Margaret Romanes: art & psychoanalysis

               

 

Yes, I know. The Scottish artist, Margaret Romanes, with her bird and flower woodcuts that somehow seem to miss the point, is probably the last person you would associate with the methods of Sigmund Freud. But there it is and, I have to say, Still life with blue jug is worth a second look. For someone who had no training, she had the essential understanding of form necessary to make a print without a keyblock. It all ends up looking like a linocut (and nothing wrong with that) and she clearly felt she had to make the colours bright enough to distinguish between her various shapes. But at least it is wall-to-wall colour unlike so many of her better-known prints. And I am not going to go on about those.
                                                                                

What is interesting is that she could perform in cream and grey just as well. She was encouraged to paint by Stanley Cursitor. He had started out as a young man down from Orkney in the lithographic printing business before going on to train in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art during the fairly short period before the first war when Mabel Royds was teaching at the department. In common with Scottish contemporaries like Anna Findlay and Francis Blair, Romanes also made her way down to St. Ives in Cornwall. I think 'only select' was the watchword she used when she made St. Ives, Cornwall. It owes a good deal to Cursitor's post-war studies in monochrome but she was wise enough to learn from him and, in fact, she describes the huddle of sunlit buildings just as well as the still life objects but uses far fewer colours. The source of light is evident, the shadows intriguing. All of which goes to show that not all depth psychology has to be sinister.
                                                                             

None of these prints are dated so it is hard to make very much sense of her career  but in the late twenties, Dr. Winifred Rushforth arrived back in Edinburgh fresh from the Tavistock Clinic where she had been undergoing psychoanalytic training. I'm not sure what the exact time sequence was but her husband took the job of registrar at the College of Art after his business in India failed. Romanes then began her training under Rushforth and funded the setting up of the Davidson Clinic where Rushforth could work supporting mothers and children as she had done in India. It struck me as extraordinary at first that an artist who had made prints with not the least hint of surrealism or psychological depth would become a psychotherapist. But that was what she did. All of which really should remind us how little we know about these artist and their lives.


Some of the prints are for sale at Sulis Fine Art but, as you can see from the Cornish woodcut, the condition is less than perfect. They turned up in a job lot at auction in Edinburgh so her work is still floating about somewhere.