William Packer

Tessa Newcomb

On New Year's Day 1986, encouraged by her dealer Andras Kalman, artist Mary Newcomb, then aged 64, began to keep a diary. She wrote in its opening pages: "I wanted [...] to remind ourselves that--in our haste--in this century--we may not give time to pause and look--and may pass on our way unheeding." This beautiful new book, compiled by the artist's daughter and grandson, reveals Mary Newcomb as an acute observer of her surroundings, reproducing her copious sketches alongside more finished paintings and short diary extracts to draw out the many themes which preoccupied her throughout her career as an artist. Mary Newcomb's world was rural East Anglia, where she managed a small mixed farm with her husband Godfrey Newcomb. The working life of the countryside engrossed her quite as much as the cycle of nature: she noticed and relished everything, with as keen an eye for the color of the bridesmaids' dresses at a wedding as for the yellow and brown of a dragonfly's body. Mary's daughter Tessa Newcomb, also an artist, introduces the key themes of the book with short texts which provide fascinating insight into her mother's world. A reflective introductory essay by art critic William Packer considers Mary Newcomb's written diary observations alongside the poetic language of her art.

Drawing from Observation

Mary Newcomb

Tai-Shan Schierenberg

Tai-Shan Schierenberg is a marvelous painter of portraits. Their impressive range runs from the great-and-good (as in the National Portrait Gallery's celebrated study of Sir John Mortimer) to family and friends. But the portraiture, though central to the artist's life and work, tells only part of the story, which is unfolded in these pages in three ways. First is the beautifully reproduced work itself. Second, William Packer has written an incisive and stimulating essay, which explores and extols Schierenberg's achievement - 'taking no short cuts, making no compromises, sticking to his personal commitment...to painting as painting'. And then the artist himself, as fluent with pen as with paint, gives a revelatory account of his development as painter and man. Born into an artistic and peripatetic family, son of a Chinese mother and German father, Schierenberg creates memorable pen portraits of the experiences, people, art and ideas that shaped him and his work. His tales of St. Martin's and the Slade are convincing but sometimes surprising - for instance, the invaluable lessons learnt from the rigorous Euan Uglow. roots: 'I'm actually an abstract painter waylaid by the gratification of realism.' The gratification is ours, too; the work abounds with painterly passion and vivid life - whether the subject is a small child, an unnamed sitter, an erotic nude, or one of the magical and important landscapes taken from the artist's beloved Norfolk. The work is a tour de force, unending and unfolding, to which the book does full and enchanting justice.

William Packer

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