Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta
Edinburgh College of Art, until 30 August
Janet Boulton (born 1936) is an artist of integrity and dedication, whose principal subject is still-life. She paints in watercolour, that most demanding of media, and eschews drama of subject or treatment. She has chosen a difficult path, and one which attracts little attention, particularly in an art world dominated by sensationalism. Boulton’s is a quiet art, its aim residing in the subtlest differentiations of tone and placing. She paints exquisite compositions of glass vessels, making of their reflective surfaces a fitting subject for contemplation, a modern vanitas. She is also a passionate gardener, and one of her most heartfelt projects in recent years — besides the designing and tending of her own small garden in Oxfordshire — has been visiting and recording Ian Hamilton Finlay’s famous garden in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland.
People are divided about the artist, writer and polemicist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). They tend either to adore him and all his works, or else to execrate his politics or self-aggrandisement. But even his severest critics are frequently won over by the charms and intellectual delights of Little Sparta, his garden. For the past 16 years, Janet Boulton has visited Little Sparta on a regular basis, spending a week there every few months, and devoting her time to recording the varying aspect of the place. A classical garden on a domestic scale, it recalls the arrangements of Stowe in the placement of inscribed sculptures in relation to various landscape features and new plantings. The themes of Finlay’s garden are an extension of his obsessions but presented in a more relaxed way. Humour, irony and affection are evident, and make a lasting monument to an often difficult man.
Boulton was allowed to visit at all times of the year, although Finlay usually decreed that the garden existed only between June and September, when it was open to visitors. Boulton got on so well with Finlay that they worked together on a number of projects (Finlay must be the greatest collaborator among modern artists, working regularly with printers and sculptors to visualise his ideas). Her understanding of his aims and her sensitivity to nuance ensure that her response to his garden is an expert and creative one; her own work, spanning watercolours, paper pulp reliefs and foamboard maquettes for marble sculptures, is assured, ambitious and celebratory.
‘Artemis with Tools’ features classical statuary in the Temple of Apollo at Little Sparta, a refurbished cow-byre intended as a repository of Finlay’s French Revolutionary work, which also doubled as a storehouse for garden tools and packing crates. Note the red band around Artemis’ neck, a French aristocratic fashion symbolising that family members had succumbed to the guillotine. Inscriptions have specific meanings: ‘Osez’ referring to St Just’s words ‘To dare is the politics of revolution’. St Just, a Finlay hero, was executed on a day named Arrosoir, which means watering can. The references ramify. Another very fine group of watercolours depicts the toy boats Finlay liked to make, placed against windows.
The Little Sparta project is central to Boulton’s achievement. Her admiration for Finlay also feeds into her own garden in Abingdon, which is full of word games and coded echoes of the master, as well as a nice homage to Paul Nash, another artist she much admires. (In 1991, Boulton edited and published a fascinating volume of Nash’s letters to his childhood friend Mercia Oakley.) Boulton’s body of work about Little Sparta is, in effect, a painter’s homage to a poet’s garden, and should be kept together as a unique and individual commentary. This exhibition travels to America in the spring of 2010, where it will be shown at the John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago. Boulton’s Little Sparta work deserves a permanent museum home somewhere — will it be in the UK, I wonder?
At the other end of the country, in Cornwall, is a small but select show of paintings and prints by Stephen Chambers (born 1960). The Wills Lane Gallery in St Ives (until 20 September) has a substantial representation of his etchings, in company with three new paintings. Chambers is one of our most interesting younger artist–printmakers, constantly open to new ways of making an image, renewing his vision through the taproot of drawing. A dab hand at texture and surface variety, he designs his pictures with a sure feeling for shape and pattern. He is a bold and inventive colourist, given to unexpected combinations and flooding his images with seraphic or startling hues. Perfect viewing for those fortunate enough to be holidaying in the south- west.
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