Artists - Grave Stories

On my way to the village shop I take the path across the churchyard. The Christmas wreaths which adorned the graves last month are disappearing now, but the first snowdrops are pushing through the grass ready to encircle the stones.

but the first snowdrops are already appearing around the older graves

Now that I have lived in the village for more than twenty years, I know a few of the inhabitants of the churchyard. They congregate beside the gate leading on to Church Mead. I pause wondering what Vivienne will think about the latest scheme to build more “executive housing” on the fields adjacent to the Mead, or what Den will have to say about the recent fly-tipping beside the brook in Wellow Lane.

I don’t need to solicit their answers, I can anticipate quite well the vehemence of their responses. I share their views: the Poundbury-pastiche housing with its pretentious porticos and faux bricked-up windows, ersatz facades, and sterile Stepford Wives ambience repels me too. Like them I seethe at the gratuitous dumping of rubbish in the woods and fields, on the roadside and in rivers.

At the same time, I smile at the memory of Den in his powerchair equipped with black sack and litter picker. The fridges and the mattresses may have eluded him, but with his dog running alongside the chair or hitching a lift, he waged a loud war on the beer bottles and fast-food wrappers tossed into the hedgerows by passing motorists.

A robin lands on the grave, cocks an eye at me, is unimpressed, and begins a furious excavation of the earth. Den was a gifted photographer, and I am reminded of his exquisite studies of birds and butterflies, fruits and flowers, and of his readiness to share his knowledge and talents with others.

Mollified by these reflections, I turn to the grave of Colin Francis. Much loved in the village for his gentle charm and the warmth of his manner, Colin was a very special person.

Though he was quiet and modest, we were all familiar with the magnitude of his talent. For Norton Saint Philip is a village of dry-stone walls: the approach roads are lined by them, the fields and our gardens enclosed by them. Victims of erosion by frosts, unchecked ivy growth, trees planted too close leaning heavily into them dislodging stones and pushing them out of line, and the occasional rogue motorist, there is always a wall somewhere in the village in need of attention. And Colin, a stone mason, was also an expert dry stone waller.

In all seasons we encountered him stripping out the walls, removing ivy roots, sorting stones, and rebuilding. It was always slow work for dry stone walling is a separate technique from masonry, requiring skill and patience in choosing the right stones, setting them correctly, hearting each course with smaller stones, ensuring that each stone crosses a joint below it, and keeping the courses level.

Moreover, we would all hinder Colin in his work for none of us could resist to stop and chat, knowing our day would be enhanced by his always smiling good humour and his apparent pleasure at our interruptions.

Throughout one particularly bitter winter he worked his way along the length of the wall which lines the Bath Road into the village. He proved the most effective traffic calming scheme we have ever had as, commuting to and from work, we all slowed down to wave and check the day’s progress, or came to a complete halt the better to admire The Great Wall of Norton Saint Philip.

Colin was only sixty-eight when he died three years ago. Two hundred people packed into the village church to remember him. They did not all know each other but they shared a common sadness at the loss of this lovable man and his joyful approach to life.

As well as the marker on his grave, a tree grows on The Mead in his memory. “It’s a blasted nuisance, but there tis,” reads the plaque beneath. This well remembered catchphrase was the closest he ever came to vexation.

But no one needs to locate either the grave or the tree to remember Colin, for like Christopher Wren,

Si monumentum requiris, cicumspire.

Colin is all around us, just out of sight behind the walls that enfold the village, his transistor radio playing softly as he plies his trade.

Part of The Great Wall of Norton Saint Philip,

seen here in April, but rebuilt by Colin during a bleak winter.

During a particularly severe winter storm the wall separating my garden from that of my neighbour collapsed, so now we have our own sample of Colin’s handiwork

One of the last walls which Colin rebuilt,

here beginning to disappear beneath spring’s green cloak .

Patrick Caulfield: Death After Lunch

By Gravedigger

On March 3, 2024

In Artists

The first time I saw it Patrick Caulfield’s After Lunch caught and held my attention and it continues to do so whenever I visit the Tate Gallery. The cartoonish, black outlines of the deserted restaurant, tables, chairs, the half obscured fondu set, the bored waiter staring across empty space, are suffused with an eerie blue light. Then, in contrast, from the wall at the back of the restaurant strident colours blaze out, a picture within a picture, a photomural of the Chateau de Chillon. In front of this but barely obscuring it Matisse-evoking goldfish swim around a plastic castle in an aquarium.

Clearly it is not a Swiss restaurant, more likely one of those themed restaurants which enjoyed popularity in the England of the sixties and early seventies. I have no idea what first drew me to the painting save that I wanted to know where and why, and what happened next.

After graduating from Chelsea Art School in 1960, Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005), visited Crete where he was inspired by the hard bright colours and fascinated by the Minoan frescoes. Later, looking at the postcards he had bought, he realised that the printer had added black lines around objects in the frescoes. Intrigued, he began using similar black outlines in his own work.

He developed a graphic style, depicting everyday objects – lamps, glasses, clocks – with deceptive simplicity in flat, bold colours: the banal rendered intriguing. At first he used household gloss paint on board, later oil paint, and finally acrylic on canvas.

But it is always the larger stylised interiors of empty public buildings, offices, and restaurants, which attract me most. I am fascinated by the saturated planes of colour bound by heavy back lines contrasting with the photorealistic landscapes on the walls. They hold me spellbound, transfixed by the unease with which I might regard a snake charmer. For although I find them alluring there is also a sense of foreboding about them. The anonymity and melancholy with which I feel quite comfortable in the works of Edward Hopper, here seems sinister and menacing.

When Caulfield died, William Feaver’s obituary recalled a discussion about famous artists’ epitaphs. Someone had asked Caulfield what he would put on his own gravestone. The response: “DEAD, of course.” And that is exactly what it says on his grave. Designed by Caulfield himself, the curt monosyllable is laser-cut through a block of granite like a child’s letter puzzle. Eye-catching amidst the crosses and angels, open books and obelisks, it brings me to a halt as my first sighting of his painting did. And I am not alone, for the arresting design exerts a magnetic lure over amused visitors. The distinctive grave has become one of the most popular in Highgate East.

Patrick Caulfield’s Grave in Highgate East.
A Contrast with the Angels, Crosses, and Urns

Perhaps people empathise with the blunt statement, welcome its frankness. I recall a friend who, wearied by delicate, well meant, euphemisms said crossly, “You don’t lose people. You lose your keys. People die.”

It is a view with which I sympathise and by all accounts Caulfield’s funeral was a joyful celebration of the life which preceded the death. And yet, fascinated as I am by the memorial, its stark, bleak message chills me, fostering the same disquiet which I experience when I stand in front of those rather threatening interiors.

Another Grave which makes me Smile: Norman Thelwell

By Gravedigger

On May 21, 2023

In Animals, Artists

Norman Thelwell (1923-2004) produced talented landscapes in watercolours and oils. He was better known however for his prolific output of cartoons; some poked gentle fun at human foibles, but it was the Thelwell Pony which brought him lasting celebrity and gave pleasure to generations of children and adults. The pony cartoons were born in the 1950s when, in a field viewed from his studio, Thelwell observed two fat, hairy, bad tempered ponies called Thunder and Lightning. In his autobiography he wrote:

They were owned by two little girls about three feet high who could have done with losing a few pounds themselves. They would arrive to collect their mounts in yellow pullovers, tiny jodhpurs, and velvet safety helmets. Thunder and Lightning would pointedly ignore them, but as the children got near, the ponies would swing round and give a few lightning kicks which the children would sidestep calmly. They had the head collars on those animals before they knew what was happening. I was astonished at how meekly they were led away, but they were plotting vengeance – you could tell by their eyes.

There followed a lifetime association with the trademark plump, stubborn ponies and their equally plump, determined riders. The comic strip Penelope and Kipper featured in the Sunday Express, and the collections of cartoons came out on a regular basis, delighting not just Pony Club Members but a whole spectrum of children and adults.

On the hundredth anniversary of his birth this year two exhibitions celebrate the work of Thelwell: one at Mottisfont, a National Trust property near his home in Hampshire, the other at the Cartoon Museum in London. The latter features his work alongside that of other cartoonists and environmentalists in an event in support of climate recovery and carbon neutrality. Entitled Norman Thelwell Saves the Planet, it pays tribute to the prescient concerns raised in his work The Effluent Society (1971), a humorous but heartfelt plea to take better care of the natural world.

In lieu of commonplace angels sounding the last trump, Thelwell’s gravestone in St. Andrew’s churchyard at Timsbury, Hampshire features two resolute little girls with herald trumpets blasting the peace of the graveyard undaunted at being bounced out of their saddles by their recalcitrant ponies.

Saying Hello to Joan, Alfred, and Lowry

By Gravedigger

On June 19, 2022

In Artists

It was a Sunday afternoon of penetrating, unrelenting, rain interspersed with claps of thunder when, shivering as the chilly water trickled under my coat collar and down my neck, I took refuge in the Wren Gallery in Burford. Here was warmth, light, and, magically appearing in front of me, a platter of smoked salmon sandwiches. Surprised but delighted I took a sandwich whereupon a tray appeared bearing glasses of white wine. “Please” said Gill Mitchell “eat as many as you can and have another glass of wine. Our exhibition is opening today but, in this weather, there won’t be anyone to eat all these sandwiches.” Happy to oblige I munched and sipped my way around the gallery and there discovered the wonderful world of Joan Gillchrest. She was a member of the talented Gilbert Scott family of architects, and after studying art in Paris and London, driving an ambulance during the war, and an exotic post war life as a model, she settled in the Cornish town of Mousehole in the 1950s. Her captivating paintings reminded me of the works of Alfred Wallis and LS Lowry: small, bent people struggled against the winds outside grey Cornish chapels, mines, and engine houses; they walked dogs on beaches and attended weddings and funerals under louring Cornish skies. Other paintings were suffused with the sunlight of a golden summer’s day: there were lighthouses, seabirds, ships in Mousehole harbour, ladies drinking sherry in the Lobster Pot Hotel. Views of the sea seen through the glorious tangle of plants in Joan’s greenhouse also featured her succession of rescue cats who formed the Titus dynasty peering through the foliage.

I returned to the gallery the following week to buy two small paintings, promising myself that in the future I would buy a larger canvas, but as my finances improved so did the value of Gillchrest’s work. So instead, I have shamelessly treated the Wren as though it were a public gallery where I have viewed ever-changing exhibitions of Joan’s work, and when, after Joan’s death, Gill Mitchell published Joan Gillchrest: a Life in Pictures I enjoyed a wider range of the paintings.

In Paul churchyard above Mousehole a rough-hewn granite stone marks Joan Gillchrest’s grave and sleeping at the base of it last time I visited lay a small, stone, black and white Titus concealed behind exotic blooms which I moved to one side for the photograph before tucking him back beneath them.

In her book Gill Mitchell comments that although Joan never knew Alfred Wallis she was open about his influence on her work and would visit his grave in St. Ives to “say hello to Alfred,” indeed her painting “Saying Hello to Alfred” features the grave at Barnoon cemetery overlooking Porthmeor beach and Tate St. Ives, home to some of his paintings. The Cornish fisherman sold little in his lifetime. He began painting as he said “for company” after his wife died, painting his ships, harbours, and lighthouses on old pieces of cardboard and grocery boxes. Even after Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Jim Ede discovered and promoted his work he lived in poverty and died in Madron workhouse. The artistic community of St. Ives paid for his grave which is one of the loveliest I know, the tiles designed by Bernard Leach portraying a lighthouse, which Wallis might have painted himself using the same subdued colours, with a small figure clambering up the steps.

Barnoon Cemetery with Alfred’s grave in foreground

I have found no reference to any influence of Lowry on Joan Gillchrest but since her hunched figures battling the elements reminded me of his, come north with me, far from the lighthouses, rocks, bays and boats of Cornwall . At the Manchester School of Art LS Lowry studied under Adolphe Valette whose own large impressionist canvases of industrial Manchester seen through a smog- filled haze occupy a magical room in Manchester Art Gallery. Lowry famously worked as a rent collector while caring for his widowed and bed ridden mother in Pendlebury, painting at night after she was asleep. Today the largest collection of his work is displayed at the Lowry Gallery in Salford Quays but to “say hello to Lowry,” I took the bus to Manchester’s Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-come-Hardy. At the largest municipal cemetery in the UK, I anticipated a daunting quest, but in the lodge the custodian supplied me with a plan and focused my search by pointing to a photograph on the wall of his own daughter standing beside Lowry’s grave. In the serried rows, a conventional white cross marks the grave of Lowry’s parents with his own name added inconspicuously on the side of the base. But I might have spotted it without help, for in front of it, in lieu of the usual vase of flowers, was a pot full of paint brushes.