Angelina Davis: Coming Up For Air by Hannah Murgatroyd
This essay accompanied the catalogue for Angelina May Davis: Coming Up For Air and was written by Hannah Murgatroyd
If I were to characterise the memory of a 1970’s childhood, it could be said to be through curtains. My working-class Nana had nets at every window, my upper-middle class Grammy, Liberty curtains. Net curtains were the demarcators of class and taste, signifying both suspicion and nostalgia, the windows of TV lounges swagged in flammable Regency frou-frou, a polyester excess current day cottage-core enthusiasts would be unnerved by. Angelina Davis hangs each of her paintings with the memories of such curtains, swaying at the windows of the housing estate on the edge of a village in rural England in which she spent her 1970’s childhood. Literally framing our view in looking back.
In viewing her paintings, we sit in the front row, dwarfed by the stage curtains on which Davis affixes images as signposts, replicating a kitchen memo board or studio wall. These are the illuminations by which we may decode the layers of meaning in her tableaux. The curtains remind me of the stages of amateur dramatics, or Sunday School pageants, the vicar’s old sheets, painted with biblical deserts or a single flaming bush and hung wonky in the village hall, revealing the stage workings behind. Davis uses these wonky gaps to great effect, exposing in them the effort by which arbiters of British culture and class utilise the pastoral to systematise our suspension of disbelief, lulling us with a Centrist’s reverie.
In ‘Coming Up For Air’, Davis includes a veritable auction catalogue of pastoral signifiers, from an example of the ubiquitous postwar public sculpture by Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore (rarer only now because so many have been nicked and smelted down for the ore); to a gargoyle, or perhaps a Toby Jug floating on its back in front of the 1930’s-does-Jacobean Country House lake, with a chimney of the Industrial Revolution forming its breathing spout. Bloated, drowning, this squat ceramic is the antithesis of Mr Darcy striding wet and heroic from his lake. Another gargoyle is stuck on its back in the foreground, mouth in rictus reminiscent of the carvings under a misericord, the hinged oak seats in medieval chapels which tipped up for monks to lean on, often revealing carved imagery rich in the idea of the world turned upside down – the carnivalesque.
I wonder about this complex little symbol, choked by the brick chimney that is supposed to give it air, as if the Agrarian society of pre-Enlightenment Britain was choked by the progress of the Industrial Revolution. The cultural significance of misrule and carnival for the peasantry replaced by soulless productivity. Similar to the main protagonist in George Orwell’s eponymous book, Coming Up for Air, the vernacular characters Davis scatters across her paintings aim to survive the future by maintaining their status as symbols of rural idylls of yore, throttled and memorialised in her painting like the National Trust delights of 1950’s sculptures in a Capability Brown garden. Landscape’s downfall embedded in the scroll floating toward the ha-ha, on which Enlightenment ideals and Enclosure Acts were written.
Always, Davis reminds us of our tendency to make Nature into an interpreted object. The frilly head of her tree more resembles an angle-poise lamp, that essential object of 1950’s middle class artisan culture, than something living and wild. She pokes her critical brush at the differing interpretations of the pastoral held by all classes, working, middle and upper, and how we express it most fully in Britain through our crockery, objets d’art and wallpaper. ‘Costumier’ is painted as a reference to landscape, but one constructed without depth, paint smeared instead flat across the surface like the decal of a thatched cottage applied onto a china plate. Perspective exists as a quotation rather than contained within the pictorial depth. Perhaps collage is what Davis’s painting lies closest to, but I think instead of the skin on custard, congealed, taut above surface, below ready to collapse. Any movement, and it will slide off the canvas. In Davis’s painting the edge is not outlined or sharp, more like expanding foam squeezed into a gap around a window frame. Historically she could fit with Samuel Palmer, his soft Romantic edges. Yet – her edge is the edge of old household paint on outhouses, or hospital radiators painted in ten coats of gloss. A methodology of painting you don’t see in today’s interior designed world. It’s of the Victorian age, and reveals the generational knowledge in Davis’s paintings. She came of age in the last century.
When I first encountered Davis’s work as her mentor on the Turps Correspondence Course, I was immediately struck by her use of colour, writing to her “Your application and colour of paint reminds me of just-mixed Angel Delight, waiting to set. Germolene pink and avocado green – a 1970’s replication of nature’s colours, in bathrooms, kitchens and food – suggesting your painting is a satire on the English relationship to landscape. Like you’ve digested Guston’s satire on America with Nixon as the protagonist, and come out with the Elm tree as your main character.”
I don’t think it is a coincidence we are reminded of DIY, of the workaday job of house painting stated comparable to the stage set, or the painter’s studio. I think of Braque, the house painter who so deftly quoted the ordinary artefacts and surfaces and materials of his former trade. Davis’s lack of interest in light is intrinsically Cubist. In the ‘Shock of the New’ Robert Hughes wrote of Juan Gris’s painting ‘Fantomas’ of 1915 that it depicted “the world of cheap production and mass production as a sort of Arcadia, a pastoral still-life that could be contained on the top of a studio table…the catalogue of peintre-decorated effects – wood grain, wallpaper dado, fake marble; the newspaper, the pipe and the paperback thriller…a measured poetry from ordinary things.” Perhaps Davis is painting landscape as still life. She thinks of landscape in relation to the received image – the postcard of a church spire framed on a bedroom wall, the biscuit tin decorated with haystacks, the machine-made tapestry of a willow tree – landscape as an object in the home. Her paintings are fully concerned with the staging of the domestic interior as a quotation of the values and aesthetic of the rural idyll. Her Arcadia sickened by Farrow & Ball colour swatches rather than the Cubist’s Tabac smoke.
And yet, in the midst of this critique Davis reminds us of a real, and enduring struggle. That of nature, and its struggle to persist in face of both our enshrining and destroying tendencies. The sheer pathos of the bobbing tree heads in her paintings, forlorn, barren. I think of Cobnut shells with their frilly caps, scattered by squirrels in their autumn frenzy across paths, insignificant, elevated in her paintings to a character. In ‘Fallen’, a shy swing of hangman’s hoods are like the wallflowers at the dance, reminding me of gibbets that ghost those country crossroads still named Hangman’s Cross, or a fritillary, which seems overdressed in late winter, as if out with all its medals on. There is no temperature, no season, no real weather in her paintings. Any shadows are cast by a single actor – a nodding tree – frozen in stage fright in the spotlight. We are viewers of an amalgam of seasons, quoted via John Constable’s clouds and John Piper’s haystacks, framed through the slit windows of WW2 pillboxes.
Davis draws into her plaster pink with sepia paint or depicts grisaille panels, reminding us of old master drawings, underpainting, of the skeletal structures that underpin paintings and landscapes. In referencing the grey tones, white and black highlights of Gainsborough’s landscape drawings, she paints the history of English landscape drawing ever so lightly, whilst reminding us through her conjunctions of screens and curtains and slits to view out of, that all these histories are constructed, all these visions of landscape are constructed, aided and abetted by the history of English landscape painting, by a culture that embeds its utopia through its tea mugs. In her bilious-coloured paintings, Davis deftly layers these methods of framing our view in looking back, pointedly demonstrating how nostalgia plays out across the classes, revealing our collective failures in the true remembering of what was our land.
