Her distinctive, sensuous style has divided critics; but there's no faulting the generosity of this prolific painter who is giving it all away to the Irish people, writes Rosita Boland
Artist Pauline Bewick probably would not agree with the expression that "less is more". This week, she donated 600 pieces of her work to the State - a gesture described by President Mary McAleese, who accepted them on behalf of the State, as "one of the loveliest acts of generosity ever given to our nation".
The donation was made in three parts. One will be on permanent display in the county where Bewick has lived for many years, Kerry - at Kerry County Council's new offices in Killorglin. One will tour throughout Ireland and overseas. The final and largest part of the donation, numbering 300 pieces, will be on permanent display at the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). Their collective worth is estimated at €3 million.
While certainly an altruistic act, the fact that an artist has 600 pieces of work in their studio that they are prepared to give away does suggest that the artist is either prolific, or that they haven't had a show for a very long time. It appears to be the former in this case, as Bewick regularly exhibits her work, and is due to have another show next year at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin. Her last show there, New Works, was in 2003.
"Pauline was actively looking for a permanent home for her collection," Prof Kieran Byrne, director of WIT, explains. "She wanted to make her work accessible to the widest possible range of people."
The proviso of the donation is that the work remains on permanent display. Waterford was initially proposed to Bewick as a suitable location for her collection by Dr Abdul Bulbulia of the Waterford Healing Arts Trust, who put her in touch with WIT.
Bewick seems delighted with the new home for 300 of her watercolours, sketches, tapestries and wall-hangings. This week, she described the Walton building on the campus, where they are now on display, as "a mini-Guggenheim". It was unclear whether she was referring to the architecture or the new contents of the space: the Guggenheim is New York's most famous gallery for modern and contemporary international art.
Pauline Gale Bewick was born in 1935, in Newcastle, England. Her mother, always known as Harry, was a formidable eccentric. When Pauline was two, Harry left her alcoholic husband, Corbett, and took Pauline and her elder daughter, Hazel (10), to Ireland. Corbett died soon after. The girls had a peripatetic childhood, with little formal education, divided between Ireland, England and Wales. Harry worked as a vegetarian cook at schools that were described as "progressive", offering unusual additions to the curriculum such as boat-building and bark-tracing. Always moving, the family lived in caravans, a houseboat, a railway carriage, a workman's hut, and seldom in a real house. Harry was, at best, functional at mothering: she sent Hazel back to Newcastle to be raised by her more conservative aunts and uncles, but kept her younger daughter with her.
Bewick has said that she recalls being kissed by her mother only once. Despite this lack of physical affection, her mother made a huge fuss of her in other ways, notably collecting and keeping every piece of drawing and scribble that she made from the age of two onwards. Bewick's major retrospective exhibition at the Guinness Storehouse in 1986 was entitled Two to Fifty, and included several of her childhood pieces among the 1,500 exhibits.
Unsurprisingly, given Bewick's unconventional upbringing, when she married psychiatrist Patrick Melia, she was initially reluctant to have children - a fact she has referred to several times in interviews. They did have two children, however: Poppy, born in 1966 and Holly, in 1970. Both her daughters are now artists themselves. Having lived in London, then Dublin, after marriage, Bewick and Melia moved to Kerry, where they have been based for almost 40 years, at Caragh Lake near Killorglin.
Bewick, who attended the National College of Art and Design, and is a member of Aosdána, has continued to paint and draw in her distinctive style, using her trademark bright colours and sensuous subjects. In 1972 she said: "I think if I never exhibited, I would draw pictures anyway. On a desert island, I would draw in the sand. If I felt angry, sexy, or any way, I'd have to get it out. The release is absolutely essential."
Her work receives two quite different reactions from critics. Some see her art as little more than endless versions of the same illustration. Others see her as a genius, as Mercy Hunter did on BBC Radio 4 in 1985: "Her beautiful, fluid line drawings reminded me of Picasso in his classical period."
James White, former director of the National Gallery of Ireland, who published his biography of her the same year, described Bewick's style as: "a way of seeing. She portrays everything in terms of the flow of water, the sweep of wind, the growth of trees, the pattern of nature. What fascinates her is sensuality. She is a person who runs out naked into the air to celebrate the joys of life, the beauty of nature."
Other critics have been less enthusiastic. Reviewing her major exhibition, The Yellow Man, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1996, Brian Fallon, then visual arts critic for this newspaper, wrote: "It is colourful, varied, and above all, consistently inventive. The actual vocabulary, however, is often close to pastiche - a kind of cross between Bugs Bunny and Arthur Rackham, with an extra mixture of Hollywood 'cuteness' . . . Another negative factor is the gradual coarsening of Pauline Bewick's graphic style, which now relies overmuch on mannerism and even formulae, including repetitious, bulbous curves which half suggest a parody of Picasso. Not so long ago, she drew with real style and finesse; nowadays she draws mostly with a flourish, and the flourishes tend to be repeated over and over."
As she aged, Harry Bewick became ever more problematic, and a cause of much grief. Since she valued freedom, independence and the unconventional, she had always disapproved thoroughly of her daughter's marriage, seeing it as unforgivably routine and respectable. She also resented her successful career as an artist.
"You can't devote yourself to art. It's like masturbation," she told her daughter. Towards the end of her life, she became even stranger and reclusive, living, without possessions, in a glasshouse intended for growing tomatoes, at Glendalough, Co Wicklow.
In 1984, Bewick told Mike Murphy in an interview: "She had a bed in it and every night would sleep out, snow or rain or whatever. Boland's Bakery dropped a few bread trays out on the road, so she picked them up and made a bed out of them."
Harry Bewick died when she was run over by a car. Her daughter decided not to press charges against the driver. "I didn't want it to be his face I saw when I thought of Harry," she told the Guardian in 1990. She also said, "Practically all I am, I owe to my mother."
In 1989, Bewick left her husband and went to the South Seas with her daughters for two years. "It's a belief of mine that all couples need a break from each other. You just get fed up with each other, it's as simple as that. It's a pity schools don't teach and prepare us for the fact that marriage does come to a very boring, flat stage," she told the Sunday Independent.
When she returned from the South Seas, the couple went to marriage counselling. "We laughed so much that we got back together again."
Bewick has always priced her work highly. Sixteen years ago, in 1990, when she showed her South Seas work at the Catto Gallery in London, the average price of the 80 pictures was £5,000 (€7,385). At her last show at the Taylor in 2003, prices ranged from €2,000 to €24,000. However, she is an opponent of droit de suite, the artists' resale right which was recently signed into Irish law. In a letter to this newspaper in August, Bewick wrote: "I feel ashamed to be amongst those artists getting a percentage on each resold work in auction houses in America, Europe and now in this country. I feel that it is greedy, because once one has sold something - a house, a piece of furniture - it no longer is yours physically."
One thing is sure: as from this week, 600 pieces of her work are definitely no longer hers. They now belong to us.
TheBewickFile
Who is she? A prolific artist with a distinctive style
Why is she in the news? Made a donation of 600 pieces of work to the State this week, worth €3 million
Most appealing characteristic: Her generosity
Least appealing characteristic: Running out naked into the air to celebrate the joys of life - as described by her biographer, James White
Most likely to say: "Here's one I made earlier"
Least likely to say: "I suffer from artist's block"