Monday 25 June 2012

Patience Galloway's colour woodcuts

                                                                                    
Or they may well be linocuts. But being a painter as well, I suppose Patience Galloway dispensed with the use of a keyblock. All that I can add about her was that she was working in the 1930s and exhibited with the Society of Graver Printers in Colour alongside alot of fairly well-known names today but also with others who have been largely forgotten. This may sound incredible given contemporary coverage of just about everything.


It's a shame the image I have of  'The old waggon', (which is the correct catalogue title) is so small but it is the best I could do given the money-grabbing nature of these art-price sites who have the face to even take my own images and then try to charge someone else to look at them! Her paintings are often of the mountains of north Wales and so far as I can make out from the dismal little images, they are not bad at all. The prints, though, are very much the work of a painter and the yacht is approached with elan and is exactly the kind of image you could sell in the streamlined 1930s. Stand by for more.

                                                                               

4 comments:

  1. Well well, discoveries are nice. A totally new name to remember. Curious to know who taught here. The Wagon has a Soper/Frank/Verpilleux feel to it. I agree with your sentiments about pay-price-art picture sites. Shameles scavengers they are, former city bankers and brokers probably.

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  2. I agree about discoveries, especially when you get there before the market does. Some artists in the twenties used manuals and they helped one another. There must have been alot of informal learning.

    She reminds me of Eric Slater. I like the way she connects the haystacks in the background to the wagon.

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  3. I keep coming back to the sail boat and find myself looking at my computer screen. It must have been a tremendous amount of work to create a single image. The waves themselves are a symphony of line and colour, and exquisitely rendered.

    Clearly done with a painters eye.

    I would stunned if they were in fact linocuts, the precision in that image is just too crisp to be done by linocut. However on that matter, I immediately think of Mavrogordato who did a couple of sailing prints. One, not very appealing to me and a little muddy and cross hatched to death and then another in the permanent collection of the SF Museum of Fine Arts which is a stunning jazz age print using waves of colour much like Galloway's print, but not nearly as refined.

    I am assuming Galloway either didn't have much output, or judging by the two images here, her works were not always consistent. Then of course there is the other reason....during the time there were not many women who were treated with the same respect or elevation of the male artists who created works that were often inferior to those of the women. One thing that is interesting is that women who often succeeded in the art world used to do illustrations for magazines, like Lill Tschudi did. It wasn't a hobby, it was her bread and butter.

    Anyway, an interesting and forgotten artist.

    Clive

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  4. Since I posted, the print has arrived, and it was obviously a colour woodcut. Apart from that, I found it exhibited as 'In the Solent' in 1937. That must be the one I've bought. Felicity also sent me another image of The Old Waggon where the green has faded to grey but you can see the waggon is well-rendered. The image I have here doesn't do that print justice. But then, old carts and all are not your thing.

    It may be that the war interrupted her career but I now have a list of about five prints, which is a fair start. The fact that she doesn't use a keyblock makes them simpler to print but I agree about the waves all the same. The rigging is also astonishingly fine and most of it has registered. Note that she also uses Robert Gibbings 'vanishing line' where the sails rise above the horizon.

    I feeling a bit numbed right now as I've just had a nasty extraction but I'll spare you the details.

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