sadieblackeyes

From the outside, it's like watching a life on a Zoetrope. A whole<br> life condensed into a series of glimpses. A bunch of boho art students in Glasgow, pioneering a striking new artistic style. All clean lines and spirals, strong blocks of colour, modern and classic at the same time. There is a photo of them when they were students sitting on a patch of grass somewhere in Glasgow, smiling, just another bunch of carefree young idealists, just another gang of us. They are sprawled out on the grass, the women in little straw hats and the men with fantastically prominent facial hair. Frances is at the back, kneeling behind them, her arms spread out from her shoulders like some ships masthead, like a parody of christ, like a bit of a wally. (It is this that tells me that she was a proper fruitloop; an oddball, kooky, a strange cookie, a woman after my own heart. I also like her because she draws girls mouths the same way as me.)

In these early days she often collaborated with her sister Margaret on pictures inspired by mythology and William Blake. They worked along with two others they had met at Art school, Frances Macnair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh."The Glasgow Four", they were called sometimes, although history has decreed that it is only Charles Mackintosh who will be widely remembered. (History has a cruel way of doing this - the legacy often has so little relation to the truth of the matter.)

She moved to Liverpool in 1899 to join Macnair who was teaching there, and they were married. They worked at the School of Architecture and Applied Art and enjoyed a bustling, happy family life. Not only did they create beautiful stylised paintings, but also jewelry, metalwork, enamelwork and embroidery. There are photos of their house at the time, and it looked cool. All very art nouveau, friezes of mermaids on the wall, huge great dressers and wall sconces, high backed chairs, very modern, very fashionable. They exhibited in Liverpool, in Glasgow, in Moscow and Vienna and Turin. They had a baby. They enjoyed a vibrant social life. Liverpoolwas, at the time, thriving, sometimes referred to as England's second city, prominent in the arts. From what one can tell, looking back - and it is never easy (nor necessarily decent) to pass judgment on the life of another when one can see so little of it that one may as well be staring through a slot in a peep show - everything was good and right. Brief snapshots of a world which was, briefly, so happy, and then everything starts to fall apart. Macnair starts drinking, they lose everything. The Art School closes. The family wealth is lost. The happy life they have created is gone, just like that.



In the later years of her life, Frances created a series of watercolor portraits, similar in style to her earlier work but somehow with much more depth and feeling. Her earlier body of work, though aesthetically exciting and creative, simply does not compare with these pictures, considered by some to be amongst the finest symbolist watercolours of the 20th century. I think they're fucking brilliant.
Deep hues of indigo and violet, inky blues and forest greens, traced with lines of silver paint. Sepia and dusty pink and bruised lilac, the colours of dying flowers, of decay. They explore themes and choices inherent in feminine life - motherhood, womanhood, to be an object of sexual desire - and not to be. But most of all they tell a story of a very deep sadness, of a darkness that had made its home in this woman's head and somehow would not leave.

Frances died in 1921. It might have been suicide - this is glossed over; the scant few paragraphs on wikipedia dedicated to her say only that she died, that she ceased to be, no mention of the method. In fact alls I have read that has suggested this have been brief footnotes, a vague suggestion around the edges of history, a sentence here and there.
After she died, Macnair destroyed all of their work he had in his posession. I don't think it would be fair to speculate on the reasons for his doing this (grief is, after all, a very private and sacred thing) but the result was that relatively few people are aware of the work they created together. The Mackintosh body of work is well known and he is heralded as a key figure in the art nouveau movement, but you are far less likely to have heard of Frances and her haunting, ethereal water colours. They should be remembered because they are a part of this womans soul, and are so sad, and so beautiful - words which dance together far too frequently in art.