Ismene Brown
The sculptor Henry Moore said: ‘Artists, in a way, are religious anyhow. They have to be if, by religion, we mean that life has some significance, and some meaning, which is what I think it has. An artist could not work without believing this.’
Eliza Andrewes, my godmother, intensely admired Moore. She was strongly religious in the orthodox sense, but all of those in this church who have a painting of hers will understand exactly how Moore’s explanation fitted her. As you know, Charles died two months ago – in fact today was to have been his memorial service. The Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem we just heard reflects to perfection how much Eliza loved him and how that love was the core of her daily existence. It is not surprising, in a way, that she did not live long after him. Eliza’s landscape had been altered by his death, in a fundamental way. Maybe she felt ready for the end of her own journey.
When I think of what was to be the final exhibition of her pictures, last year in Highgate Gallery, which like the Abbots Hall and Castlegate galleries in Cumbria regularly showed her latest work, I see paintings that revealed a true visionary – an artist who sought light, couldn’t help pursuing it, running after it to catch it, as if to paint it right would be actually to feel it, to understand it, to enter it. In the Highgate exhibition there was a remarkable contre-jour triptych of light through trees, which suggested that Liza increasingly saw through the sun itself, into an ultimate source of light. What to most of us is merely the great warming star that rises and falls over us, enables us to see our daily way, was to Eliza a metaphor of God, fearful, tremendous and miraculous, but also the final home.
I’m struck as I remember back over the decades, how many of Liza’s pictures were representations of holes, portals, places of transition, or meeting places between different states, solid and liquid, liquid and air. She painted mountains and lakes, yes, and most of her pictures bear the names of these hills that she’d walked often and knew well. But the Skiddaws and Castle Crags, the Wastwaters and Bassenthwaites, that reared agelessly from the earth’s mantle, or plunged mysteriously down into it, were always in an exultant and constantly altering engagement with the air and with light.
Liza was the most sociable of hostesses, as her long service as housemaster’s wife in Eton proved, but her inner eye was far away in places only a highly tuned and spiritually directed imagination could reach. High in the sky in cloud paintings, flying through holes of cirrus into the blue beyond – rolling in grass, peering with a vole’s eyeview through the whiskery seed heads at marvellous sunset effects over a distant ridge – or standing still at a window and meditating on the rampant Brontë-esque darkness as the moon rose over Westmoreland.
People didn’t cluster in Liza’s painting, and nor on the whole, did their activities. But that didn’t mean she did not enjoy, with a lively eye, what they did and what they saw. She made a huge, strikingly beautiful set of wall-panels for the Corrymeela reconciliation centre in the then terrorised Northern Ireland, which hang to this day dominating their dining room – possibly Liza’s favourite room in any house. She made stunning theatrical props for boys’ plays at Eton on a wing, a hope and a tub of Copydex.
Often asked to do portraits of people’s houses, Eliza had mercy on the residents’ pride in the romantically rioting clematis around their gates even as she pointed out the facts of stonework or roofing with her pen.
She adored watching movement – she loved coming to dance performances. A month ago she dropped everything to attend a particularly inscrutable and cutting-edge piece by William Forsythe at Sadler’s Wells, and she was captivated by Merce Cunningham’s choreographies, where totally abstract dancers movements met abstract art and music in a random collision of human activities. Liza knew the movements of the body as well as she knew the movements of cloud. That she could instantly capture with wit and acuity the way people move in the street was evident from her lithographs of Eton College, and again in the studies and sketches she did for her Manual for Drawing and Painting, which was commissioned by the Teach Yourself series in 1978, where her instructions for figure drawing have an almost incidental virtuosity about them. She was kind and she was exact, which made her an outstanding teacher. As she wrote firmly in the Teach Yourself book, “The imagination is not always as reliable as the eye.”
But it’s the imaginative eye that distinguishes a really fine artist, who seizes a viewer and carries them off to see with her. Eliza’s pictures documented a soul’s journey alone in the vastness of the world that surrounds it, and it’s a journey that communicates excitement. When I was a child I remember Liza’s paintings being thick, tactile, crusty, almost modelled in acrylic ridges and troughs. A blind person would enjoy those pictures – I have a large moonlit landscape from the mid 70s that it’s a pleasure just to run one’s fingers over. Eliza was a most elegant lady but her hands were strong and practical, more often decorated with blobs of paint than rings, hands that loved dogs and muddy children and long day’s walks – and when you look at her pictures you can feel how she has dug her hands in the earth, has felt the rock, the moss, the oozy swamps.
When she turned to watercolour, the knowledge of those geological and botanical textures was translated without apparent effort into this diagonally opposite medium where no adjustment could be done to the paint as she worked – where the thought had to be transparently clear in the mind before brush met paper, and the thought had to be made in a quite different way. In watercolour she had to think in layers of time, know water’s properties and finely assess how much solid colour was needed, and in what order – she had to have the skill and patience to wait for the exact point of dryness when another layer could be added, with a new set of information about opacity or translucency. What a bold curiosity she possessed, that was able to ask the question whether the hardcore materials of this planet, that she’d paid such sensual attention to with thick, substantial acrylics and charcoals, could be transfigured from earth to water, from body to spirit. And then, having shown that it could, she moved on yet again, taking that new mastery of delicacy with her back to acrylic, and her last transfiguring paintings of sunlight through Hampstead Heath’s trees – veiled, ethereal pictures, the working process now totally focused on pure vision.
I am happy to possess two pairs of Liza’s extraordinary landscapes ‘Above Derwentwater’: a pair of watercolours and their related charcoal studies. The charcoals radiate that powerful drive and physical connection with the paper that her earlier acrylics had; the black stick judders off the white paper, heedlessly leaving powder and bits of debris as part of the picture – she’s in an excited, urgent mood. What is telling is that she has split her portrayal of a natural phenomenon into a diptych, because she must communicate something more than just the sight of it – she’s telling us what she’s thinking. In the left-hand picture she urges us to look right this instant at an astonishing effect in a valley the other side of the lake, where cloud and fog and water seem to gurgle and seethe volcanically. It’s an explosion just occurring – a sight in itself – complete, a lesser artist might think. Yet Liza says otherwise: the right-hand picture shows, it seems, the consequence on the landscape of this event, the clutching trails of vapours and chilly mists that will soon snake over the water towards you if you stay awhile. With that spectacular fact comes this slow effect, she says. And then you look at the watercolour versions – and you’re amazed at how what was black and white over there, graphic, an intense scribbling of what’s happening before her eyes, has become an aria in understanding, where the turmoil and fogs are part of a wider harmony, where the sky is blissful and clear far above, and the cold purples, turquoises and livid oranges meld lyrically – “drinking in a pure organic pleasure”, as Wordsworth put it in the poem we just heard. This is art that captures one’s mind, as well as delighting one’s eye.
To sum up, I think of Eliza the painter as always in pursuit of the marvellous. A real Wordsworthian. Someone whose motivation was above all love – love for her family and friends, and love of the splendour of creation. Alive in Wordsworth’s phrase: “through every hair-breadth in that field of light.”