Neverends: Judith Tucker’s Fitties
Neverends: Judith Tucker’s Fitties
In June-July 2024 the library in Cleethorpes hosted an exhibition of a small selection of Judith Tucker’s Fitties paintings. During the exhibition some of Judith’s friends and colleagues came together to talk about Judith and her work.
Throughout June and July 2024, the library in Cleethorpes with its strong local community base played host to a selection of Judith Tucker’s paintings spanning 2013 – 2023; a fraction of the work the artist created on the Fitties nearby. This was a posthumous selection, a memorial exhibition due to her tragic death in a traffic accident in November 2023.
Judith, and her partner in life and work, Harriet Tarlo had made a coastal home and many friends in the area, sharing a love for the unique settlement of the Fitties, rich in a quiet, yet important and social history and coastal environment, its many realities drawn out by their work into beautiful images, words and metaphors to communicate issues seemingly intricate, actually global.
The library had, in previous years, also been the site for Tarlo and Tucker to disseminate their research and wider partnerships with others working in connected fields of interest as well as providing activities and opportunities from which the local community, artists and writers benefitted and mutually rich and reciprocal results were enjoyed by all.
The 2024 show was a commission arising from the library’s successful Arts Council England project fund to provide a series of cultural activities – exhibitions, poetry, performances, workshops – to enrich the area, one of low provision, ambition, opportunity.
Judith had been planning for over two years to show new work. By the time the show came around, the area had lost its Arts Development Team to financial cuts and Judith’s show – a jewel in the crown of the library’s project – due to her death, was in jeopardy.
Out of determination and love for Judith and her work, the show was made possible by Harriet agreeing to work with Linda Ingham, who had introduced the artist and poet to the area in 2013, commissioning them to create work for a project at Abbey Walk Gallery in Grimsby.
Living locally to the library meant that Linda could help with some of the logistics as well as co-curate and hang the work, which concentrated on the Fitties including pieces from the recent series’ Night Fitties and Hideaway as well as much earlier works.
On June 1, in the middle of the run of the show, an event was held in the exhibition space at which five artists from the Contemporary British Painting organisation which Judith had been Chairperson of, spoke of the gathered work, introduced by Harriet.
Paula MacArthur, Gavin Maughfling, Ruth Philo, Narbi Price and Joanna Whittle, all close friends with Judith as well as colleagues, spoke movingly about her work. The subjects of home, ecology, place, impermanence, politics and process were addressed in a wide-ranging and warm presentation of words and thought articulating the exhibition content, the intelligence in the work and Judith’s feeling for the Fitties place and its people. Their own regard for her personally and as a painter was also in evidence.
Some of the audience shared their experiences of their connection to Judith and her work, (later evidenced in the form of written feedback both local and national) and the exhibition attracted 3781visitors over the two-month run.
The June 1 audience were invited to a lunch of fish and chips and a walk around the Fitties to see for themselves the places in the painting and poems (and experience some Fitties community hospitality!)
The day and the wider exhibition perhaps acted as an opportunity for some to experience the Fitties and coastal location through paintings, words and place.
What follows are very lightly edited transcriptions from the talk on June 1 – a record of the voices and words used by the participants in relation to Judith and her work, their relationships with her, the feel of the day, and therefore NOT a piece of writing as such, with the consideration and editorial process that entails. These texts were sent to those in attendance and those who wanted to visit, but were unable, continuing the spirit of Judith Tucker’s drawing in-and-together of people and place.
I’m not going to say anything very clever and I’m not going to say anything about painting, because we have five painters to talk about painting, and I’m really looking forward to hearing them talk about the painting from the, from the point of view of comrades, friends, painters and CBP – there; they are in a flock ☺ So they’re here … and I’m literally going to say a tiny bit about the Fitties and our work and its stages (in the end, I thought that could be really tedious, so I’ve printed out a little account of the stages of our Fitties work which I have written for the CBP website) but this place, which was basically a muse to us, it spoke to us; as you can see from this panting I’m standing near. This was a very early work and it was the beauty of the coastline, you know, that was the first thing that we saw; but then we had to stay somewhere and we discovered the Fitties, and I said ‘why don’t we ring one of these numbers in one of these windows,’ you know and then that began our obsession with the Fitties and it became a place of inspiration but also a place of refuge.
It’s an incredible place as some of you who are here in this room know well already and some of you don’t but you’ll see later when I hope you’ll take up the kind invitation to visit; because it holds the history of generations of happiness really for people who have stayed there, and, you know, it’s just a place for the dwellers of the Fitties and the visitors of the Fitties. It’s a resting place, it’s a haven; and the landscape is a haven too, you know, for a lot of living creatures, birds and creatures, sea creatures there’s a really strong of sense of that in the work but also in the people of the Fitties who – most of them are feeding foxes and encouraging hedgehogs and keeping birds going on the Fitties. For us as well, it’s a place of hope, most people on the Fitties are in some way resistant to the dominant mainstream (and look where the dominant mainstream got us) you know, it’s not a homogeneous community as pretty much everyone who knows it knows, but pretty much everyone has some resistance to-to what is dominant.
So for us it was a place of great hope and inspiration, and it helped Judy to-to-do all this work, you know, she did so much work, Imean – this is a fraction of the work she did from the area and for this show we focussed , Linda and I, we focussed very much on the Fitties stuff ‘cos we felt that that was appropriate and of coursethere’s also all the landscape work that she did around the Fitties as well, which is another part of it; and she would have gone on doing work here; we would have gone on doing work here ‘cos we’d just embarked on a whole new project on dunes and verges.
So just a tiny, I’m gonna say just a tiny bit about the stages for those of you who don’t know about our Fitties work, so, when Linda first introduced us to the Fitties – we came here on a very cold foggy day and we walked along the bank and she said ‘…and there’s this out here, and this out there’ – the forts, for example… and we couldn’t see anything you know we were just walking there in the cold biting wind that you get here and you [to Linda]opened it up for us and we responded, we just responded and we just went on, you know, responding to the mystery of it and the beauty of it and er so we started with the landscape and landscape paintings and poems … and then these very sort of light-filled , rather loving little portraits that we’ve just got a very few of here and they were the first little portraits that Judy did and that’s where I began my obsession with my little poems that are written from the names that people give to their chalets which change all the time, every time people take a new one up, they give it a new name; and I played with this, I called them The Name Game series and I played with just thinking about what the place meant to people through those little poems and I’m still doing them and I’ve just carried on doing them and I keep notes of every new name that comes along.
So that was the beginning of our work and then we went into a phase where we were talking to lots of people and we worked with Annabel who’s also here and another of our great friends in this area and Annabel is, well, she does everything now, there’s no form of art she won’t do, but at that point she was taking amazing portraits and photographs and we had a show together in 2016 of photographs and paintings and poems and we went and we visited people and we met Caroline. We visited Caroline who’s one of our great local friends here and Caroline just sort of inspired us and I always remember [to Annabel] when you took incredible pictures of Caroline with that kettle and we had those inspired sort of environmental conversations about the place and what it could be…
Caroline’s chalet is an absolutely beautiful chalet and it’s there, it’s the middle chalet there with the little lights. That was the painting that Judy did of Caroline’s chalet and she also has Judy’s old horse box which has been made into an environmental moving class room which we’ll see later. So that was that phase and then the Night Fitties phase is, is here and that was quite a long phase and there was an element ofdarkness to that, it was partly the shadow of the stress and trauma around the build-up to Brexit but also around the selling of the Fitties to a private company and the desperate attempts of Caroline and many others on the Fitties to stop that happening, and that was a very big – you know, that was quite a dark time in a way, well there was a time of hope and then it didn’t well, you know, we won’t get into that history now and we can talk about that later when we’re on the Fitties, but it was also about light and I’m sure that is what a lot of painters will talk about later when they talk about Judy’s work and she was obsessed with light and depicting light and working with light and we spent a lot of time sort of meandering around the Fitties darkness and peering into people’s windows with a dog– ‘you hold the dog, I need to write something-‘ ‘-no you hold the dog while I’m taking a photograph,’ you know, that was quite a long phase and that phase went on, of the Night Fitties phase.
And then our most recent work, really, was a return to try to bring together the work on the Fitties together with the work with landscape and the environmental politics of the salt marsh and so we were doing a lot of work with the community and lots of people and by then we had a chalet and that was something that Annabel and Judy and I talked each other into, she did it first and then we did it and we had a lot of people to the chalet we had an environmental event with a lot of familiar faces here people who came to it and we spoke about salt marsh, the value of salt marsh and also the value of the Fitties community, so those Hideaway paintings over there are from archival visits we also made during that project ‘cos that was a proper Arts Council funded project with funding to go to archives and reconnect with Alan Dowling’s materials and there’s a very, very early Fitties dwelling there from that project. So those are a different phase of the work in a way, of our Fitties work and as I say there is a handout that I have photocopied here of a couple of pages so if people want more detail of those different phases and what they were all about and I think the real joy of this is to bring the work back here – probably the last time that you’ll see all the different phases of Judy’s Fitties paintings together in one space, but also in the space that they came from so it means a huge amount, thank you, and over to the painters.
… I thought I might talk through, basically, about ideas of what home is, er – our thoughts of home, people’s homes and some of the things I want to talk about, well, they’re all in the paintings for me, anyway and so I thought a bit about home on the train over and previous weeks and of course home’s really permanent and impermanent so, homes are where we, where we have our lives, or pretty much…
So the things we do: we take photographs, we make videos, we write about them; our routines, making evening meals; they’re looking after pets, they’re dealing with family members, they’re neighbours, and they’re maybe gardens if you’ve got them, they’re conversations we have with our neighbours and a lot of conversations – Harriet recorded so beautifully and turned into poems that are snatches of conversations you had, or heard, or recorded, so all these parts of home are really solid and sort of celebrated and of course homes are also impermanent and whenever we move house you pack up your boxes and tape them up and take the paintings off the wall and you see all those dirty marks around the paintings you’ve had and people have this sort of feeling that they don’t want to leave and it’s suddenly gone, the whole spirit of it suddenly vanishes with your life and kind of the small, the really small things you’ve built up with someone else together to make a life.
…and I think what these paintings for me hold is both that permanence and impermanence; so; what makes a home impermanent? I was talking to Annabel earlier on about two of the things that Harriet referred to just now. One is that the Fitties has been under economic changes that may undermine home and the changes like marriages, birth, deaths, change homes, people move for new jobs, people move from migration so everything in these paintings is both solid and forever and transient at the same time and I think it’s either at times of dusk or night time because those are the hours, of course, where shadows draw in and it can seem, if you like, both cosy… and you can look around there are little lights on in one of my favourite paintings, the one opposite me and the far end across there where you see a couple of lights on in one of the chalets and it has that feeling I mentioned in what I wrote for Judy’s funeral, you have that real sense of cosiness you can imagine the life inside that chalet; putting the kettle on and having the radio on and it’s this sense of the world getting darker on the outside and but also of course there’s both that cosiness and the sense of dark outside .
So there’s that kind of sense of impermanence and also the other thing that Harriet mentioned was Brexit. I did wonder on the train if I should bring this up because, ‘cos nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to talk about it in the current election campaign but I remember – We were driving through some of those mining, former mining villages in West Yorkshire like Denby Dale and there were Union Jacks and George flags everywhere and Brexit posters and, coming from London, that was a real shock and Judy said, you know ‘I think it’s gonna win, that Brexit’s gonna happen. Of course, she was right and I thought there was a real kind of strange irony in a way, not an irony but actually a real truth because when we were at college together, I was a country boy from Herefordshire and Judy was a cool Londoner from London and worked at the Youth Club and went clubbing cos we didn’t have a club in Hereford and she just seemed so … and there was her whole, kind of, heritage and she just seemed so cosmopolitan and yet she came up to Yorkshire to study at Bretton then taught at Leeds and stayed at Holmfirth and in a funny way she became rooted in England much more than I ever was and there’s something about how there is this huge divide between London and the rest of the-the country and there’s something else about that sense about Englishness or feeling home and so much of her work was about that trying to find a home from family that on one side her mum’s side had been uprooted for example, her PhD was all about the idea of coasts that sense of always wanting… a suitcase, the suitcase kept ready on top of the wardrobe or sense of always feel the need and the sense of desire to get away from being kind of inland, the heartland…
Towards the edges and the periphery and a lot of her work for example –this (Night Fitties) is my favourite body of all Judy’s incredible work apart from the drawings that she made for the North Baltic Coast in Germany where her family holidayed and the wonderful drawings of the wicker baskets the Strandkörbe which were used to sit on the beach because it was so windy and cold bit like the North sea and the sea in North Wales, it faces North and you don’t get much sun so – you’ve got one, Harriet, I think …? Where was I going with this? There was that idea of coast and of finding a-a kind of safe place and of being outside but of course the other side of Judy’s heritage is that her father is from just further up this very North sea that’s outside the window here, in Middlesbrough there is this sense, this might be slightly sentimental but there is a sense almost of a coming home in these works and you had a beautiful phrase just now Harriet, when you said the Fitties carried … I can’t remember but all the happiness of the lives that people had here and I thought that was so wonderful, that sense of finding, that sense of continuity and the richness of kind of daily, everyday, ordinary life that you capture in the poems and she captures so beautifully in these.
And I’ll say, I’ll finish on one last thing which was that last week I went on one of those Google Street Tours of – partly because I’m paranoid about getting lost, but I thought I’d start in Cleethorpes station and, and work my way through to here [the library] and right down, right out to the Fitties and I went through all the avenues and I got really curious about it – and I’ve never been here so I can’t wait to see it later on – and I went up onto that bank between the Fitties and the sea… apparently the sea is higher than the Fitties … that’s the other thing I didn’t mention is climate change – and one of the views, I turned that camera round and looked back towards the Fitties and it’s that view in the painting behind me there, it’s there, and in the daytime, the time of day that that little lorry or car was gong past the camera and it was that kind of time of day and a very low kind of golden light across there; it was the most uncanny feeling seeing, Judy’s paintings, there, in real life and we’ll see it all later, so that’s my ideas…
Hello, I’m feeling quite wobbly today but the things I’ve been thinking about, and I suppose I wanted to talk about, is my home in a way. I’ve written something so I’ll just try and read what I’ve written in relation to this painting in particular.
Every morning, I wake up quite early at this time of the year, go to the kitchen make myself a coffee and sit down at the kitchen table and look out onto a new day
I look out over Romney Marsh, about 200 miles south of here not quite as close to the sea as the Fitties but there’s a similar cluster of turbines which I watched being built when we first moved there. 24 turbines just popped up in-in a month, they just kind of went up, almost one a day, it was just amazing to watch and every day as I drink my coffee, the day begins, and everyone starts switching on their kettles, and the turbines gradually start to turn as people are using more power, and the turbines, the marsh and even the black coffee remind me of Judy and her paintings. And once I get my act together and get to the studio I’m just a few steps away from the salt marsh which runs along the River Rother for a mile or so and out towards the sea. This is in Rye, where my studio is, in East Sussex. I often walk there and it always feels like walking through one of Judy’s paintings of the marsh plant life and I occasionally photographed things and sent them to her saying, ‘You know, this is like being inside one of your paintings’ and all the other elements, plants and walking though that space through the changing seasons, the increasingly extreme tides, frequent storms, it’s easy to see at first hand that the climate’s changing. Recently I haven’t been able to make that walk, because they’re building new flood defences and actually doing it very sympathetically, which is nice, they’re creating/they’re extending the salt marsh, effectively and already more kind of bird life and animal life is moving in.
So these plotlands, seen at dusk hint at the end and nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ which were of course not without difficulty, and these paintings touch upon a complex industrial history and political history associated with the Fitties, but first and foremost these are people’s homes described – described with a genuine warmth and this – they’re painted with real love. The turbines seem to creep up and loom over through the shadows of this painting; modern technology kind of clashing with the comfortable nostalgia and perhaps like Monet’s steam engine paintings, this modern technology is somewhat jarring with the craft of painting itself, you know, it’s – it’s not common to see these things in paintings but, maybe they’ll become more common and comfortable, but the turbines do I think, like the luminous skies and the glowing windows, bring a sense of hope through all the adversity. Thank you – I’ll finish there.
I met Judy’s paintings before I met her herself when I was teaching in Suffolk and I took a group of students to her exhibition, Resort in 2005 in Gainsborough’s house and, yes, Gavin spoke about her paintings of the Baltic and these were those paintings where both the students and I felt they were full of feeling but also a kind of remoteness perhaps a longing, a real poignancy. Then I got to know that Judy’s mother had fled Nazi Germany in the ‘30’s and was a refugee and it’s interesting what Judy said too, that she could never know what it was like to be a refugee but only know what its like to be a refugees childand I feel that, although she had two parents, obviously one quite firmly rooted in the UK; that sense of a refugee finding refuge comes through in her work. I think her PhD dealt with that as well, painting landscape: mediating dislocation and I’m sure we feel that through the work, through the techniques, the subject-matter and through that space of the canvas. Ten years later I met Judy herself at a CBP exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery, I think in 2015. We both became members of the Contemporary British Painting Group and then when it became a fully artist-run organisation in 2019, we both joined the committee, she as vice chair and me as secretary. I also enjoyed travelling with her immensely, and Harriet, and we did a residency together in Yantai on the East Coast of China. We also exhibited together in a show in Gdansk in Poland also on the edge, a British Council exhibition in Iasi, Romania 2020 and we met in Venice too! So there was always lots of fun to be had and Judy often gave talks about landscape and walking in her work which were fascinating and she would generously include a broad range of artists in projects.
We shared a love of walking, immersing ourselves in landscape in order to make work and although our work is very different hers figurative and mine abstract, we shared interests across these different terrains and became friends.
Judy’s work and her career went from strength to strength. I feel she really found her voice in these paintings, particularly her Dark Marsh ones and there was a symbiosis with her work at the University of Leeds and her contribution to organisations like Land2 and CBP. She was always a major player, perceptive, supportive, engaging and fun and she always looked out for possible ways of including people, her students and painter friends, everyone really!
In her paintings I’ve always been struck by the chiaroscuro; I was particularly thinking about blue but also that wall over there and the way that Judy brings light through the darkness to illuminate the idea of her subject. Her monochrome grounds of Paynes Grey, Cassells Earth, smalt, aluminium and graphite powder or sometimes a coloured ground, you know they’re quite heavy and she kind of works through that. I use a graphite ground in my painting too, I like something to kind of push against, in a way. She blocked them in and then worked into them figuratively with direct mark-making. Her process involved immersing herself in the landscape, I read that she quoted Helen Frankenthaler who said: I think, (I’m not sure I’ve got this quite right) but Judy said ‘I had the landscape in my mind and shoulders and waist.’
Where did the landscape begin for her? Marking the point on a map? Walking, drawing, painting? All these elements – it’s like the weather isn’t it – you’re out there and all the time you’re picking up signals in your body you know when you go back into a landscape that you know, you remember it and somehow it digs into you and names come up and events and things like that – she saturated herself in a particular place. The Fitties work in particular truly demonstrates the embodiment of site, place and landscape through her painting. Her process was one of building up, adding and subtracting layers – underpainting, glazing, mark making, erasure and more additions; the paintings too became a site, like a palimpsest really with layers of the history of making a painting, much like the landscape itself.
Her paintings, involved, as she recognized, dealing with vulnerability, a precarity of landscape, a preoccupation as you see with the light in these chalets and vans and identity and refuge. Her Dark Marsh paintings continue these themes, looking more closely at the lives of plants and habitat and the threats of climate change. In her Hideaway paintings we have that sense of people close to nature in their flimsy vans made of wood, each with a different identity, the vulnerability evident, but that kind of understanding, that friendship of being there, of knowing it, of painting it that we all feel – we understand what she was saying through her paintings I think. They’re enveloped by darkness but bright with occupation, humanity and hope. I think there’s layers of hope in Judy’s work. She was influenced by the works of Rembrandt that she saw on her childhood visits to Kenwood House – the perfect master.
Judy said that the colour in these paintings was often ‘unplanned, unexpected, a bright patch of intuitive colour could pull a painting into a resolved state’. I’ve recently started interviewing artists about their relationship with colour for a podcast The Geography of Colour and I’d spoken to Judy about this hoping to interview her; I’m really sorry that I didn’t get to her in time. She uses colour as light and she said that ‘light is one of the most important drivers of my work and usually a catalyst for the idea of a painting’. I think Judy illuminated not only her paintings but other people’s lives, she was a great friend, colleague, teacher to many people; she had an incredible energy and verve for life; I loved the deep connection her paintings and Harriet’s poems have together and the insightful titles that go with them They’d have a party and everyone could go, (one in another exhibition) just summed Judy up, she’d have the party! It’s a very dark painting with one magically lit window and there’s a postcard of it down here which I’ve picked up; and that one over there says, I don’t like being in a house, is it Caroline? [Harriet: Caroline said it that like and I put it in a poem and Judy put it in the title.]
The gaggle of bright lights hanging in the darkness.
Judy burnt brightly and was a massive force of energy, both in her work and in our lives. She is hugely missed.
I’m gonna speak about Judy in the present tense cos I can’t get my head around the fact that she might not come in and grab me by the elbow and grudgingly introduce me to someone – er, the begrudging on my part – er – so I’ve really been privileged by having incredible in-depth conversations about paintings with Judy because she was my PhD examiner so, in that, sort of wonderful way she has of asking very simple direct questions you don’t know the answer to, the, the Viva was sort of a really friendly interrogation;I, I sweated all my tattoos off onto the floor!
I asked Judy to be my PhD examiner – there’s a close relationship between our interests and our research where we’re talking about site, we’re talking about geographical specificity, talking about ideas of what it is to embody a space and whilst our interests are very closely aligned in some ways and vastly different in others, there were very practical things that we share: painting man-made things, doing it in a very different way, being nerdy about paint in a very, very different way and just looking at these works, all together and seeing a sort of progression.
…there are a few things that Ruth mentioned like the pulling of light out of dark works very well and the way that she manages to get quite playful and quite interesting techniques that if other people did it, it wouldn’t work; so there are things like the use of – Paula noticed this earlier on, it’s sparkling, it’s got some kind of interference medium in it and you don’t see that unless you move around it. This one has similar iridescent paint in the sky; if anyone else did that it would look really cheesy but somehow she gets away with it and yeh, similarly over here on this one, it’s pink in the light in the sky and you don’t see it until you move around it and again, it’s the sort of paints – I used to work in an art shop for like, 12 years and you’d see these mediums getting introduced by the paint companies and they’d frequently get used by people who were making greetings cards or something like that and to see them employed in a really effective and really subtle way is really, really, er it’s astounding really.
And I think that’s what I really enjoy about Judy’s work. There’s these sort of multiple layers of different things that pull you in from different stand points and different view-points, there’s all of the things we’ve talked about; all of the things about home, specificity and the very sort of theoretical research cos they’re deeply academic but they’re also fun and there’s a very clear sense of Judy figuring something out and playing with it, it’s sort of , ‘hang on, how do I paint a Jolly Roger flag? Let’s figure it out. How do I paint the light coming through the silhouette of some trees’…
You can see her sort of figuring it out how it’s done and the sort of playful economy and in a way there are similar things that are depicted across different paintings, are done in different way; I think that playfulness and that sense of thinking though painting is something that really comes through in all of Judy’s work. And the little bits where you can tell she’s saved a little bit to the end because she was looking forward to putting it on; that red light on there and she was looking forward to getting a couple of colours on the brush at the same time to paint in the highlight on the reed, and you can tell that as she’s like building up and building up to that and not wanting to rush because that would be the bit, that would be the bit you wanna get and we all have that as painters I think we all sort of gotta do this slight drudgery first ‘cos then POP! Right at the end and there’s pops in every one of these works, in every one of Judy’s paintings I think that joyful sense of a POP! is how I feel about Judy.
So, as the last person to talk, as a W, I’m mopping up what hasn’t been said; but I think what’s interesting to me about Judy’s work is that we were almost walking side by side thematically, because I paint transient structures in the landscape, in evening light, but also it’s really funny because her structures are that much more established, because I paint a tent; she paints cabins and things that have moved on further, the evening has moved on further, to darker; the way we paint , the way we talked about paint to each other, we were so similar and we had these conversations, the way we prepared for exhibitions was last-minute, we’d be really frazzled ‘have you finished yours?’ ‘no but I’m nearly finished I’ve just got another thing to do’, yeh, no, really.
So it was this kind of tandem thing, but I think light is so important in both our works and I think with the light in Judy’s paintings is the interplay of surface which is something that we talked about again and we were both really into Bachelard and The Poetics of Space and kind of inhabiting a space of you know my paintings it was really hard to talk about them without thinking of our conversations about our own work, but it’s how the viewer inhabits the work as well and you know when Harriet was talking about ‘put that down, I’m writing’, ‘put that down, I’m taking a picture of it’, you can feel the kind of movement through the landscape and you as the viewer are invited to follow along in that moment and to hide in the shadows and to observe; there’s also this, this kind of idea about light that that’s push and pull with the surface, so, you know, the, the underpainting of the illumination that’s coming from the cabins of the Fitties but also there’s the kind of flutter of light in the sky and the scumbling of clouds and this constant push-pull of surface, this push-pull of light, this push-pull of shadow which I find really beautiful.
It’s a constant interplay in the work and I really like this one over there which has the green light the street light, it’s so obviously so different and it’s that kind of neon green and I think Judy was so sophisticated with colour that you, you don’t notice and seeing the work again, you see it again with beautiful moments of colour that she’s so clever about and I hadn’t – I think Sean Williams, another painter from CBP, ‘have you seen Judy’s work?’ I hadn’t at that stage and we spoke about this beautiful ability to use yellow and shadow which is really difficult as a painter and there’s such a complexity with this that she was so skilled at doing.
So, in terms of light, there’s a subversiveness as well of light, you think of light as illumination and there’s also like an idea of hope and also you’re not home and in the shadows but also in something you said, Harriet ? the idea of not being allowed to be here, be in your homes during the closed period and the idea of concealing that light there and blackout curtains and hiding and light becomes subversive instead of illuminating which I really love that kind of idea of it.
Judy did a talk about Ruskin at the Guild of St George a talk about Ruskin and some of his ideas of ruin, which again moves into both our work and again this sort of transient structuring you know, we spoke a lot about the, the fragility being transient structures and, and subversive really in the idea that they’re not the classic ruin at all, they’re not the idea of time and man’s presence and kind of great themes, they’re a subversion of higher things, which again is interesting and thinking about the Fitties being reclaimed and called back, you know these were amazing things that people escaped to and claimed and moved out of society now they’ve been called back in and drawn back in really interesting things there.
I’m trying not to repeat too much, I’ll check my notes, yeh, the idea of environment and the Dark Marsh paintings this holding again, this push and pull something which, it’s always this meniscus, this meniscus of light in the windows and it’s the same in the Fitties, this tenderness between environment and habitation and whether the Dark Marsh either is encroaching but also protecting, the idea that it holds water and protects it and it’s kind of deeply fragile understanding of the human in the landscape environment which I find so kind of beautiful in Judy’s work and there’s a real , finally, a real love, understanding of landscape which we were talking about that you know landscape being within you and that touch of light on trees and the paint and it’s really hard to paint trees, it’s hard to paint the specificity of them you can see the Lombardy poplars, you can see the oaks with the ivy and you can see that she understands those trees, she understands how to translate that into this tree-less medium of paint and that beautiful moment and that beautiful understanding of nature and light.
