Laura Knight Exhibition : Presented by The Friends of Dame Laura Knight Society, Malvern and Colwall Branch.
Between the dates of the 30th of June and 4th of August anyone visiting Waitrose, Wilko’s and shops on Church Walk in Malvern was treated to an outdoor exhibition of 25 good quality poster size reproductions of paintings by Laura Knight.
It was plain to see from the close interest paid to the pictures on display by people who seemed happily distracted from their shopping, that her depictions of local scenes around Malvern and Colwall and other subjects attracted much admiration – both in the quality of the art and the surprise to learn that she had spent many years from the early 1930s to the 60s visiting and living in Malvern. This was evidently unknown to many of the people who had stopped to look at the display.
A new book published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her death in 1970, describes Laura Knight’s time and work here: ‘Laura Knight In the Malverns’, by Heather Whatley, and with its very informative text includes many paintings, photographs and maps of the area, shows how highly she valued her time in Malvern.
The wide variety of her subjects extended beyond landscapes to the circus and theatre, recordings of war time work and civil defence activities of women on the home front, as evident in the displayed ‘A Balloon Site in Coventry‘ showing an all-women’s detachment of women operating a barrage balloon defence unit and ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring’ where a young woman is busily working at a lathe in a factory fabricating part of a gun. She was appointed as an official war artist and recorded much otherwise unrecorded war time activity, mostly showing how much was being done by women. Her remarkable painting of the Nuremberg Trials (not included in this exhibition) after World War II is well worth studying.
Other subjects illustrated in the exhibition included vibrant landscapes of the sea and coast around Cornwall, paintings of gypsies, circus characters (particularly clowns), ballet dancers, hop pickers and farm workers (some in and around Colwall) as well as the occasional portrait of celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw. She obviously enjoyed people and people with character in particular. She was, it seems, a social personality in her own rite and this liveliness informs many of her paintings of the people she chose as her subjects.
The exhibition was very well received and informed many people of Dame Laura’s work and especially her presence in Malvern, generating curiosity, discussion and interest.
Stan Little
August 2020
‘Laura Knight in the Malverns’
In this age of gloom, happy events are hard to come by. But, as the proverbial saying has it, you wait for ages then two come along together. Both arrived in Malvern with good news for lovers of fine things.
Happy event No.1 was the delightful exhibition which took place throughout July and into August, outdoors and healthily accessible to all, of a selection of Laura Knight’s paintings. The artist’s work, displayed along Church Walk and on to the end of the Waitrose Wall, opened a window onto a woman who helped put Malvern on the map.
Happy event No. 2 was the publication of ‘Laura Knight in the Malverns’, just at the right moment to be a perfect complement, in both title and comment, to the exhibition. The author, Heather Whatley, has given us a precise and detailed account of the many years that Laura, with her husband Harold, stayed and worked in Malvern. We are treated to a kaleidoscope of words and pictures which give an insight into the work of the artist as well as capturing her personality and, an extra bonus, a picture of Malvern and the people she met whilst painting there.
Laura Knight’s artistic reputation is world-wide; the images which accompany the text illustrate this. There are portraits of the great and the good, there are paintings of gypsies and hop-pickers, there are sweeping landscapes, some peopled by the workers who toiled in those fields. There are reminders of the Malvern Festival when Malvern became a cultural centre, hosting actors, playwrights and writers. Laura enjoyed the company of such luminaries as John Drinkwater, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw and many others.
Best of all we are given a picture of the artist herself, a capricious, kind, strong-willed woman who viewed society around her with an artist’s eye; happy to catch
the moments in order to represent them on canvas for the delight of others. Laura Knight loved her time in Malvern and her work demonstrates this. This book tells of her collaboration with Barry Jackson which gave her access to the world of theatre, from Stratford on Avon to London, and back, where Laura’s paintings shine the limelight on the intriguing, always colourful, backstage dramas, The scenes are depicted as dramatic narratives; she felt very much at home in this milieu having spent much time in and around the Malvern Theatre. All of this shows us an artist of high renown – but one who was always ‘up for a lark’ and wasn’t averse to a ‘bit of a knees up’ in the Unicorn Inn.
Heather Whatley was the founder of ‘The Friends of Dame Laura Knight Society’; who more fitting to take on the role of author. Her dedication to the Society’s purpose, to raise the profile of the artist, and her wide pursuit of material needed to crown a decade of enthusiasm, has resulted in a colourful picture of a woman and her work, and a place, Malvern, and its luck to have someone who chose to illustrate much of it. G.K.