Pleasing and relevant
Mark Glazebrook
Elisabeth Vellacott: A Memorial Exhibition Redfern Gallery, 20 Cork Street, Wl, until 15 May -Ellisabeth Vellacott (1905-2002) studied I ' at the Royal College of Art in the late Twenties, when Sir William Rothenstein was principal. She then struggled to make a living, based mainly in the vicinity of Cambridge — the dons tended to be interested in art more in theory than in practice — by making more or less abstract fabric designs, by occasional work for the theatre and by teaching. She was, by all accounts, an excellent teacher (and examiner) of art. It was not until after the second world war, when she was in her forties, that she began to find her own vision as an artist. She came to specialise in drawing and painting landscapes, people and flowers.
This memorial exhibition, arranged with meticulous care by Quentin Stevenson, contains work from six decades. There is an elegant and informative catalogue. The strong but gentle colour of her late paintings is well set off by the groups of grey, non-linear, indeed almost painterly, pencil drawings in which trees are observed with a charming but intense thoughtfulness.
In the mid-1980s, when she was about 80 herself, Elisabeth Vellacott wrote to a friend: 'I seem cut off from any trend.' Her paintings of the 1950s, however, such as The Madwoman Banging her Dustbinlids' and The Dwarf', do now look typical of that period. In the same mid-1980s letter she did also note, with as much surprise as pride, that there were 'many people, young ones too, who find my pictures pleasing and relevant'. Trend-setters in the art world forget at their peril that intelligent people who are seriously interested in looking at pictures are only too pleased to discover an artist such as Elisabeth Vellacott whose work gradually explains itself on its own terms, without reference to an ism or a current fashion.
Even in her more serene later work, Vellacott was by no means isolated. A delightfully contemplative painting of 1969, entitled 'Two Girls in a Room', is a case in point. On the left, a girl in a white nightdress stands in front of a bed to arrange some white flowers in a blue vase. In the centre, facing the window, in the opposite direction sits another girl with slightly pinker arms in a shorter white nightie. The walls and floor are a seamless background of subtly modulated darker and lighter greys. The sitting girl is gazing out of the window, at the blue of the sky and the greenness of the landscape. There are no bars on the window so despite the billowing muslin curtains it could almost be a large portrait-shaped painting, Pop, Op and Minimalism are conspicuous by their absence but 'Two Girls in a Room' touches on a theme treated by David Hockney in 'Le Parc des Sources, Vichy', 1970, in which people contemplate a landscape as though it were a picture.
Vellacott's 'Seaside Town', 1982, and 'The Artist in Winter', 1983, tackle a similar theme. 'Two Girls in a Room' is clearly about looking outwards and looking inwards. It is therefore about what a painter has to do in order to create art. It is also, perhaps, about the classic role of women in society.
One of the first luminaries to spot and encourage Elisabeth Vellacott's talent was Bryan Robertson. Robertson showed examples of her work in Heffer's Gallery, Cambridge, in the late Forties and at the Whitechapel in 1954. It is probable that Robertson had a hand in instigating her solo exhibition at The Minories, Colchester in 1968. He certainly encouraged the New Art Centre in Sloane Street to show her work, which it did regularly from 1972. In 1981 Robertson curated a first retrospective of her work for the Warwick Arts Centre, London and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
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