andras Kalman, the
Hungarian refugee who had championed LS Lowry in his first
gallery in Manchester. On that occasion the Knightsbridge
premises were thronged with people, so Mary went home again.
But her second attempt resulted in an instant meeting of
minds and the start of a model relationship between artist
and dealer.
With a dozen solo exhibitions at Crane Kalman from 1970, and
further shows across Europe and in America, the Newcomb name
was firmly on the map. There were purchases by numerous
public galleries including the Tate and in 1996, a splendid
monograph by Christopher Andreae, recently republished. Her
art lay in the rhythms of nature and the rituals of rural
life - in her chickens, guinea fowl and, best of all, sheep,
in village fetes and country shows, or in incidents glimpsed
as she travelled on the bus, or walked or bicycled. Her
canvas ranged from the tiniest insects to the night sky.
Lyrical titles could underline the poetry of the pictures. A
view of an ancient farmhouse lost in a field and closed up
save for a tiny attic opening was called Mrs Meek Opens her
Window to the Larks. After the Train had Gone showed horses
running in a field. Perspective and proportion could run
amok in her work - walkers or cyclists were dwarfed by
bunches of allotment flowers. But, however unwittingly, she
made a key point about the ways in which everything can
connect within the harmony of the universe.
With pictures such as Ewes Watching Shooting Stars and Some
Bees do not Die but Remain on their Backs Confused, there
was always an overwhelming sense of awe and often a note of
wry comedy about the strange nature of existence.
Her successive studios contained jumbled notes and drawings
and souvenirs from rural journeys latterly as far afield as
Orkney and the south of France. Several pictures would be in
progress at any one time; first streaked with vibrant
combinations of abstract colour, then propped against the
wall, and turned into new positions until they suggested a
remembered scene. New images could be brushed on top of
upside-down old ones. Towards the end, her paintings became
sparer, lighter, larger and increasingly abstract; they were
works that could hold their place on the walls of major
museums. But they always referred back to observable reality
as she saw it.
Acclaimed by fellow artists from Ben Nicholson to Mary
Fedden, she was also admired by numerous writers. JG
Farrell, who was to be swept off a rock while fishing in
Ireland, ended his novel The Singapore Grip by detailing her
paintings on the wall above him as he wrote.
Mary found in East Anglian author Ronald Blythe an
especially kindred spirit - his words and her pictures
memorably combining in the book of essays Talking to the
Neighbours. Soon afterwards, the cover painting, showing
bullfinches whirring around a thistle like ponies on a
carousel, was destroyed in a fire in Kalman's flat.
Godfrey Newcomb died in April 2003 and Mary suffered a
debilitating stroke in the October of that year from which
she was not expected to recover. But she had a tenacious
hold on life, and a fascination for the immediate world even
in extremis. Although she was severely paralysed and unable
to eat or speak, her mind remained her own to the very last
morning four-and-a half-years later. Her final lease of life
sounds hellish, but was not.
The atmosphere in her nursing home at Darsham, near
Saxmundham, Suffolk, was astonishingly like that of her
successive houses - an old cat might be asleep on a bedside
armchair, birds thronged window feeders and chickens pecked
at a glass door.
Mary, who had always existed primarily in a rich interior
world, was not so much stoic as endlessly interested and
often amused. She was perfectly aware that she had painted
some wonderful pictures.
· Mary Newcomb, painter, born January 25 1922; died March 29
2008
Hyfler/Rosner
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> Mary Newcomb
> Passionate painter whose art lay in the rhythms of nature
> and the rituals of rural life
>
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