Guests can watch a conservator at work on one of many nice unfinished work of the twentieth century, as a part of a brand new exhibition on the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, the place the artist spent most of his life.
Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, which occupied Spencer for greater than a decade however remained incomplete on the time of his demise in 1959, has been hung excessive up within the gallery because it opened in 1962. Now, the centrepiece of Revealing Genius, Conserving Artwork: Stanley Spencer’s Remaining Masterpiece, has been introduced right down to floor stage, permitting conservation scholar Olivia Leake to analyze Spencer’s strategies and supplies.
Whereas Spencer’s use of a conventional pencil-drawn grid to switch drawings to canvas is straightforward to see with the bare eye, different particulars have proved extra shocking. “I used to be fairly shocked to understand simply how skinny the paint is—you possibly can see the bottom coming by in most paint passages,” says Leake, who’s finishing a grasp’s diploma in easel portray conservation at London’s Courtauld Institute.
Extremely-violet (UV) mild reveals “little pinpoint breaks” within the paint layer, which Leake believes are in step with Spencer’s need to complete the portray rapidly, earlier than he died. She feels equally concerning the artist’s concentrate on the determine of Christ on the portray’s centre, which is one among only a few areas of the roughly two by 5 metres canvas that could be thought of full.
Such insights have up to now proved fascinating to guests. “Opening conservation as much as broader audiences is admittedly necessary,” says Leake, including that such work explains why funding the humanities stays necessary. “Rather a lot goes into it behind the scenes that individuals do not realise,” she explains.
Paint evaluation of the work has revealed that an space of water, initially inexperienced, was later overpainted with blue. Leake additionally factors out a number of adjustments to the underdrawings, together with to the figurehead within the foreground.
That is notably fascinating, Leake says, as a result of there are lots of anecdotes about Spencer by no means altering the underdrawing. “He’s quoted as saying to his daughter, that ‘the drawing is the picture of the soul’,” she explains.
Going ahead, the conservator’s priorities might be figuring out and stabilising areas of concern, particularly an space of staining within the high left of the work the place no paint is current, solely pencil on primed canvas. It might be mould, established in the course of the portray’s peripatetic youth, when Spencer habitually rolled it up and took it with him wherever he was going.
