|
|
 |
| |
Malvina Cheek reflects on her rich artistic career at home |
Malvina, the ‘recording’ artist tuned into Britain
Malvina Cheek, once assigned by Winston Churchill to preserve the nation’s culture, continues to create and inspire at 93, writes Piers Plowright
The Silent Fairground.
By Malvina Cheek. £4.95
SHE was born a year after the outbreak of the First World War and was taking her first steps when the Battle of the Somme began.
Now almost 94 and living in the terrace house where she’s been for more than 50 years, Malvina Cheek sits on her balcony drinking a glass of wine. It’s a beautiful June morning and the sun shines in on rooms, landings and hallway crammed with paintings and prints from a life spent painting and inspiring other painters, gardening, and composing music. And writing poetry – her new book of poems, The Silent Fairground, came out last autumn.
It’s an idyllic place to talk, even if Malvina carefully turns her back on the monstrous bulk of the Royal Free Hospital, which she admires for what it does, not for how it looks.
And it’s the “look of things” that has been at the heart of her long life. At the beginning of the Second World War, after graduating from the Royal College of Art, she joined the team of artists working on Kenneth Clark and Arnold Palmer’s Recording Britain project who were sent out to capture the country in paint and line before German bombs had a chance to obliterate it.
Backed by Winston Churchill himself, the project was a morale-boosting exercise designed to show, as the headline rather grandly put it, “that the enemy had not extinguished British culture”.
Malvina remembers a wonderful sense of freedom, as she chugged round Britain in her blue Morris Traveller.
“They didn’t mind what we did,” she says, “so I drew what I liked, mostly trees.”
Malvina can’t remember where she stayed – “probably a pub or a farmhouse or I just knocked on somebody’s door”. It was a fascinating experience and a great training for her watchful eye – something noticed by her students after the war at St Albans School of Art, including the distinguished artist and illustrator David Gentleman, who says she was the teacher he got most from.
Malvina’s great friend, another Hampstead artist and champion of popular art, Barbara Jones, was also involved in Recording Britain and it was through Barbara that Malvina met her husband, John, a French teacher and wine connoisseur with whom she shared a passionate love of France. John’s death in 2002 was a great blow but it didn’t stop her creativity and the seven years since then have produced new poems, some portraits, plenty of drawing, more pages to her voluminous diary and more music – she gives me a CD of her string trio to take away.
So even if Malvina now feels her powers are waning (“About a year ago,” she says, “it was as if an axe came down and I suddenly couldn’t remember things”) her conversation is still full of the pleasures of painting and writing, of friendship and family – daughter Sarah, son-in-law David, and two grand-daughters now share the house. And she’s still fascinated by patterns and connections: there’s very little “chance” in Malvina Cheek’s understanding of the world – “if we knew how to look,” she says, “we’d see that everything happens for a reason and that there’s a message in it.” She puts this very sharply in a 10-year-old poem:
The stars in their courses, use us as their slaves, to reveal hidden truths.
I think they’ve revealed quite a few to this remarkable woman, sunning herself on a Hampstead balcony after 93 years of creative and fulfilling life.
|
 |
|
|
Your comments:
I WAS very interested to read your article about Malvina Cheek. My mother knew her in the war and posed for a painting which she did or a blood donor queue. My mother was wearing a yellow coat. I've been trying to find this painting for ages and wondered if you would pass on my email address to Malvina. I would love to ask her about this time and the painting if she would contact me. I would be most grateful. I will also write to you with a sae in the hope that you could pass it on to Malvina.
Best Wishes
J. Tomlinson
|
|
|
|
|
