The first woman director producer on Broadway - Margaret Anglin
The first woman director producer on Broadway – Margaret Anglin
She was born Mary Warren Anglin on april 3rd, 1876 in Ottawa, Ontario, & was the youngest of nine children of newspaper editor and politician Timothy Warren Anglin (1822–1896) by his second wife, Ellen MacTavish. She remembers being held by Oscar Wilde, a guest of her father, when she was six years old, probably during Wilde’s first visit to America via the SS Arizona in 1882, when he conducted…
Clare Carswell (CC) : We are in a room to the side of the entrance hall of Brantwood that is used for temporary exhibitions. There is just one large painting hung in here now, entitled ‘Landscape Painting’ by Steve Mitchell, it is a painting of extraordinary detail, combining landscape with an interior scene that is being exhibited as part of the museum’s One-to-One programme, what is the programme ?
Howard Hull (HH) : The One-to-One programme has been running for three years now and exhibits a single work by a contemporary artist who works with landscape. It offers the opportunity for the viewer to slow down and really spend time in front of a work of art. Unlike the experience of an exhibition that is hung in a linear way where one can be almost blinded by the invitation to judgement, by the comparison of one work to another, here we offer the viewer the experience of time spent with one work. Ruskin lived with contemporary work on his walls and in our homes we live day-in, day-out with works and so get to look at them often, we can revisit them and see them differently as we experience differing moods and feelings.
CC : The work by Mitchell is a painting within a painting, a landscape atop the glimpses of the interior of the artist’s studio and is both impressive in its mastery and yet also somewhat disorienting, do you feel that ?
HH : It is intriguing how the harsher and more penetrating light is on the personal and presumably the more intimate items in the foreground and yet little is really given away about the artist and he does not speak of deeper personal significance in the work. There is the solitary figure in the centre who we cannot access and yet we feel that we want to enter the space too and reach. Our eye is drawn to the human element but it appears so small and insignificant in front of that great vista of nature. It reminds me of ‘Goldau’ by Turner. a fierce sunset over the alps and Turner makes a fleck of red with the palette knife that becomes the optical centre of the picture.
CC: What connection do you see between Mitchell’s approach and Ruskin ?
HH : Ruskin was pre-eminently concerned with the connection between artists and landscape and although Mitchell’s approach is contemporary and different to Ruskin’s they share an intensity in the way they see landscape. There are a multiplicity of ways of looking at landscape. Here there is the contemporary reference to film making where the image created is an illusion but there is also a deeper meaning that is about the experience of being in landscape. It touches on the way in which we are now conditioned to viewing it through film, through a camera, that is the language that we are now familiar with.
CC : How did you meet Steve Mitchell ?
HH : Through gallerist Celia Lendis. Some years ago we showed the work of her husband, artist John Lendis, after he had returned from Tasmania. His work had a connection to the Pre-Raphaelites. At the time Celia ran a gallery and then went on to represent Steve Mitchell individually and suggested I look at his work and I did and my imagination was caught by his approach, I was intrigued as we are always looking for artists who respond to landscape in different ways.
CC: How involved were you with the artist whilst he made the painting ?
HH : Barely at all in fact. I contacted Steve and asked him if he would like to make a painting for the space and he then got on with it. I had faith in him and I saw a small snap of the unfinished painting a month or so before it came up here from his studio in the Cotswolds. I didn’t actually see it until it was un-wrapped here in the gallery.
CC : The artist attended the opening and you held a Q&A with him in front of an audience, what topics did you touch on during that conversation ?
HH : Steve talked about how differently he paints in public and in private. He works as a scenic artist in the film industry and so to him this painting which is large at eight feet wide, is to him a miniature. When working for cinema he has to work very fast in acrylics but when doing his own painting he chooses to work slowly in oils, using layers of paint and he experiences the pleasure of taking advantage of the medium and of the subtlety of the effects that can be achieved with it. He singled out the glazing on the fells as an example and spoke of how the experience of time is implicit in this painting and the pleasure and significance of that to him.
CC : What has the audience response been to this work by Steve Mitchell ?
HH : People are amazed by it. They need time to be with it to really look and even if it tells them that they don’t have time, that is valuable in itself.
CC : What would Ruskin have made of Mitchell’s painting ?
HH : Well it would depend on what mood he was in ! He often contradicted himself but I think that he would look at the way that Mitchell has addressed the hills in the painting and his evident sensitivity to nature, the seeing. If artists can see with the head and the heart, and Mitchell does, then he would approve, as he would of the painting of the fells, the sense of space, the volume of air in the valley, the control of the light on the crags, what a masterpiece of painting it is. It has taken courage to create something that elevates our feelings like this and then to encase it in something more mundane, the studio. Steve is looking at layers of history here, of our multiple ways of looking at landscape from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the present.He’s also looking at looking itself. There’s a tradition ofpaintings within paintings that you see in the Pre-Raphaelites and later the Surrealists and Ruskin understood that there was a symbolic ,philosophical and socially meaningful side. Indeed he said that the measure of a picture’s greatness was the degree of its thoughtfulness, the number of ideas that it contained. He was harshly critical of any sign of deliberate virtuosity and so might have had issue with some aspects of Steve’s painting, and yet the Pre-Raphaelites did it. Like any powerful teacher, Ruskin was often critical of artists he admired. He knew that he contradicted himself but he regarded it as essential to challenge others and what he was really doing when he did this was extending his own thinking.
CC : What has his relevance to artists been and does it continue ?
HH : The late nineteenth century and many twentieth century artists have been influenced by him. Most notably he was read by the Pre-Raphaelites. His more radical linking of social ideas with art was influential on late nineteenth century and early twentieth century artistic figures . Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and poets like Ezra Pound acknowledged their debt to him. In almost every decade since his death you will find artists who have found him important, and this very much continues today. This is because he looks behind the surface style and understands the seriousness of the concerns that the artist is driven by and what the implications are for all of us when they succeeed in giving them voice. ….
CC : Who are the other artists that you have shown works by as part of the One-to-One Programme ?
HH : The first was internationally showing Cumbrian painter Julian Cooper who makes large canvases of vertical rock faces and quarries. Also the winner of the John Moores prize, painter Martin Greenland who makes technically astonishing paintings of imaginary landscapes, mountains and lakes.
CC : What other exhibitions have you shown here ?
HH : This is the Blue Gallery. It is a small but flexible space and we hold four or five exhibitions a year in here. Because it is literally in the middle of the historic rooms of Ruskin’s home, with all his stuff around, we display works in here that speak in some way to Ruskin’s interests or ideas. We usually have a couple of historic hangings and a couple by contemporary artists. We have exhibited everything from works by Turner, Cozens and Girtin to comic strips by Hunt Emerson and installations by Patricia Townsend. The most recent were sixteen works by Durer.
CC : What is happening next ?
HH : We have botanical artist Kate Houghton coming to do a semi-residency here to focus on the ferns of Brantwood, which are on their way to being a national collection. She will visit at various times, to see the croziers un-furl in June and then the colours in autumn.
CC : Thank you very much for your time, it is a pleasure to see this extraordinary painting so thoughtfully presented in such a wonderful setting.
