Sometimes I ask myself what would I lose or miss if I didn't paint directly from life? I am excited by and wonder at what is revealed by the simple act of looking. The shapes between things and beats of tone seem to affect me. Painting is a way of thinking through what you are looking at. Then the looking becomes more than a naming of objects. It gives you a chance to look at the world without words through interacting shapes, subtle tonal differences and rhythms, warm darks, cool lights. It can involve the abstract, your senses, memory.
Different combinations of colour for the palette or a new pigment can help express that perception and give it form. In particular, Gamboge Yellow Lake, which has a golden quality of warmth and light. It is quite translucent, unlike Naples or yellow ochre, and not as acid as cadmium or lemon. It has edginess and energy.
Strategic Colour
There is in all of Alice Mumford’s work a focus on light’s capacity to animate, for light is her essential subject. First and foremost a colourist, her eye is keenly attuned to the physical and sensory effects of colour, its chromatic variations and interactions, and to the ways in which the eye navigates and makes sense of both objects and space, its comprehension informed by the quality and play of light. The artist’s motifs of still life and landscape stem from her surroundings; the stuff of her everyday life, transformed in paint to conjure something that speaks of both permanence and transience. Her work reflects the seasons. Here, Summer Heat on the Patio, Lesceave, Cornwall summons the optical effects of high summer, the way that motes swim and things momentarily appear to shimmer and dissolve as one narrows one’s gaze as it moves from shadow towards the glare of the sun. Frost and Early Morning Sun is equally though differently dramatic, its raked wintry light causing long bluish shadows whilst making hues in a bowl of fruit sharper. Elsewhere, the drama of light and colour relationships is gentler, more nuanced, particularly in domestic still life arrangements such as The Pink and White Edged Plate and Mirror, in which the interplay between a still life and its reflection creates a picture within a picture, the inflected whites of tablecloth and mirror frame merging the two.
Amongst Mumford’s most admired painters are Matisse and Cézanne, though it is with Bonnard that she feels the closest kinship. She sometimes makes painted copies from works by other artists in an attempt to understand them more deeply, and recently made a copy of Bonnard’s ‘The Dining Room at Le Cannet’ (1932). Subsequently, she recounted how it was only upon realising that she had omitted from her canvas a small patch of blue that Bonnard had painted near to the centre of his tabletop still life that it dawned on her that this was the very thing that held everything in place:
“I had pretty much finished the copy, and began to think that the mysteries of how this painting worked were impenetrable. Then I realised I had omitted the small, blue, diagonal rectangle, that adjoins the large orange rectangle in the middle of the canvas. Without this dark blue chip, the structure of the space seemed to fall apart. Not only does it provide a way into the picture, as the point of most contrast, but it also brightens all the whites, oranges and yellow-oranges, creating this incredible bouncing light.”
We cannot be certain whether Bonnard invented this anchoring fragment, or painted it from a carefully chosen object: it was though clearly fundamental to his pictorial stratagem. And it is insights such as this, into the often-complex architecture of shape and colour involved in picture making, which inform and underpin Mumford’s work. There is for instance a not dissimilar patch of colour to that of the Bonnard in her Summer days at Lesceave; a centrally placed blue-black strip that describes the edge of a dish or book set on a table positioned out of doors, and that marks a point in space between the blacks within a vase of flowers in the foreground and those in a group of shrubs set further back against sea and sky. One realises that here too this ostensibly minor component is fundamental to the creation of pictorial space. This painting and Opening the French Windows, Polgrean – the two largest and most complex canvases here – each consist of a sequence of interconnected interior and exterior spaces, in which a room is bathed in warm light, light which flows through a curtained open doorway that acts as a proscenium linking inside and outside worlds.
The artist has said before how important tempo is in her painting, referring to the rhythm and pace of application of pigment to canvas. She employs a wide vocabulary of mark, sometimes put down with deliberative forethought; sometimes more spontaneously, with concentrated speed. In some works one senses the scrabbling of the brush in its quest to pin down a transitory effect, the paint scurried on in impasto or dry-brush. This certainly applies to certain of the small still life canvases shown here, all of them essays in pure painting; Apple blossom in the window with The Pink Cup and Bright Lights and White Table Cloth are amongst prime examples. Elsewhere, in works such as the lyrical The Olive Tree in a Cloudless Sky, the handling is softer, more delicate and restrained. Throughout, Mumford elicits an unforced poetry, one that stems from her deep commitment to the craft of painting, and a continuing fascination with colour and light.
Ian Massey
2017
The Sensuous Life of Things
She placed a vase of jasmine on the windowsill.' 'The glass of water glowed as though the tablecloth's deep pink colour had dissolved and intensified inside it…'. Still life, when you do it in words, is never entirely still – in the background, out of sight, someone is usually moving about, opening windows, eating breakfast. And once people enter the scene, stories begin to unfold and the passage of time picks up is familiar, distracting momentum.
Still life paintings, on the other hand, really can slow the beat almost to a standstill. Light and shadow hold their balance however long you look, and longer. In their refusal to be agitated by the human goings-on around them, objects radiate the self-contained, silent life of things. Paradoxically, the stillness of still-life becomes deeper and more sensuous when, as in Alice Mumford's new paintings, there's a corresponding feeling of vitality, even exuberance, breaking through. Alongside plain glass beakers and earthenware pots – those old retainers in the house of art – there are pink and orangey red textiles, warm atmospheric greys, and explosive sprigs of blossom rendered with the impulsive, open-ended kind of brush mark that a relatively recent development in Mumford's work.
Modest as they are, the objects in these paintings – the patterned plates, milk jugs and impromptu, vivid little bunches of flowers – inhabit what you imagine to be, in the general experience of twenty-first-century domestic multi-tasking, a pleasant, slightly rarefied world in which there will always be time to spread the table or explore the garden. This is part of their allure, since who can resist the thought of such moments, however seldom they actually occur?
But it's not quite that simple: how is it, for example, that all is quick, approximate brush strokes finally add up to an effective poise and calm? It is much easier to enjoy than to explain how it feels so peaceful on the table top where the sunlight falls and where small, everyday objects focus a very particular sense of solace and in elation.
Michael Bird
August 2010
The St Ives and Camberwell traditions
A major strand in St Ives' contribution to modern British art has been the painterly, from John Park and Christopher Wood in the 1920s to, in their own distinctive ways, Brian Pearce and Fred Yates today, and our exhibition St Ives: 80 years modernism (22 November – 18 December 2001) demonstrated this. Alice Mumford, born in 1965, continues this tradition. Her family is Cornish and she has lived in West Cornwall for the past 14 years. There are and have been many painters in her family: she is the fourth generation.
She studied at the Camberwell School of Art and also comes from that tradition of painting from life, with an emphasis on observation, light, tone, space, and placing: this encourages the discovery of that magical beauty which is to be found in the humblest of objects or scenes. She follows in the footsteps of Camberwell teachers and pupils such as Frank Auerbach, Bernard Dunstan, Terry Frost, Howard Hodgkin, and Ewan Uglow.
Julian Lax
May 2003
The Prosaic and the Dramatic
The true artist must reveal the spiritual dimension which lies at the heart of ordinary and lowly objects. Alice Mumford is such an artist, following in the still life tradition defined by John-Baptiste Chardin and developed by Giorgio Morandi. She sees clearly in the paintings of Paul Cézanne what she defines as a process of weaving, with the interlacing energies of warp and weft across the entire surface forming a unified picture plane. This interlacing creates the basic abstraction to be found in all modernist painting.
Her objects have at one in the same time a prosaic and a dramatic nature and symbolise the presence of human beings and the mystery of their daily lives. She instilled in English flavour into the still life tradition and, in her profound understanding and joyful handling of oil paint, can be likened to Winifred Nicholson and the School of St Ives.
Professor Richard Demarco OBE
May 2003