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Green Pebble Magazine
Articles
Mary
Gundry: Paintings From
the Heart
Green Pebble Winter 2007 issue
If there is one contemporary Suffolk artist whose star appears to have risen as fast as the town she paints, that artist is Mary Gundry. By Ruby Ormerod.
A figurative
water colourist, Mary Gundry’s now-familiar idyllic images of children
playing on Southwold beach and crabbing in the shallows of neighbouring Walberswick
can be found on cards, calendars and mugs throughout the region. What is less
known outside Southwold is that her family portraits are on countless East
Anglian living room walls, commissioned by parents eager to capture their
offspring’s childhood.
Indeed, if commissions are an indicator, it must be possible to credit Mary
with single-handedly making watercolour family scenes fashionable in the Southwold
region. She is in such demand, her calendar is full for up to six months in
advance.
This writer first came across Mary Gundry’s work in the unforgiving
heat of the Middle East. There, surrounded by formal Islamic art, it seemed
both incongruous and amusing to find two large watercolour paintings devoted
to children enjoying a breezy Southwold seaside.
Quickly amusement was crowded out by nostalgia for the familiar settings of
home. These portraits were inescapably English; their subject matter, composition,
light and palette made it virtually impossible for the imagery to have been
from anywhere else. She captured Englishness so well.
It was also evident the artist was not simply ‘competent’ at figure
drawing, but extremely accomplished. Her subject matter may have been infused
with a feel good factor – hardly the material of modern day ‘serious’
artists – but her technique was mature and confident.
The cumulative effect was that the two paintings evoked a primal, parental
response. Forget hoodies, gang violence and bullying. When seen through Mary’s
eyes, children were children in the purest sense; as parents would wish them
to remain, forever. The children in her paintings were focused, relaxed and
innocent. They still played as their parents and grandparents played, with
sticks and buckets and inquisitive minds.
Unforgivably nostalgic? Contrived?
Perhaps. Except that a trip to Southwold beach on a sunny summer’s day
will reveal gaggles of such children in their floral swimsuits and pirate
t-shirts, and the galleries selling Mary Gundry’s work will confirm
what so many spontaneously say – people love Mary’s work...
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