Life- enhancing
his death, a body of his work was left in the care of the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, where it has pretty much languished ever since until an exhibition opened last month in Britain.
Has it rebuilt his reputation? Even Blackburn seems unsure: “I didn’t know when I started out on this book and I still don’t know now, if John Craske was an important artist or an unimportant artist. I am not sure if it matters either way: his work made life meaningful for him and he went on doing it, almost to the moment of his death.”
Undeniably, Craske’s pictures are very striking. This is a man of the sea who loved the sea and understood its moods and the ways in which boats behaved. At his most stuporous, unreachable moments, the only solace he found was in looking at the sea.
Then he began to paint it, and when he could not sit or stand to paint he lay on his back in bed and made embroidered pictures of it. These derive their power from a simple combination of colours and some vivid imagery. As Craske got older he also became more ambitious, his piece de resistance being an embroidery of the evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II about 3m long and half a metre wide. The scale, however, is unusual – most of the works reproduced in the book are small, not least because his poverty made the purchase of materials impossible. When a visitor arrived at the cottage, she found almost every surface covered in paintings and every wall hung with his work.
Such a cliché has it become that I cringe as I write it, but the absolute fascination of this book is not the arrival but the journey. Because so little has been written or is known about Craske, Blackburn has to follow any possible lead and explore any connection however remote. This leads her to museums where Craske’s work is bundled into dusty boxes, onto fishing boats, into conversations with distant relatives, and tramping the Norfolk coastline. And almost imperceptibly a picture emerges not just of Craske himself and his astonishingly resilient and wonderful wife Laura, but of a time, an era that no longer exists.
Blackburn is a lover ( as am I) of eccentricity and quirkiness, and so she introduces us to a range of historical characters ranging from the Norfolk Giant ( over 2m in height and more than 200kg in weight) along with Alfred Einstein, of whom there is a wonderful photograph when in exile in Norfolk accompanied by two glamorous young women with shotguns for his defence.
There are moments when you think that all of this might just unravel, so disparate are some of the strands Blackburn explores, but somehow ( and despite the personal tragedy she experiences while writing the book), it never does. What you are left with is a delightful, quirky, and beautifully written book that leaves you wiser and with your life somehow enhanced. I loved it.
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