Marjorie Arnfield

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)
The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia.
Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(December 2007)

Marjorie Arnfield, MBE (1930 - 2001) was an English artist who specialised in both industrial and rural landscapes, painting in oil, acrylic and watercolour. Her landscapes, particularly her paintings of Provence and Spain, are characterized by vivid colours and an impressionistic style.

In an interview in the magazine Artists & Illustrators in 1998, Arnfield described her palette of colours, which included ochres, burnt siennas, cadmium, viridian, reds and blues, as “colours that sing”.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Marjorie Arnfield was born in Newcastle on Tyne on 25 November 1930 and brought up in Sunderland, attending Sunderland Church High School.[1] Her grandfather, great-uncle and two uncles were regional architects, responsible for many public buildings in the North East of England, including the Sunderland Empire Theatre.[2] She died on 26 April 2001 in Nottingham.

While attending art schools in Sunderland and Durham, she was taught by distinguished British artists such as Lawrence Gowing, Quentin Bell (Virginia Woolf's nephew), and Victor Passmore.

She travelled extensively in the Mediterranean with her husband, Ron Arnfield. In her paintings of scenes from the Greek islands, France and Spain, she sought to capture the vibrancy of the sun and the natural colours ((http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/public-affairs/newsletter/pdfs/225.pdf). She also used colour to depict emotion, for example in her mining paintings. Arnfield portrayed the energy and excitement of football when she was invited by Sunderland United Football Club to watch one of their games in their new stadium, and then paint a picture of the match.

She spent many years teaching art to adults and schoolchildren in England and Scotland. She also took adults on painting holidays to France and the Greek islands. Disabled due to rheumatoid arthritis, her husband Ron Arnfield (d. 2006) assisted her over the years with her exhibitions and teaching (Obituary of Ron Arnfield, The Guardian, 1 May 2006).

She was awarded the MBE in Britain’s millennium honours list in 2000, the year before her death in Nottingham, for her "services to art". The Times (www.timesonline.co.uk), in a review of her commemorative exhibition at Nottingham University in July 2001, said it was among the top five one-person exhibitions in the UK that month.

In a review of an exhibition by Arnfield at the Mawbray Gallery in Sunderland in October 1964, The Guardian wrote: "Apart from a series of broad, fell country watercolours held together by a lyrical and febrile line, Arnfield, with a brief, decourous and decorative look in gouache and oil at industry in Whitehaven and Tee-side, seems most readily at home when, in pen and wash, she follows in the tradition of Raoul Duffy and John Paddy Carstairs." The review also described Arnfield as a a 'realist painter with an obvious appeal."

Marjorie Arnfield's late son, Nick Arnfield, was also an artist and art teacher. Nick Arnfield died in April 1999.

[edit] Coal Mining

In the 1990s, Arnfield was deeply affected by the demise of the British coal industry, following the government’s decision to privatize British Coal, operator of the UK’s coal mines. She decided to capture through her art something of the power and history of the mining industry, which was once a major contributor to the British economy.

In Marjorie Arnfield: Artist's Statement, a document produced for an exhibition at Bishop Auckland Town Hall in 1999, Arnfield wrote that, prior to commencing her mining paintings, she turned to the writings of D.H. Lawrence. The Nottinghamshire-born novelist grew up in the East Midlands coal field, and the coal mines formed a backdrop to his writing. "The disappearance of the pits that Lawrence knew (following the demise of the British coal mining industry) led me to explore the use of archival photographs as a source material for my paintings of miners at work," Arnfield wrote.

In 1994, British Coal sponsored Arnfield’s exhibition A Tribute to Coal Mining in Nottinghamshire at Nottingham University's Djanogly Art Gallery. She then held a further 20 exhibitions of her mining art under the title “Images of Coal” at museums and art galleries across the UK.

In her mining paintings, Marjorie Arnfield focused on historical mining methods, social aspects of mining communities, and the demolition of the pits. Her mining paintings were purchased by private collections, museums and art galleries.

According to The Artists of Northumbria (http://www.artdictionaries.com/inprint.html) by Marshall Hall, Arnfield was one of the few British women artists to show a particular interest in the theme of coal mining. This reference work on Northumbrian artists, published in 2005, provides a detailed account of Arnfield's career.

An account of Arnfield's coal mining art is to be found in Shafts of Light: Mining Art in the Great Northern Coalfield by Robert McManners and Gillian Wales, Gemini Productions, 2002.

[edit] Posthumous

Marjorie Arnfield, A Celebration of her Life and Work, which was published after her death in 2001, described her pictures as “embodying a spirit of vitality, optimism and sheer ‘aliveness to it all’”. She also left many sketchbooks and diaries which combined extensive comments on her travels with illustrations of what she saw (see [1]).

In 2002-2003, Ron Arnfield, the artist's late husband, commissioned a professional photographer to scan much of her work, including her sketchbooks. A CD-ROM, Marjorie Arnfield, A Digital Library, was then produced. A Website showcasing her work, [2], was also created.

In July 2007, the Public Catalogue Foundation (www.thepcf.org.uk) said it would include a photograph of Arnfield's Keep The Pits Open: Protest painting in its forthcoming Oil Paintings in Public Ownership: West Yorkshire catalogue. The Foundation is a not-for-profit organization which catalogues works of art in public galleries and museums across the UK, and makes them available online and in print form. Keep The Pits Open: Protest is held in the National Coal Mining Museum for England in Wakefield, West Yorkshire (http://www.ncm.org.uk/).

[edit] Collections

Arnfield’s work can be seen at the following public collections:

  • Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
  • Middlesbrough Art Gallery
  • National Mining Museum of England (3 works)
  • Rotherham Museums' Service (3 works)
  • Sunderland Art Gallery
  • Woodhorn Colliery Museum

[edit] References

  1. ^ Biography for Marjorie Arnfield. Retrieved on 2008-06-04.
  2. ^ Robinson, Alistair (2000). Sunderland Empire. TUPS Books. 

[edit] See also