Side By Side, not by Sondheim – by Willey and Henley.
These two oils are on the top landing. Colin Willey is a Dorset artist whose work I have admired since the early 1990s. In those days he exhibited in a gallery in Dorchester while hedging his bets working in a supermarket.
Colin likes to get out into the countryside or go to the seaside to paint. I hope he didn’t get a soaking painting this. It is on a larger scale than his usual pictures and in a picture of this sort, size does matter. Sometimes friends roguishly ask to go upstairs to see my big Willey. I have a few of his smaller pictures but they are still lifes. You may remember one from a previous post, if not you can see it here.
This is a portrait of me by my then mother-in-law, Nancy, Lady Henley done in the 1980s. She had been painting her grandchildren and felt ready to tackle a son-in-law. She put me in the bay window of her house on Sydney Buildings in Bath, with the canal and city in the background. As the grandchildren had been depicted surrounded by toys she furnished me with the same: Burke’s Peerage, The Spectator and a hefty dictionary. Then, to keep me occupied, she provide gin and The Times crossword. She also painted some good still life stuff but when she started going to Life classes I stopped acquiring her work and felt somewhat nervous as to what demands might be made of me. In those days she was a formidable grande dame.
To change the subject, I often find myself looking up words with which I am unfamiliar. Yesterday morning alone these cropped up.
Perhaps not immediately germane to your post but;
Three of my mother’s words not infrequently used to describe those she felt not up to the mark:-
Meretricious
Disagreeable
Vacuous
I am sorry for bruising the authors ego, but his big Willey does nothing for me. Conversely Lady Henley’s effort is rather fine and demonstrates a capital aptitude for portraiture: surely the most daunting of all subjects. I see in her work elements which I so admire in artists such as Sean O’Sullivan & Margaret Clarke. In addition to a reasonable likeness she has managed to capture much of the character of the sitter in a rather informal disposition, though not so informal as to dispense with tie & cuff links. The image could depict any gentleman from the middle orders were it not for Burkes, so discriminately placed, as to allude to the subjects pedigree. The large glass of gin (always half full), so synonymous with the sitter, speaks volumes about his persona.
May I be so bold as to suggest that the composition is somewhat diminished by the frame. The addition of a mount would allow the scene to breathe and feel less cluttered.
The best feature of the painting is the way the artist has captured the texture of the authors jersey, actually he did look quite spiffy in the eighties. I am more accustomed to the tatterdemalion CJB.