Recently I was sent the catalogue for an exhibition of the work of the late Norman Neasom. He is not one of the best-known of English artists, but clearly somebody who built during his life-time a very solid reputation for his lovely pencil and wash drawings. I believe that he began to build his reputation after the Second World War, and died in 2010. Looking through the catalogue I realise that I have developed a very ambivalent relationship to his work.*
Neasom’s material is drawn from the every-day life of village and small-town England, together with a body of landscape works. I guess that the sub-title given to the catalogue essay captures the essence of his painting: “Corners of Paradise”. He records for us the everyday life and work of agricultural workers, and their social encounters, in the setting of the English Midlands. A part of me loves what he does. I really admire his draughtsmanship and the quality of his watercolour. I suppose that an element in this attachment is my own childhood in rural Norfolk. Yes: farming was still like that then. I too have a love of the countryside. There is very good reason to celebrate the importance of unpretentious community, the vestiges of which are still to be experienced in the village on the edge of Bradford in which I live now. There is, however, a “but”.
There runs throughout Neasom’s painting a sense of artificiality. This world, even when he painted it, was already almost a thing of the past. Yes: people did dress like that in 1950 …. but why paint them like that in 1990? I am disturbed by the fact that he offers us a picture of a Spitfire, and a recollection of “The Ack-Ack Barage over Birmingham”, painted in 2000 and 2002 respectively. To what extent are his figures only ghosts? The trouble with nostalgia is that it has to be distinguished from memory. It provides us with an account of the past which is filtered and tinted, so that it does become very attractive. Perhaps it does present us with a kind of truth …. but ….
*Neasom’s exhibition is at Messum’s Gallery in Bury St., London, until Christmas.