The Most Beautiful Art of Morwenna Thistlethwaite _ Exhibition Walkthrough _ GOLDMARK

Hello and welcome to another fantastic exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery Today I'm delighted to present you with the work of Morwenna Thistlethwaite Now that's a name you might not recognize It's certainly one we hadn't heard of here at the Gallery But once were introduced to Morwenna's wor Through this remarkable collection of paintings — a blend of gouaches and oils—it was evident that here was someone who thought deeply and meticulously about every piece she created Someone who had been practicing for a very long time and who was clearly a successful artist in her own right Now fortunately and I'd like to say a great big thank you here o the art historian Sasha Llewellyn who specializes in restoring female artists to prominence in her work Sasha has been able to by connecting with Morwenna's children and examining her work uncover the history behind her enigmatic life She’s managed to uncover a bit more of the story about where Morwenna came from and how her work was received throughout her life It's a story I had no idea about and it's fantastically written in the catalogue for this exhibition Now I'm not going to tell the entire story during this walkthrough I'll save that for you to pick up a copy of the catalogue if you can It's a really fantastic read But what Sasha shows is that Morwenna was an artist who was incredibly well-received both as a student and later in life and also presents a truly fascinating case study in someone who had to balance her personal life She had to balance her life as a mother as a wife and later as a widow with the art she created Morwenna was born in 1912 as Morwenna Brock and spent the last 30 years of her life as a widow Paintings created in Dandelon St Ives And that's where most of these works were made the ones you'll see around me As we move through this exhibition you'll notice that Morwenna's work has a distinctly unique style—her paintings appear cozy and familiar and quite beautiful at first glance We have delicate interior scenes featuring flowers and still lifes We also have paintings of gardens and farmlands The stories of people's everyday lives Continuing on with their daily routines But the more we examine Morwenna's work the stranger more enigmatic and more secluded it grows She has this wonderful slightly melancholic muted palette—those beautiful greens in the grassland a tone that leans toward lilacs and blues And in many cases this seemingly straightforward naive artist turns out to be contradictory and deceptively clever At first glance we're met with calm placid and gently composed paintings But as we move through this exhibition you'll also notice Morwenna's monogram her signature large and almost like a potter's mark pressed into these paintings There's an intriguing balance between bold formal accomplishment and the quiet gentle essence of these paintings—a delightful contradiction that becomes evident as we move through the exhibition What makes Morwenna's work so compelling is that it prompts us to confront the many questions we must ask ourselves about the vast number of unrecognized overlooked female artists who have worked in the last 100 years and whose work is only now truly coming into prominence For one thing we examine the subject matter of Morwenna's paintings and for the most part they conform to that stereotypical image we hold of the woman artist especially one who has children of the serene domestic scene We have paintings of ladies sitting and reading in a sitting room We have still lifes here images of the surrounding outdoor world of St Ives which she made her home for the last 30 years of her life It's a domestic world that has increasingly captured people's imagination people's interests especially I believe since the lockdown when people have become much more aware of their own domestic environments They give us a sense of calmness security comfort and coziness yet it 's also a kind of safety that as many women know can be stripped away And there's a subtle unsettling sense that something's just slightly off in many of Morwenna's paintings We have images like these here often featuring female protagonists sometimes with men in the images whose faces are turned away from us gazing out from a doorway or a window numerous depictions of mothers and children Numerous intimate small-scale family moments But Morwenna always gives us this slightly skewed perspective on these stories There's something oddly unusual and voyeuristic about them It feels as though we're intruding on someone's private life We're gaining access to a world we probably shouldn't be seeing Yet she instantly offers us comfort and a sense of familiarity within the domestic interior scene while also subtly subverting it It also shows Morwenna as a once truly compelling artist You can see it in these paintings along here especially this exquisite still life at the end with its peculiar surrealist undertones Morwenna carefully considered the arrangement of her pictures and how they would unfold across the canvas or the board Often what we receive feels like a shift in perspective or a vantage point that's nearly impossible to achieve physically So for example consider this painting here We have this woman with her presumably her child in the foreground It 's as if we're looking straight down at this table with the vase here Then the room shifts abruptly right behind them We see this vast wall with a skirting board here this peculiar convergence of angles It's almost like a Japanese print We can see every wall face in front of us And then shifting to the right here there's a sort of mirror image of this painting on the wall over there We have a path leading out into the scene right beyond up to the sea and the sky out here So in one painting in one single view We’ve got this massive movement stretching from the very near to the very far Moena's paintings often feature this peculiar perspective —almost as if we've opened the door to a dollhouse We've removed the windows doors and walls in front of us and now we can see inside It's also a quality she shared with many of the artists who worked in St Ives people like Winfred Nicholson—the ability to blur the boundary between the outside world and the inner self And that's often achieved in Moena's paintings through elements like these doorways that stretch out into the distant horizon or a window through which we can glimpse beyond That's something she has in common with those St Ives artists tracing back to paintings like the ones Matisse created in the 1910s rying to spark a kind of dialogue between the visible world beyond and the inner realm for instance in a image like this It's this peculiar arrangement of objects on the table here— what looks like fruit a book and this odd almost sculptural shape contrast to this figure below Or perhaps a small gouache painting here a delicate watercolor e intimate still life so close at hand these exquisite green leaves from the plant and the landscape from which it emerged beyond Exploring the boundary between the external world and the internal is a device many artists have embraced sparking a wide range of compelling conversations But in Moena's work it seems to serve a peculiar and almost unsettling purpose—we're never quite sure what's happening in a picture There's always something unspoken unsaid unheard going on in a painting— something just around the corner beyond in the landscape words we can't hear And it gives us this sense that we're being drawn into these stories into these small worlds unfolding around us about which we truly don’t know what’s really going on Although there's a touch of that mythic St Ives essence in the paintings Moena created during the final years of her life something in the blend of her slightly naive style and the setting of many of her paintings—these are certainly not a pastiche of other established St Ives artists And they possess a truly distinctive quality a voice all their own I believe One reason I think is that— although they are in many instances somewhat autobiographical they depict places she knew and often visited as well as people she likely saw moving through those spaces You'd have to really know the place to recognize the location of some of these paintings these Victorian-style benches these parklands and these paths that seem to lead nowhere They're certainly not the kind of traditional paintings of boats bobbing about in the harbour There's something remarkably unusual in Moena's palette as well and it's something she appears to have discovered entirely on her own There's none of the vibrancy or the punch found in someone like Mary Fedden or the kind of magentas and the kind of gold marigold yellows you might find in Winifred Nicholson There's a peculiar kind of daydream quality to the lavender sage and olive hues she employed which have been matched exquisitely I think By the way many of these paintings have been framed I'm especially thrilled though that we're able to bring this exhibition to you on film because something that's truly difficult to convey in pr and on the screen is the play of light across these paintings They're pictures which when you see them as a static image feel somewhat straightforward naive and childlike It's certainly an effect Moena was aiming for We know from her background as explored by Sasha Llewellyn that she was an exceptionally talented painter She was a standout student in her day But once you start moving around these paintings once you witness the light shifting across their surfaces and you get up close and can see the meticulous buildup of each of these images through these tiny brushstrokes and you begin to sense the wonderful undulation of movement that continues beneath them And you can see it clearly in these exterior shots You have these remarkable pathways that guide us through the scenery and it's reflected in the gentle rolling hills surrounding us in the forms of these trees and in the curves of this wrought iron bench You can see it here in this work in the tire tracks of the tractor the hills in the foreground and those in the background And especially you can see it in this painting a otherwise quite simple scene a pair of nearly Shire horses here A few people are walking through what appears to be farmland or parkland here But the way Mawenna has built up this surface and the way beneath these brushstrokes you can see the different colors layering one upon another As you move around it the light bounces and reflects off its surface giving it a beautifully dreamlike quality And it's a quality that mirrors the mysterious nature of the painting—this faintly unsettling sense that we have no idea what's actually happening within these works They capture that sense of being in a dream where events unfold around you of yourself as a spectator floating through the air watching the dream unfold all around you but never quite sure of what's happening as you' re dreaming and then of it fading as you wake up After her husband's death in 1960 she continued to exhibit in London where she was then residing and came to St Ives in 1976 She had a Cornish mother and a Cornish family with roots stretching back for generations so this was in a way a return to her homeland Though I don’t believe she’d ever lived in St Ives before She arrived at a remarkably quiet yet profoundly pivotal moment in St Ives It was a year after Barbara Hepworth and Roger Hilton had both passed away under very different circumstances and truly the 1970s witnessed an influx of a new generation of artists up-and-coming artists working in Cornwall many of them born after the war Now Mawenna was in her mid-60s when she arrived She would have been an uncommon sight There were many amateur watercolorists basket weavers potters and women who had retired to the area and coming to paint in the beautiful light of St Ives and Cornwall But she was a profoundly more resolute steadfast and accomplished painter when she arrived We’ll see in many of her paintings a recurring ensemble —not just of characters but of still-life objects Echoes of daffodils the mockware jugs you'd find in a Ben or a Winifred Nixon painting So we'll see alongside mothers and children young women going about their daily lives as well as these beautiful still-life compositions It's often in these that we truly sense Mawenna's grasp of form and texture These still-life paintings gave her the perfect chance to truly experiment with layering colors layering images and playing with composition in ways she never could before In her farm scenes and in her interior scenes as well I really love these kinds of almost semi-pseudo-cubist paintings where she subtly repositioned fragments of the wallpaper the flowers the jug the table Everything is fragmented taken apart and reassembled in this peculiar new arrangement This also sheds light on some of the background behind Mawenna's work She had worked as a muralist so she was thoroughly accustomed to adapting her designs to the specific characteristics of a given space She had also exhibited and sold well-received designs for Liberties in London and you can see that influence in her sense of pattern and color throughout many of these gouache studies here You might notice as we move through this exhibition that there are smaller gouache studies that relate to the larger oil paintings featured here This reflects Mawenna’s working process She was in many ways a remarkably old-fashioned artist Every painting began with sketches in pencil or often in ballpoint actually—quite committed ideas rendered in pen Sketching out the initial placements of key elements within the painting That would then evolve into a smaller gouache study And for a long time Mawenna was almost throwing these away or stacking them into piles She had to be convinced that there was value in these gouache studies These preliminary explorations of ideas allowed her to quickly and meticulously position her characters resulting in paintings that are thoroughly thought out There's a deeply thoughtful approach to composition at play here Every time we see subjects like this young girl playing with a chessboard or this figure gazing toward the window Mawenna is always attuned to the dynamics unfolding between these different elements in the paintings Since these were preliminary studies we often see an even wider range of themes explored in the gouaches So not only do we encounter these recurring scenes of characters playing games Gazing out the window cradling a baby or a cat yet we also engage with the real objects depicted in the painting We encounter these still lifes fragmented into unusual shapes and textures There are several truly beautiful studies along this path We have a few pieces here that capture Mawenna exploring some of those concepts like this stunning tapestry of colors in still lifes such as this painting right here Paintings that reveal she was not only a painter deeply immersed in her craft—quietly introspective and intensely focused—but also capable of drawing inspiration from the other artists in the area She was a contemporary of individuals such as Wilhelmina Barnes Graham and we know she occasionally visited Patrick Heron’s studio These are two of my favorite paintings in the exhibition It's in these still lifes that Mawenna truly delves into some of the colors that would otherwise feel alien within the landscape Some of these rich oranges yellows and vibrant reds work beautifully in these more formal arrangements complementing the kind of interior scenes she enhances But then she could also convey her own sense of purpose her own deliberate composition in paintings like this—one perhaps showing a family gathering in a park or a couple an older pair here feeding the birds this young woman walking her dog We've got that classic pathway leading us on a strange journey We're not quite sure where we are We' re in this oddly peculiar enclosed space a sense of confinement that isolates us from everything happening around us And that's a question Mawenna would ponder either silently to herself or aloud to those who came to view her paintings I wonder what's going on there It was almost as if she were searching for the mystery itself rearranging these people reshaping her composition She was seeking a setting that captured the essence of a story whose origins remain unclear to us characters we’ve never met that sense of a life continuing just beyond our grasp There's so much more to be said about Mawenna's work There's certainly more to be said about her life story and you'll find even more of that in Sasha Llewellyn's outstanding catalog essay If you're unable to attend the exhibition which I highly recommend you do At the very least pick up a copy of that exhibition catalogue It's a true privilege for us to handle a collection of this caliber featuring paintings by an artist whose work hasn't been seen in nearly two decades Even though Mawenna was a well-established artist both in St Ives where she worked and beyond She exhibited in Canada She was a regular contributor to RA exhibitions She is just one of countless legacies from 20th-century women artists whose work without exhibitions like this and without the extraordinary efforts of people like Sasha Llewellyn would have remained unseen would fade into obscurity I'm deeply grateful that Sasha was able to locate Mawenna's children find people who knew about her life and piece together some of that history And I’d like to conclude this exhibition with a quote—actually included by Sasha at the end of her essay—by the American poet Adrienne Rich And it speaks to how revision—the act of looking back and seeing with fresh eyes—is more than just a cultural chapter for women it is an act of survival It's been a true pleasure spending time with these paintings getting to know them feeling as though I'm just beginning to understand them who Mawenna Thistlethwaite was certainly the way she viewed the world It's a beautiful show There's a wonderful intimacy not just to the work itself but also to the way they've been framed and the way they've been hung in this exhibition It's a very calm show with a deeply serene atmosphere I truly recommend that if you can you come here and see the work for yourself For now I'll leave you with the stunning work of Mawenna Thistlethwaite