I went to the NPG on the spur of the moment, feeling a bit fed up and sluggish. This was a good move. She was born in the 1880s and died in 1970. She did the most amazing portraits during a life time living in various artist communities.
Laura Knight had a fairly realistic style, and although she supported herself sometimes by commissioned society portraits of the great and the good, she did a lot of portraits of people I find more interesting - black people, gypsies, backstage theatre dancers, women involved in wartime engineering. She was also a Government War Artist and her picture Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring (1943) became particularly famous. Cutting the screw grooves was a highly skilled job normally achieved after a full apprenticeship and Ruby had acquired this skill particularly quickly. Ruby could not be released from war work for the commission, so it was painted over 3 weeks while Ruby worked at the factory, which was in full time production.
Laura Knight was also a war artist at the Neurenberg War Trial, and her images are fixating. She was in a cramped press box above the dock, which was packed with senior nazi officers. She wrote to her husband during the trial, and these diary letters were in a display box. To read her verbatim account of her thoughts of the trial was moving and disturbing. I am not sure whether being there as a war artist would be a privilege or a penance. However she made a very good account of her duty to record the events. I don't think I could have done it.
While in the exhibition, I had a couple of interesting conversations. One was with an art teacher from Liverpool who worked with ex-offenders. I was saying that I thought a lot of exhibitions were driven by the equality policy - which I thought was a good thing. I want to look at portraits that reflect a range of people in society. He said he was always being asked to document how he had covered equality in his classes and he found it difficult, particularly as his class base covered people who had committed the most serious crimes. I suggested that if they had a budget for models, could they draw portraits of models who had experienced depression or a learning difficulty. One of the best portraits I had seen in the National Portrait Award a few years ago, was a small portrait of a young man with a learning disability. I think the artist was from Belgium. Another idea I have had is to ask the class to being in an object that reminds them of a positive memory of someone they respected. I have been working with potato peelers recently, so this represents my Mum who was an older working class woman. Laura Knight's portraits represent all sorts of people in the first half of the 20th century and I liked them.
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