When she was invited by a team of surgeons to watch them operate…
I’m half way through my first OCA course, Start Drawing. On page 17, there’s a question about the artist Ben Nicholson – “Why did he simplify still life forms and negative space and superimpose them on the Cornish landscape?” Good question. I didn’t know but knew at once that I wanted to find out. I’ve ordered a book on his work and life from Amazon, googled him on the web and have a sense that I’m on the way. The reason for the delight in the prospect of researching the question was that it brought back a flood of memories of one of the most enjoyable days of my life!
It was April 2005, and I was in St Ives. I had a day to myself to explore the Tate, the Barbara Hepworth museum and sculpture garden and numerous small galleries all over the town, all set off by the golden beaches and turquoise waves. At the Tate I saw Denis Mitchell’s “Ascending Forms” — elegant polished bronzes spiralling upwards, an expression of the spirit’s desire to soar. The idea was first conceived of, I read, when he was forced to work underground in the tin mines for the duration of the war. I learned about the St Ives artists, and their excitement about the new forms of abstract art. I have scribbled a quote in my logbook, by Peter Lanyon I think, “how do you paint the flight of a bird, the currents of the sea, the warmth of the sun, the columns of air? Not by painting a seagull suspended in the middle of the canvas!” (Note to myself, make sure you reference your notes properly in future!)
In the Barbara Hepworth museum I saw something which stopped me in my tracks. The notice next to a small sculpture said that one of the inspirations for the work had been her appreciation of the post-war spirit of cooperation and social regeneration symbolised by the newly founded National Health Service. It struck me as inconceivable today that a piece of art would ever be created in celebration of the NHS, or of any national or international institution for that matter.
I found out later she did a number of drawings of surgeons in the operating theatre and these influenced her sculptures of human forms. In her autobiography she writes “I found there was such beauty in the co-ordinated human endeavour that the composition – human in appearance – became abstract in shape. I became completely absorbed by the extraordinary beauty of purpose between human beings all dedicated to saving life; and the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.”
Growing up in the 60s and 70s I had, like nearly everybody else in my generation, dismissed the 50s as being impossibly restrictive and superficial. That day in St Ives made me think again and appreciate the optimism and vision of those times, and ability to celebrate an ideal without being ironic.