The Manicurist- A Closer Look at Derrick Greaves Iconic Painting - GOLDMARK

In the 1960s something very strange happened to the art of Derek Greaves. He had emerged on the scene about 10 years earlier as one of the poster boys for Kitchen Sink painting. He was one of the Beaux-Arts Quartet, four main figures of that kind of movement represented by Helen Lessor, amongst them John Bratby, Jack Smith, Edward Middleditch and Greaves himself. They were part of this growing movement of painting social realist pictures, quite drab, dull, muted palette that reflected post-war living in Britain. As you can see there's nothing drab, dull, muted about this strange animatic painting. Greaves explained how he became disillusioned with the Kitchen Sink style and all four of the poster boys went off in their own separate directions. For Greaves he found his paintings were getting flatter and flatter. They were kind of picking up on elements of pop art, of colour field painting in America but it was a style that Greaves kind of came to by himself. He found his paintings were kind of becoming more simple, more symbolic. This is called The Manicurist, it's from about 1965-66 and so we see this lady sitting in what I presume is a kind of nail salon shop. She's not the manicurist herself obviously, she's got her hand out, she's admiring her new nail job, these beautiful red nails set off against this extraordinary green background. We have this strange kind of quotation here, it almost looks like a square of wallpaper or some kind of interior design with the elements of kind of almost like a floral arrangement going on here. Flowers became a big recurring symbol in Greaves' art and in this strange painting we get a hint of that kind of poetic mystery that became Greaves' kind of his enduring subject. These paintings that were much less literal reflections of life in England after the war and much more kind of reflective, much more meditative, picking up on elements of literature, of other art going on at the time but at the core we still have a scene, a sort of everyday scene, a lady going to get her nails done before maybe she goes out and has a nice supper with friends at home. It is almost certainly the largest Greaves that we've ever had here at the Gallery and this green is immense, it's this beautiful colour, it looks flat but the more you stand in front of it, the more you get these kind of slight changes in the colour, the way the light bounces across this surface, it's a really beautiful painting that you just kind of get swallowed up by. A really wonderful example of how Derek Greaves developed this style, this kind of symbolic poetic style with very sparse elements that kind of just draws you in the more you look at it.