ART DOCUMENTARY - Pat Porter- A Hidden Light - GOLDMARK

This painting is, we think, the last painting that she was working on, unfinished. It was painful growing up watching them not be shown because of her never really exhibiting in her lifetime or never really having her work being seen, which then caused her great distress and frustration later in her life. We could see that it was good, but then also we couldn't do anything to help. It really was something that she could never account for and I think she really saw as some sense of failure or some sense of humiliation because she knew how good her work was and with no arrogance. She knew how good she was, which I think then goes back to her always what she could do. I wish it had been the case that somehow, somewhere along the way, she had found a way but she didn't and that's that. It caused her great upset. This is Sarah. That's me. Charlie and Chloe. So it goes from oldest to youngest. Our mum loved painting and she also painted pretty much every day. So she used to say that she felt sick if she couldn't paint or do some kind of drawing every day and obviously if she was actually sick, she was actually ill, then she would be really miserable because she couldn't. So it felt like you were constantly in danger of being drawn in some way, if you know what I mean. Yeah, she'd look up and notice. If she wasn't doing that or she wasn't doing, you know, a tedium of looking after kids, like cooking, she was creative in some way, wasn't she? Yeah. She loved painting from being a child. She grew up in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. I think she just always knew she was an artist. I mean, she remembers being bought her first, just a little set of paints in Scarborough. I definitely remember saying that when she was really quite young. And she had an art teacher who recognised what she could do. The art teacher encouraged her to apply for the Slade, the art school connected to University College London. So she applied to the Slade, she got into the Slade, that was it. She loved the Slade. She loved London. She met my dad, Tony Porter, at the Slade. He was a year younger than her, so they met in her second year. She studied with William Coldstream. She always talked to Coldstream extremely fondly. When we were growing up, they would take us to visit him and he would throw us in the air to guess our weight. And she loved that he did that, so the relationship was fond. She went to all the lectures, I think, was it the History of Art particularly? Because Dad was in the year below her. She really liked it. Yes, she went to the lectures again the following year because Dad was going to them and she just really enjoyed them I have very happy memories of the Slade. And so in their final year, they lived down in Herne Hill, down in South London, and she would talk about renting from this small-time gangster. I think they paid him by painting the building. So Mum always painted from life. She wasn't part of any fashion within art movements. If you look back at our father's work at the time, he was doing much more experimental art, which you could see as being connected to that time in the 60s and to London in the 60s. They left London and they moved to rural Northamptonshire. They lived in farmhouses. They were very remote suddenly. They were quite private people. They weren't particularly social. So it's very interesting that they particularly removed themselves from a contemporary narrative around art. She could draft, she could paint from life, she could draw from life. So that's what she did. And she never saw that she had to bend that to try and be within fashion. So maybe that's the reason why they moved, was because they had no interest in being part of movements. And that certainly is the beginning of her never really exhibiting in her lifetime or never really having a work being seen. Their first child was 69, so a couple of years after, I think, leaving London. She wasn't in the room. I remember eating paint and thinking, that's not that exciting. I couldn't take the being stared at, so I can remember her drawing this. That was why I was looking down, because I just found it, particularly at that age, I think that was about sort of sixth form. Dad had an element of success in the 80s and 90s, so therefore appeared to be not more important, but mum was supporting him rather than the other way around. But I think actually they had a very equal way of doing things. Dad was much more gregarious, so was able to have his work, to show his work to people. I think that there are contemporaries of theirs, particularly in America, there are definite artist relationships like Pollock and Krasner, where we can see the female artist and the male artist, there being kind of anger between the two or this kind of one less seen and known and heralded and that causing this kind of friction or a sense of frustration because of that. It was different between my mum and dad. She was really encouraging and wanted the best for my dad and wanted things to happen for my dad, so it wasn't that fractious relationship. She also always engaged us in talking about art. We were always taken to see exhibitions. We went to a lot of galleries. A huge number of galleries. I remember being on a really hot day in Paris because our grandparents lived in Switzerland, so we used to drive to Switzerland in the summer and so we stopped off in Paris to see. I think it In those days, travel was very much more difficult than it is today, so getting to Paris was very difficult because my dad had a job as an art teacher, so they were only able to take holidays in the school holidays and they would talk about going to museums, trying to look at art with children slung over their shoulders. She's cut this out from something. I think the work's called The Nativity, maybe. This is in the National Gallery and she would take us to go and see it and say that this foot, the way the leg is here. Wait, I can't do it with my foot, but the way the leg is and the way the foot is, she thinks is the first time that depth, this kind of three-dimensionality happened in art and she was obsessed with this foot. So as very, very young children, looking at art was part of what we did, so that when she would talk about her own work, she would be talking about colour and light and what is there and what she's trying to see, so that it just was very normal to have that as a conversation and she enjoyed it and I think she enjoyed talking with children about it as well. I remember her always loving to say that the red that she sees, we have no way of knowing if it's the same as the red that I see. We'd always be on the way home and there'd be a quick turn down a lane to scope out where to go and paint and that sort of thing, so she used to do a lot of landscapes. They had a bilingo and he used to lift the boot so it made a little roof and so he'd be doing his watercolours and so he'd park in a way that meant, you know, mum had a good view from the front seat and he could do something from the back. Whereas dad would quite happily go and stand in a field all morning and paint, she wouldn't. She'd tend to either do something at home or from the car and then once we'd all left home, they had quite an elaborate arrangement of how to get all these wet pictures back. You know, if they'd been away for a few days, they'd be, you know, tupperware variously in the boot with pictures arranged so that they could get back. I've not yet said the word Cézanne and like the word Cézanne is the key word for her. Cézanne was everything and she absolutely could look at Cézanne and look at Cézanne and look at Cézanne over and over and over. She would try and visit as many Cézannes as she could. Cézanne and Jane Austen who were her two people. Cézanne and Jane Austen were central to her life. Obsessions. She would either be in bed, she'd either be reading Pride and Prejudice or something or she'd have a Cézanne book propped up on her knee and look at a picture before she went to sleep. I think we found about 14 copies of Pride and Prejudice, didn't we? What they shared that she would talk about is this thing about there being nothing there and by that she would mean that with Cézanne it wouldn't be drawn out like this is an apple and this is the table. It's more that actually the edge isn't there. So Harry gets the thing to be there without it being here's an apple, here's a table. The same thing with Jane Austen sentences that she would say there's nothing there and so she was interested in this sense of how you convey something but she was always interested in representing what's there without assuming what's there. So I think there was a sense of what you end up with on the canvas is not necessarily precisely what you see in a sort of photographic way but it has to be a sort of true response and articulation through the paint of what's there and I think she thought that Cézanne did that the best and she was sort of aiming to do that or to surpass that I think was what she really wanted. Mum liked to look at her work. She always liked to look at her work and see her work. She would have her work around in the house. Dad didn't like to look at his own work. She would often paint photographs so the photographs would be part of a setup but she'd be painting the photograph that's actually there. So she never took a photograph of something then brought it back to the studio and made a painting from the photograph. So she always worked from life whether it be a setup that she'd make in the studio space or whether it be a portrait usually of one of us or if it was out in landscape. It was always from life so it was always about representing what's there in that moment. She saw everything in terms of sort of a kind of principle and sense of integrity and I think she was trying to produce paintings which were the closest possible expression of what she could see but not necessarily that makes it sound like it's trying to be literal and that's not what I mean and I think that's why in the later paintings it becomes more like what you might think of as abstract. It was abstract of what? What is abstract? Whereas much of her later work you could imagine someone saying that it was abstract but it's not abstract because it's always of something. It's always what was in front of her. It's also kind of not about that. It's not about being photographic. It's not about being just oh I've represented the thing that there's something else that she's doing there. But yeah it was never about being sort of literal. I think she thought about painting as a sort of analytical act so you're sort of looking at whatever it is you're painting and being really honest I suppose with what it actually is. If you see what I mean which sounds silly almost to say of a painting of an orange but there's a way in which she very strongly didn't want it to be like okay so this is what an orange looks like. It's like okay so I will paint the light that I see, the shapes that I see that are there and that's what the painting will be. There were significant objects that would appear and reappear and reappear and reappear where there are bowls with fruiting that are placed on top of art books that are open at particular pages. It can be like a bowl and a jug and they look like they're having a conversation. It looks like there's animation in the objects. She loved cups, she loved jugs, she loved particular pebbles. I mean she loved things for the relationship between things. I guess setting herself a challenge of can she represent that relationship, can she represent what is happening between those things. I think this is one of the reasons that she felt that her paintings didn't always fit into people's expectations. People think of it as still life or a portrait and expect it to be sort of pretty or ornamental or decorous whereas her work had a sort of strength to it and this kind of intensity which is then slightly disarming for what the genre is I suppose. I think mum had a complex relationship with the art market throughout her life and you know I suppose she basically sat it out to a large extent she didn't necessarily like what was happening. I think she always wanted to have been showing that's the thing it was never that she was isolating herself or fearful of showing. She wanted her work to be seen that was part of She was very shy and so she got this great self-knowledge about what her work was but an inability to then say to someone else hey this is how my work is and because by that point then her work was very much out of step with fashion within art. I think she had extremely high standards and didn't want anybody to bend what she was doing. She had incredible confidence in her abilities as a painter considering how shy she was. She would sometimes get downhearted about it about the fact that people weren't seeing her paintings. She was quite a strange contrast set of contrasts between someone who in some ways wasn't very confident in themselves socially but actually was really really really certain of their own power in what they could make. They moved here in 93. So I think Empingham is the place where she started working the most fully regularly again having slowed down what she'd had all of us growing up and then when we were at Empingham we moved there when I was about 11 I think and I think while we were there she must have painted or done some kind of drawing I think probably pretty much every day. I have a really clear memory of the sound of being painted and so if you'd be sitting there and possibly you'd have Test Match Special on in the summer. Or the archers. Yes yes true. Test Match Special was better. Yes because it lasted a lot longer. Mum was very allergic to turps and so that was obviously a central part of her painting process was that she would have to get dressed up in all sorts of protective. She'd have barrier cream, rubber gloves and she'd have a process of preparing the paint and everything so it was all ready. I think it's the History of Britain by Kenneth O Morgan. 20th century Britain and that's the Sun King. Lots of people had that book. The red one. Yeah the red one in the 70s. I don't know why but there's a picture of Versailles and I can't remember what that one was. In some ways it was a sort of endurance test because you'd have to sit very still. There was a sense that what she was trying to achieve in the painting was so important that there was almost nothing else mattered even though you're her child sitting there. Your leg would be going numb and she'd say well just five minutes longer so she could get the painting right. It was like a squabby sound because she'd have the rubber glove and the paintbrush and the palette and she'd be sort of squab squab squab squab and then she'd be just looking all the time. There'd be squabbling going on. She'd be looking looking more at you than at the picture and it was just I don't know just a real clear sensory memory I suppose of that. As well as the experience of sitting for the portrait she did actually used to just sketch you when you weren't realising quite often. If we sat for her we'd have to sit very still but she could sketch people moving around very easily and Dad always used to talk about this about how she'd been able to sketch something from out the window of a car moving along things like that with no no trouble and she and Dad if we went to the theatre or if we went to a concert they would sit there sketching so you'd sit there with this going on and so there's loads and loads and loads of sketch drawings that she has that she made of singers, opera singers, musicians, actors, all sorts of things and she was always drawing and always scribbling and it was kind of non-stop. She loved the space for the light that she could paint in. It really was the first studio that she'd had that was entirely completely her own definitely throughout the 80s into the 90s that she'd not had her own space so she would paint in the on the living room table and we would just know to not touch that easel on that setup while it was happening so here was the first time where she could set pieces together and paint and leave it and work on the same piece and work on the same piece and work on the same piece and be isolated away. It was the place that she came away to and just worked and would just think about painting all the time. She always used to bring her pictures into the house to look at at the end of the day. There's a particular patch on the wall that's got paint dabs where she would be walking past the whole time so she could look at the painting in a different light and be looking at what she was doing and really try and understand what she was doing. And you could tell because there were paint marks on the wall around where the painting would go. And often when we'd speak to her she'd be like I don't I don't know what it is I don't know if I pushed it and she would be in kind of yeah her experience of painting was very high wire it wasn't okay I've done that bit it wasn't methodical it would be can she get it this kind of sense of like it could all fall apart straight away it could all fall apart in a moment and then she'd have lost it and then it's gone so painting was high stakes. After I'd left home probably about five six years after I'd left home I think she really started to produce these paintings that were increasingly challenging to know what they were and inventive and distinctive. To me it was suddenly but I don't actually think it may have been over a period of years there was then this letting go where she was then able to start painting the light. She freed herself from worry about her legacy or about whether she was seen and could just start painting. Which I think is partly how she kept going producing so many paintings because it was just a sense of conviction of this is what I'm and I think also later in her life she did speed up in intensity and was just it seemed to have had this absolute outpouring of painting in the last few years of her life and it did she did actually used to talk about life being short and needing to to paint as much as she could and to take her painting as far as it could go in in whatever time that there was. I think in those last years there was a kind of really rapid I think opening up of her confidence in what she could do. And it started this period where she let go and she let go and she pushed further and further and further into what she could do on a canvas but then there'd be these works of extraordinary colour like really really vibrant and clashing colour. It comes to a point where they seem almost cartoonish in their electricness and their vibrancy and also a kind of gleefulness as well of like look what look what I could do like look at this look at this I can do. This painting is we think the last painting that she was working on. We say this because you know she died very suddenly and and it was a very difficult time and and and then our father died nine months afterwards from his pre-existing heart conditions. He kind of wasn't able to live without mum looking after him. It's I don't know any more than that you know it's it's interesting because actually the eye wants to read into it a figure here in a building you know it actually looks like a very different painting from what you would imagine that she would be painting. It looks very different from the other works. She was ill. She died of her of a cancer which was undiagnosed and so her kidneys were failing and so in the months before she eventually went to hospital she was less and less capable of working so maybe that's also why it's so different I don't know but yeah this we think is the last work she was working on unfinished. The number of paintings that we have I do not know but there were just paintings absolutely everywhere. It was a constant issue actually storage and all the drawings that we found in plan chests and things like that I don't know. The idea of all the pictures just sitting in storage and nobody ever looking at them and nobody ever seeing them yeah or appreciating them and then presumably you get to a point where you can't afford the storage anymore because we would all much rather they were out in the world being looked at and people enjoying them. Yeah exactly. I think she was a bit sad I think it was a kind of a combination I think she wanted her work to be seen even though she was so incredibly shy and private. Also able to be in the world like from being in London you know she could be in the world so she wasn't scared but she wouldn't necessarily seek company but she would enjoy talking to people. She didn't want to engage in a conversation she didn't want to have. I think she did struggle to talk about it she was much happier just doing it. Which I guess is another way of saying she hated wasting time. There was a sense of urgency to it I think almost always. Which is another way of saying that she spent her time painting or with her family or the time that she spent was very important to her and she didn't want to go through hoops of what you're meant to do to make yourself seem more presentable to society. I think she just just just wanted always to focus on painting. Yeah so she was very specific like that. Very brave it sounds like in her work. Yeah absolutely yeah and I think and again I think that's something that she recognised in herself in Austen characters where they keep themselves themselves but are very actually very bold and strong. I think also the experience of cataloguing and storing mum's work I think it's been really fulfilling hasn't it. We spent days in storage you know receiving pictures and work out where to put them and things and it's just really lovely to be with them. Well we know we need to try and get her work known because there we all think an artistic value. We had a lot of pictures and we needed to move them to storage. Yeah there were some that were not in such great condition and it was sort of how do we look after them really wasn't it. I just rang up for some advice and knowing that dad had known they'd both known Mike. Mike yeah and Mike rang back and we had quite a nice chat yeah and was interested in coming coming and having a look. I have known Tony and Pat Porter for many many years and in fact on quite a number of occasions we showed Tony's work at the gallery here in Uppingham. When Charlie Porter called me and said that both his parents had passed and asked me to go across to the house in Empingham to have a look at his mother's work I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. Years and years of real art it was honest it evolved beautifully over the years and was extraordinarily beautiful. We are absolutely delighted to have been asked so honoured to host this first major show of Pat Porter's work. Yeah so it's been really serendipitous that it's just sort of organically happened. And what would she make of this the exhibition? I think she'd be absolutely overwhelmed to have her work on show. Mum would have been absolutely delighted I mean beside herself she wouldn't believe it because it was so what she always wanted for her work to be seen and talked about. I was just thinking about what her reaction would have been had she been here and she was doing it when she was still alive and she would she would have refused to do it that's the first thing to say absolutely no way would she have appeared on camera. She herself would be obviously very conflicted about it she probably would find it very difficult to be sat here talking. I think she would have loved it but hated the focus on her personally she would have loved the attention on the pictures but the focus on her would have been difficult. She would have been just absolutely thrilled she always wants their work to be seen she wanted her work to be to be lived with she wanted other people to live with her work there was no desire to hoard it. She obviously had certain works that she loved and which she would keep for herself but she was an artist who wanted to have her art be seen so you know she would have been wildly thrilled by it.