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The artist Mary Stork, who died in Treliske Hospital on Monday, aged
68, always maintained that "a good picture should continue to breathe
and vibrate with energy long after it is painted", and the many
pictures she produced and exhibited during her successful career did
just that, not only continuing to breathe but also to vibrate with a
raw energy, vitality and sense of movement, impossible to ignore.Born
in Portsmouth, she grew up in Devon where her father was principal of
the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and who, as it happened, would
appoint Mousehole artist Jack Pender as the college art master. He, in
turn, later became a close friend of hers when she came to settle in
Penwith in 1960. She studied at the West of England College of Art in
Bristol and at the Slade School in London and it was at the latter that
she met fellow artist Jeremy Le Grice, whom she was to marry, and who
recalls that with her first show at the Slade she "displayed great
flair as a painter and swept the board". Although on leaving the Slade
she enjoyed several successful shows of her work, eventually she had to
forego her blossoming career as a painter, largely to raise their
family of three, Anna, Tom and Harriet, and was unable to pick up her
brush again and return to full-time painting until the mid-1980s.
Making
up, as it were, for lost time her progress was all but meteoric. She
married her second husband, fisherman and miner Irving Edward "Herbie"
Uren, whose sudden death in 1994 was to affect her greatly and, in
fact, left such a hole in her life that again she was unable to paint
for a good while. She quickly gained admiration and critical acclaim
for her studies of the human form, became a member of both the Newlyn
and Penwith Societies of Artists, exhibited extensively in mixed shows
from Penzance to Plymouth, Bath to Edinburgh, and enjoyed solo shows
from the Salt House Gallery, St Ives to David Messum Fine Art, London.
Her works now form part of a number of private collections from the UK
to the USA, from Germany to the Netherlands.
Rather like Degas,
she was always ready, willing and able to experiment with a variety of
media, a factor which led to her developing a highly individual
technique, using water, paper and pastels that gave her compositions an
instantly recognisable identity and helped place them in a class of
their own. For the most part the figures in her paintings are
anonymous, their gender neither apparent nor important. Their faces
remain featureless and what matters is their mixture of simplicity and
sophistication, their inner rhythms and tensions, and the contrasting
density and transparency of their textural and tonal values. When at
the Slade, apparently, she was especially interested in sculpture and
there is a strength and solidity, a curvilinear structure, in much of
her work that is almost sculptural. One who worked fast and freely
confessed to often not knowing what the end result in a work would be,
she relied on her instinct and intuition to tell her when a work was
right, and they never let her down.
Beautifully balanced,
monumental yet curiously modest, the omissions in her compositions are
as important as the inclusions, at once reflective and reposeful, as
peaceful and as powerful as prayers. Mary Stork's images sprang from
her imagination and memory and the paintings she made invite and reward
contemplation. An artist who achieved a state of simple clarity in her
work which, considering her fast-lane approach to her art, is as
astonishing as it is admirable, with typical generosity she once said
"the warmth in my work is for the world". One who possessed "great
flair" both as a person and a painter, Mary Stork will be sorely missed.
Her funeral service is being held in St Mary's Church, Penzance, at 2.30pm on Monday.
article copyright THE CORNISHMAN
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