Winter with Mary Potter

Mary Potter
The Wood, 1968
Oil on canvas
41 x 46 cm
16 x 18 in.

As we approach the darkest winter days, we start to welcome warm light against dark skies. In many of Mary Potter’s late works from the late 1960s onwards, attention is given to small moments of light and feeling. Fragments and reflections are treated with refined mark making, resulting in paintings that are ultimately warm and familiar.

These three works were painted soon after Potter’s first experience with the New Art Centre in 1967. Their titles give a clue, an instance of how her appellations return us from the abstract realm and into a more recognisable scene, and from this the painting begins to reveal itself more and more as we scan the delicate flashes of colour across the surface.

Having been introduced to the New Art Centre by Sir Kenneth Clark, Potter had 13 solo exhibitions with the gallery during her lifetime. This was during a pivotal period in her life, when her work was becoming less representational.

Mary Potter wrote of these late works; "It is certainly not representational; I haven’t been that for a great many years. I don’t suppose it is abstract – I don’t know what I call myself – I just go on following my inclinations."

An encroaching light, diffused or reflected, encourages a subtle layering of colours, while her cursory treatment of line and form seems to place her subjects at a remove from everyday reality... It has been observed that, with their restrained yet refulgent colours, her pictures continue, once experienced, to glow in the mind.

– Frances Spalding, 2024

Mary Potter
Evening in the Snow, 1979
Oil on canvas
76 x 61 cm
30 x 24 in.

Mary Potter
Lantern, 1970
Oil on Canvas
56 x 101.5 cm
22 x 40 in.

Lantern, a view from a window at night, where reflections of golden light suggest jubilations and music inside. It is an excellent example of Potter’s use of beeswax, which she mixed with oil paint for impasto areas. She also mixed marble dust with oil paint for flatness and a subtle chalky quality, which flattens the perspective and, absent of the sheen which would normally appear had the paint not been mixed with marble dust and beeswax, gives the impression of an iridescent, glimmering light.

Lantern is a celebrated piece and has been included in several of Mary Potter’s major exhibitions. It was first shown with the New Art Centre in 1972. It was shown in both the retrospective organised by the Arts Council at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981 - a signal success with an audience close to 25,000 people - and at the major retrospective at Oriel 31, Welshpool, in 1989.

Mary Potter (1900 – 1981) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1918 – 21. Mary Potter became an early member of the Seven and Five Society in 1921, where she was provided with her first source of critical praise. Later, she moved to join the London Group amongst the likes of Frances Hodgkins and Ceri Richards; soon after, she had her first solo exhibition in 1931 at the Bloomsbury Gallery.

After moving to Aldeburgh in 1951, she started to draw more from feeling and intuition, rather than literal representation. The Suffolk coast and its light fed into her later work, as well as her close friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. In 1964 Bryan Robertson, then Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, offered her a solo exhibition in the gallery which was a major success, and was the starting point for pushing her work into abstraction.

Mary Potter A Transformative Vision: A Survey of Paintings 1960 – 1980 continues in the Artists House and Stable Gallery.