A wacky, intense art teacher like no other
Mark Hudson looks back fondly on his time as a student in Winchester with the great abstract painter Gillian Ayres, who died this week
My first significant encounter with Gillian Ayres, as a student at Winchester School of Art, took place in the late Seventies, in the crowded buffet car of a morning commuter train from Waterloo to Winchester. There Ayres, newly appointed head of painting, sat amid a group of other tutors, a romantically dishevelled figure. Her mass of greying blonde hair wreathed in cigarette smoke, she held forth in rhapsodic tones on the brilliance of the Venetian Renaissance painter Tintoretto as a psychologist – “one of the greatest,” she maintained, “who ever lived.” But what really riveted my attention was the inch-long column of ash teetering at the tip of her cigarette that appeared about to collapse at any moment into her untouched cup of coffee.
The fact that Ayres’s cigarette held together until the train arrived at Winchester station seems an apt metaphor for an artist who, at least to some of her students at the college, may sometimes have appeared unimaginably vague and off-with-the-fairies, but who had the steeliness to sustain a career at the forefront of British art for more than six decades. She arrived in Winchester in 1978, two years after I did, during a deeply uncertain period in British art. The euphoric movements of the Sixties – conceptualism, minimalism, pop art – were still around, but no longer the potent force they once were. To the average British art student there was little sense of direction, either at Winchester or in the wider art scene in general. Art definitely did not seem like it would ever be the new rock’n’roll. Indeed, I’d abandoned painting at Winchester, deeming it irrelevant to the era of punk and industrial unrest, and taken up filmmaking. Ayres had been part of a wave of young British abstract painters who in the late Fifties blasted away the cosy provincialism of post-war British art, and who in photographs of the time, radiated a cool sex appeal, like an English rose-beatnik in blue jeans. With her philosophy of panoramic lyrical abstraction, she had been brought to Winchester by William Crozier, the then-head of fine art, who wanted, as I recall, to “shake things up”. Ayres, the first woman to become head of painting in a British art college, immediately had a huge impact. The college, on the riverbank in the sleepy and then run-down cathedral town, was tiny and no one could be unaware of Ayres’s defiantly untidy presence. She was a bit posh, a bit wacky, and totally disinterested in her appearance. Art teachers don’t tend to wear three-piece suits but even by their standards the chain-smoking Ayres cut a rumpled figure. You could usually tell when Ayres had dropped into the canteen for a coffee and a cake: there would be a mayhem of butts and cake crumbs left all over the table. One of my friends referred to her as “The Mess”.
Nevertheless her radical influence on the students was extraordinary. Within months of her arrival a substantial number had stopped painting aimless landscapes and started producing large-scale, gestural, Ay resesque abstracts – a development that had more to do with Ayres’s force of personality than any kind of systematic instruction. Compared to today, when bureaucratic paperwork dominates every aspect of education, back then teachers in art schools didn’t really teach, they just hung out. Ayres’s approach was all about enabling the natural artist in the student, rather than telling them how to paint. She would simply turn up in the corner of a studio where you were working and start talking about your painting in totally abstract, near-mystical terms.
On other occasions I remember she or one of the like-minded painters she’d brought in to teach, such as the British abstractionist John Mclean and the artist Clyde Hopkins, would engage in a group crit in which students would talk in hushed voices about abstract marks made by a student on a blank canvas. Never mind what the marks might “mean”: for Ayres, the idea that a message or a story should exist outside of what was physically present on canvas was anathema. She was concerned only with getting it – a kind of impulsive life-force – on the canvas and she barely conceded the relevance of anything not visually apparent. “Gillian exuded this enthusiasm for painting, for colour and materials, and the idea you could and should stick with a painting until something happened,” says Gill Ord, a friend of mine in the year below and now a noted artist in her own right. “There was a paint store at the college with masses of paint and rolls of canvas and she’d encourage you to work on a really big scale. The idea that there might be a budget probably never entered her head. And she’d get into a really intense conversation about painting with you just about anywhere, on a staircase or when you were up a ladder with paint dripping everywhere. You’d be putting brush to canvas and she’d be saying, ‘What does one do, does one let it all flow or does one try to control it?’, as paint was flooding down the canvas. But to her that was all good.”
Suddenly, the studios at Winchester were full of students throwing paint at canvases in exhilarated, excited
‘She’d encourage you to work on a really big scale. The idea there might be a budget probably never entered her head’
abandon. Without realising it Ord and her peers were taking part in the revival of what Ayres had pioneered in the Fifties but which was now taking place on a much larger scale. One of the most significant tendencies in late 20th century British art, it became known as lyrical abstraction. Exemplified by Ayres as well as Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland, Albert Irvin and others, it was effectively the rebirth of the painterly values of the Abstract Expressionist era: large-scale canvases, exuberant sensual brushwork and – particularly in Ayres’s case – an almost gastronomic enthusiasm for colour. These were qualities unfettered from the need to be about anything other than themselves: pure painting if you like, but with a touch of English pastoral lurking in its exuberant surfaces.
Yet the perceived antiintellectualism of this attitude and her indifference to external theories about art made Ayres an unfashionable figure. She resigned from her position at Winchester in 1981, the victim, she claimed, of a new managerial tendency in art education, though she had also fallen out with some colleagues on the matter of whether art history should be taught. Since nothing, in Ayres’s view, should inhibit the excitement of the student’s personal discovery of other artists’ work, she naturally believed it shouldn’t.
That’s a view that disregards the needs of the majority of students who, unless pointed to what’s worthwhile will never find it, in favour of the talented and committed minority who will seek out the greatest art whatever the odds.
While Gillian Ayres was amiable and generous both as artist and human being, it was inevitably only those students who shared her all-consuming passion for art, to the exclusion of anything else, that she was really interested in. And unfashionably undemocratic as that may sound, why, frankly, should it have been otherwise?
GILLIAN AYRES who has died aged 88, was an English abstract painter whose large, colourful canvasses dominated any room in which they were hung.
Throughout the course of her long career Gillian Ayres’s work remained remarkably consistent in both its style and concern. Her paintings expressed her love of colour, which was released in swirling organic forms, dazzling the viewer with the vibrancy of her brush strokes and with the modulations and juxtapositions of her primaries.
Although her endlessly reworked paintings could take months to complete, she was never a painter to reveal her process. Her art spun on its spontaneity, its air of apparent ease and effortlessness. She never resorted to the geometric, the mathematical, or to the drab tones and subject matter of the Euston Road School that predominated in her early years.
For Gillian Ayres, work was an ode to beauty, to colour in its natural form which, at its highest pitch, communicated its reflexive purity and joy to the viewer.
Gillian Ayres was born on February 3 1930 in London, the daughter of Stephen and Florence. Her father ran the family hat-making business in Soho. She was the youngest of three daughters and was educated at the experimental Froebel school and St Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammermsith, where her friends included Shirley Williams, who would be co-founder of the Social Democratic Party, and the novelist Shirley Conran, who was to become one of the foremost collectors of her work.
She decided as a child that she wished to become a painter, leaving school at 16 against her parents’ wishes to enter Camberwell School of Art. She had rejected the Slade after it only offered her a place when she was 18.
Entering Camberwell in 1946 as the only girl in her year was a daunting experience. Many of her classmates were war veterans simply thrilled to be alive, for whom painting was a joy after the jungle and the desert. One of these, Henry Mundy, 11 years older than Gillian Ayres, was to become her husband in 1951.
She left without taking her exams – which she considered “bourgeois” – although she was later to become an examiner at the Royal College of Art. Having exhibited at the first Young Contemporaries show in 1949, Gillian and Henry spent a summer painting in Cornwall and working at the Land’s End Hotel. They returned to London and shared a job at the Artists’ International Association (AIA) gallery, a communist organisation prepared to employ non-communist artists, and painted compulsively in their spare time.
There Gillian Ayres met Roger Hilton, whose vibrant, un-english aesthetic inspired her to pursue her chosen style in which swaths of colour were paramount. She exhibited alone and in group shows, travelled extensively in southern Europe where the warmth of colour and light fired her imagination, and painted a mural for South Hampstead School – which was so disliked that it was papered over and only exhumed in the 1990s.
In 1959 Gillian Ayres and Mundy moved to Corsham, in Wiltshire, to teach at the Bath Academy of Art, where their colleagues included Howard Hodgkin and Adrian Heath.
They taught and painted obsessively, Gillian Ayres not even allowing the births of their children to interrupt her routine. Mundy’s exquisite miniature abstracts were enjoying some success and the pair remained at Corsham until 1965, when they left to take up teaching posts at St Martin’s School of Art.
Gillian Ayres stayed at St Martin’s until 1978, during which time she was divorced from Mundy. She then became head of painting at Winchester College of Art. It was not an easy period. Government cutbacks undermined funding and the trend in art schools was towards extensive written exams, which Gillian Ayres abhorred.
For someone who taught art for over twenty years, Gillian Ayres maintained a remarkably relaxed attitude towards it. She once said: “I don’t think you can teach art … If one was a good teacher, it was probably because one set up a nice atmosphere in a sort of lazy way.”
The year 1981 was the turning point in Gillian Ayres’s life. She resigned from Winchester, a significant financial risk, sold her house in Barnes and moved with a younger artist, Gareth Williams, to the Llŷn Peninsula in Wales, having calculated that she had enough money to paint full time for three years and would then take work in a local supermarket.
The risk was triumphantly justified. She exhibited successfully at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1981, became a member of the Royal Academy the following year (though she left for a while in 1997 in protest at the Academy displaying a portrait of Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer) and in 1983 enjoyed a sell-out show at the Serpentine Gallery.
Her household took an unusual turn when her former husband came to stay for Christmas – and stayed forever. In 1986, the year after she and Norman Lynton had made an Open University film on abstract art, Williams was killed in a road accident.
The following year Gillian Ayres moved with Mundy to the Devon corn wall border, where they lived for the remainder of their lives, painting in their respective studios – although they never remarried. All her life Gillian Ayres painted whenever she could. “I can’t not work,” she said. “You totally feel you’re wasting your life.” Much of her work she never exhibited and could not bear to sell. It covered every inch of her house, the glorious colours providing the only warmth in her unheated studio.
Viewing a Gillian Ayres painting is a sensuous experience. The work is wholly abstract, to the extent that she would excise any line or motif that appeared to convey meaning or specific form. The paintings were given titles such as A Belt of Straw and Ivy Buds (1983) after they were completed, names that were not intended to be significant.
At the outset Gillian Ayres covered the whole canvas as quickly as possible, creating a base for the work. The freshness of the original application could not be maintained, but she was able to retain the aura of speed and innocence, the sense of original perception, by mixing the colours on the canvas, adding and subtracting layers and idioms to create a feeling of abandon, of submission to the exalted heights of her imagination. To that extent her paintings were whole; they were, of themselves, fields of pure colour, alluding to nothing beyond the confines of the canvas.
Gillian Ayres’s art was at odds with the British aesthetic. She once lamented that “our particular culture is happier with serious subjects and brown paintings. When people talk of pure decoration they talk about it as if it were something like an embroidered cushion.”
She was unrepentantly concerned with beauty as an end in itself. “I think beauty can lift you up and sort of take your feet away from the ground … I mean, if the world doesn’t care about it, then I think the world’s gone potty.” In her own art, throughout her working life, Gillian Ayres never aimed for anything other than the creation of pure beauty.
In 1990 the British Council invited Gillian Ayres to paint in India. She went with her son and a friend, Alexandra Pringle, who described travelling with Ayres as “being given a new pair of eyes”. She returned in 1991 as the British representative at the India Triennale in Delhi.
Gillian Ayres was fascinated by the quiddity of life, by its minutiae and its rhythm. A dedicated conversationalist, forever with a glass and a cigarette to hand, she defied the doctors who prescribed a teetotal diet after a near fatal illness with the same zest that she defied motherhood in pursuit of art.
Her qualities and unique contribution to modern British painting were recognised when she was appointed OBE in 1986, advanced to CBE in 2011. In the mid-1990s she was appointed a senior fellow at the Royal College of Art and the following year awarded the Sargent Fellowship at the British School at Rome.
She and Mundy had two sons, one of whom, Sammy, is an artist.
Gillian Ayres, born February 3, 1930, died April 11 2018