Barbara’s Studio

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

From earliest childhood, the boys had been treated differently from their sister. They were allowed more freedom, encouraged to play outdoors and to engage in rough and tumble, and their lives were expanded early on when, at the age of seven, each was sent to St. Mary’s, the prep school of Stonyhurst College. It seemed as if the boys were being readied for adventure and excitement, but while their horizons were opening up, Leonora [Carrington] felt hers were being closed down – or more specifically, never explored. Her role, which was clear even when she was in the nursery, was to keep safe: not to rock any boats, not to take any chances. What they sought to teach her was that she should sit a certain way and behave a certain way: she should be supportive, helpful, polite. She should listen, especially to men, she should have traditional skills, such as playing music and speaking French. Drawing and painting, for which she showed altitude from an early age, were fine within reason. What harm could there be in Prim [Lenora] creating pictures? Especially if those pictures were of flowers and trees, family members and characters from fairy stories.

But art was Leonora’s secret weapon – and she hid it in plain sight, because her parents did not have the faintest idea where her talents might lead. Art, for them, was unthreatening and pretty. They had no idea that this skill their daughter was developing would be one the key to another life entirely; still less that art could never be a validation of the status quo, but meant a radical reappraisal of everything in the artists sight.

So what Leonora practiced in the nursery at Crookhey was the subversive silence of smoldering rebellion. Spared by the inherent unfairness that gave Pat, Gerard, and Arthur so much freedom; stoked by the growing realization that she had a talent that would lead, eventually, to Liberty. “I always painted, and I always knew it was what I would do,” she said many years later. As the Jesuits who educated her brothers at Stonyhurst might have said (but didn’t): show me a girl aged seven, and I will show you the woman.

Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington

Comments are welcome!