Obituaries in The Times, The Guardian and The
Independent would suggest a life of distinction for any person, but are a
unique achievement for a man with intellectual disabilities. But Bryan Pearce earned his fame more for
what he did than for who he was. One of the
leading naïve artists of the twentieth century, his oil paintings now hang in
the Tate Gallery and at Kettle’s Yard, and he has been the subject of no less
than three biographies.
So here’s a question to chew over.
Does an artist have to be clever?
For that matter, what do we mean by clever? Several times, I’ve arranged for artists to
give talks, and then been disappointed when they have turned out to be
incoherent, even tongue-tied. But it was
of course me who was being stupid: the whole point is that many artists are
folks who communicate through their work, not with words. Not all of course – I’ve encountered other
visual artists who have spoken beautifully about what they are trying to
do.
But what if the artist has an intellectual impairment, and cannot fully
reflect on what they are doing? Does
that make the work less meaningful, less good?
How much does the creator’s intention matter? After all, the viewer always brings their own
response, their own interpretation to a work of art. Once the image is out there, it takes on a
life of its own, regardless of the artist’s intentions. Sometimes, the artist themselves, and I mean
any artist, does not fully understand why their pieces work for others or what
they might mean. But can you make great
art by accident? Could a child make a
masterpiece?
It was my psychiatrist friend Jane Bernal who first introduced me to the
work of the painter Bryan Pearce. I was
trying to locate famous people with learning disabilities for my blog about
famous disabled people from history. She
was working in Cornwall, and knew people who had known Pearce. She used his work in her teaching, to show
what people with intellectual disabilities are capable of. In an age obsessed by knowledge and
information and learning, it’s important to state that people with cognitive
limitations still have value and can do work of value.
You’ve probably heard of autistic savant artists, like Stephen Wiltshire,
who have an extraordinary facility to represent what they see. Wiltshire is taken on a helicopter flight over
New York or Tokyo and then produces a five meter long drawing, exactly
reproducing what he has seen. People
queue up to buy his books or to watch television documentaries about him. He clearly has a great talent. But do we value this innate ability in the
same way as the draughtsmanship of an artist whose natural skills are somehow
mediated by their training? I am not
sure.
This is the problem of Outsider Art.
The term was invented in 1972, as
a translation of the French “Art Brut”, a word coined by Jean Dubuffet, who
wrote: “We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by
artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part…”. Take someone like the American artist Judith
Scott. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak
and had Down syndrome. She spent years
in an institution, until her twin sister rescued her. Yet today, her textile pieces are held in
museums throughout the world and sell for tens of thousands of dollars. She made her artworks at the Creative Growth
Art Center, which is a disability arts project in Oakland, California. She had started in the painting class, where
she showed no particular talent. One
day, she saw people working with textiles, and immediately gravitated to that
medium. Her pieces consist of found
objects, which she carefully wrapped in coloured fibre. People are fascinated
by this profoundly disabled person who was at the same time a great artist,
whose work has bought pleasure to so many.
People with intellectual disabilities very rarely achieve any
prominence. Judith Scott, who has been the
subject of many articles and books and films, is an exception. Another is the Cornish painter Bryan Pearce,
who received obituaries in national newspapers when he died in 2007, and has
been the subject of several biographies. Bryan Pearce was born in St Ives in
1929. His father was a butcher and a
rugby player, and his mother was a keen amateur painter. Nature and nurture are a theme that runs
through his life. Pearce had the
condition Phenylketonuria or PKU, which mean that as a developing infant, he
was unable to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine. PKU arises from a random genetic
mutation. Today, all children are tested
at birth for PKU, and if they have the mutation, are placed on a diet free of
phenylalanine, and so grow up unaffected.
In 1929, the condition was unknown, and as a result, Bryan experienced
intellectual impairment and other health problems, and so grew up with
cognitive deficits and attended a school for children with special needs.
Environments matter, and if Bryan Pearce had been born somewhere else,
his life may have turned out very differently.
St Ives has a long tradition of fine painting, and was the home of Alfred
Wallis, a former fisherman who became a self-taught artist, painting mainly
seascapes on cardboard. A turning point
was the arrival of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo as refugees
from London in 1939, when Bryan Pearce would have been 10. These modernist artists celebrated what they
saw as the innocent primitivism of locals like Wallis. This
was the context in which, as a teenager, Bryan was encouraged by his mother and
other artists to paint. To begin with,
he painted rather tentative watercolours.
His obvious talent meant that he attended the St Ives School of Painting
during his twenties. Importantly, this School
welcomed both novice and professional artists, and had a commitment to
inclusion. So unlike other Outsider
Artists, Pearce was not a self-taught or untrained amateur.
The turning point in Bryan Pearce’s career came in 1957 when he started
painting in oils. He began to exhibit soon
after. Two years later he had his first
solo exhibition at the local Newlyn Gallery.
Although he painted slowly,
producing perhaps one picture a month, he had a long and very successful
career, exhibiting throughout England.
Late in life, he made etchings and his work was also sold in the form of
limited-edition screen prints. His work
has been bought by both major public collections, such as the Tate Gallery and
Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and private collectors.
Pearce has a very distinctive style.
Although the work has a naivete,
you would probably not guess, if you didn’t already know, that he was disabled.
His work is not manic or fascinatingly odd, like some Outsider Artists, who
obsessively draw pictures of cats or little girls. It’s not meticulous and photographic, like
Stephen Wiltshire. It’s in the
tradition of folk art like that of Alfred Wallis. If
Lowry had left the rainy North West and come down to sunny Cornwall, maybe he’d
have painted like Pearce. Words like
“serene” and “visionary” are often used of his work.
Let me try and describe two of these paintings, they’re both on board,
the same size, about 60cm by 50cm.
Belladonna Lilies no 4 is a simple picture of half a dozen lilies in a
jug. They are sat on a tiled surface,
with the frame of a window behind. The
flowers are pink and white with dark stalks, and they loll in different
directions. The tones of the picture are
muted, with slate blue tiles, the paler blue of the window, and the reddish
lines which mark out the curves of the jug and the rectangular window
frame. The picture reminds me of David
Hockney in its simplicity, but it could also by an early Italian Renaissance
painter like Giotto. Others have
compared Pearce’s work to that of Fra Angelico.
Part of this is because the depictions do not follow the established
artistic rules of perspective. It’s also
because there’s a literalness about Pearce, whether he’s painting mugs and
bowls and tablecloths, or angels above the local churchyard. Finally, I think this simplicity gives the
work a similar spiritual intensity.
Pearce’s 1973 picture, My Mother,
also has a muted colour range. Mary
Pearce is looking to the left in profile, like the Queen on a playing
card. But she also seems to be keeping
one eye on the painter. The background
is plain grey, but there are two orange lines cutting across like tracks about
a third the way down the canvas. Bryan
has captured the texture of his mother’s hair, and then has carefully followed
the checks of her blouse. It’s a very balanced painting, which has both
stillness and weight. Bryan Pearce
mainly avoided putting people in his pictures.
But he did paint his mother and her friends, and sometimes their lawn
bowls team.
So far, I’ve described a still life and a portrait, but Bryan Pearce is
best known for painting his own home town of St Ives and surrounding
countryside. Every morning and
afternoon, he would take long walks around the local district , and come back
to paint. He had a powerful visual memory, but his works
are also carefully composed. Take, for
example, a painting of Westcott’s Quay from 1980 which shows several buildings,
and in a gap between them, you can see the harbor and on the horizon a spit of
land, ending in a lighthouse on an island. A fishing boat is moored in the
harbor. The stones of the walls and the
tiles of the roofs are rendered carefully.
There are no people in sight, but it’s almost as if the windows of the
buildings are eyes, as if the town itself has personality. It’s a calm painting, with this
characteristic stillness. Something
about the way he uses line is very satisfying to me.
You always know you are in Cornwall, with Bryan Pearce. They’re always sunny scenes, bathed in light,
full of vivid colour, reminiscent of a post-impressionist like Cezanne, or
perhaps of modernist stained glass. Often the perspective is unusual, sometimes
the scene is taken with a bird’s eye view, as if Picasso had done it. But Pearce himself did not study other
artists, and his style was his own, not the result of external influences. He never felt bound by convention. Nor was
he bothered by art-world politics. In his
obituary, critic Mel Gooding wrote of him as:
“a visionary
artist of a quite particular kind, whose distinction had to do with the
solitary nature of his artistic experience and the use he made of a profound
creative solitude in the midst of a world experienced with preternatural
vividness. That enforced and productive apartness is not to be confused with
social solitude or loneliness; it was, rather, the necessary condition of his
imaginative freedom and his peculiar talent.”
Whereas other St Ives artists sometimes struggled to achieve
authenticity, he wasn’t trying for this effect.
He had no other way to communicate than this.
Descriptions like innocence and lack of self-consciousness are often made in connection with learning disabled people. We tend to think of such folk as childlike and unreflexive. We may admire their apparent purity and sincerity, because it contrasts with our world of ambition and manipulation.
I think that when we see the work of Bryan Pearce, which is as visionary
and unique as that of any other major British artist, we are forced to rethink
our assumptions about intellectual disability.
Bryan Pearce was limited in his ability to learn and communicate
verbally. But alongside his deficits was
a huge talent to see and communicate through art. As he said to his mother
"What would I do if I
didn't paint? What would I do?”
Further reading
Ruth Jones, The
Path of the Son (1976)
Marion Whybrow, Bryan
Pearce: a private view (1985)
Janet Axten, The
Artist and His Work (2004)
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