Mary Fairclough in the studio

Tara Heinemann has sent me some photos of more proofs and prints by Mary Fairclough. I'm starting off with the best linocut by her I've come across, this powerful portrait of a gypsy woman. I've seen this for sale before so I'm certain it's a finished print and looks like another of her portraits based on a photograph. (Please bear in mind that many of the ones below are working proofs as Tara used to own a studio folder).

Just to show she doesn't always go for high drama, we see her in gentle mood, with this subtle study of alder trees. Although I was about to say I thought she was strongest on portraits, I love the heavy horses below. A tremendous sense of them moving forwards as they graze into the wind.

I particularly like the massed shrubs in the foreground here. Try and think of how many British colour printers at the time attempted both portrait and landscape - not many. Not entirely successful of course. The farm buildings are ungainly and the trees look obviously overprinted.

Finally her portrait of Captain Digby. This is definitely a proof. The whole image is larger and unfinished. It was a working proof for book illustration. Fairclough did in fact go on to write and illustrate books for children after the war.

Many thanks to Tara who will be standing at Antiques for Everyone at the NEC Birmingham, 28th - 31st October, 2010. That's next weekend. Be there, or be square.

Mary Fairclough

First up is the British artist, Mary Fairclough. Born in Bristol in 1913, her career began only a few years before the outbreak of war with a striking concentration on the human face and figure. Peasant women, Roma, native north Americans, a character from Gilbert & Sullivan are all in the youthful mix.

Here she takes on Howard Coster who took the photograph of Grey Owl during his speaking tour of Britain in 1935. Cropping Coster's image, she moves the head into the top right hand corner, turning his gaze away from the viewer and turning Grey Owl into something more like a Nigerian sculpture, both expressionist and backwoods with nothing stagey about it, unless we detect the heroic pose of a matinee idol. There certainly is the sense of the big screen. It could almost be an American print of the thirties. Ironically, she had made him look more real than he was. It eventually turned out that Grey Owl had been brought up in Hastings. There is a similar sense of drama in the classic colour linocut called 'Glamorous Night'. A woman is left alone whilst others whirl behind her like truncated DH Lawrence dervishes. She gazes down sadly as a bearded man approaches. Perhaps he is a revolutionary leader. This is a peasantry that has broken out into the jazz age. Not content with making linocut look like wood engraving, she also masters colour woodcut for a drole image of Poobah from Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Mikado', a tour de force of folds. She creates another subtly fractured image, astutely avoiding a pastiche of Japanese art by choosing a theatrical subject. The topknot and the irises are equally inspired.