Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

One can hardly blame young Scottish artist, Elspeth Conroy, for being a woman. Nor can one admonish the Roxborough Gallery on Bond Street for championing her work so ardently. In this modern art world, dominated by men of soaring talent, the claims of promising female painters are too rarely recognised. But what makes the first solo exhibition by Glasgow Schooled Conroy such a fizzling disappointment is the heightened expectation one carries into the gallery. The Roxborough’s advance publicity material is the main contributor: Miss Conroy is proclaimed to be ‘Britain’s next great female painter’ before the oil on her work is even dry. It would be tough for any living artist, with the exception of Picasso, to match the hysteria of such a promotional campaign, so what chance this young lassie?

Well, although there is plenty to admire in the technical proficiency of all nine paintings on display, one is presented with the same niggling doubts at every turn of her debut show: Is this really the work of a true original? Or does one’s heart simply plead for it because the painter is a woman?

As yet, no practising female painter has been able to replicate the trembling excitement we encounter in the work of Bacon or Sutherland. The fine sculptures of Barbara Hepworth have brought us close, but even this exceptional artist still struggles to elude the shadow of her male contemporaries. There is no doubt that our next great female painter will appear when she is ready, but I am sad to report that this show offers little evidence of Conroy being our girl. Her landscape paintings are so consciously mannered that they only succeed in aggravating, the way a child who finishes all her homework before bedtime invites suspicion from her father. In short: they try too hard to be appreciated.

Conroy has a tendency to overstate each minor brushstroke, resulting in a suite of tepid, unconvincing images: London canal scenes with crooked, wispy figures whose obliqueness is much too premeditated. The careful abstraction of these scenes, though rendered deftly, is a transplant from another (male) artist’s heart: Picasso has lent his influence to everything Conroy paints. This might well be a habit that afflicts too many of our current painters, regardless of their gender, but it is a particularly bewildering trait in the work of a young woman from the banks of the Clyde.

There is just one faint glimmer of promise in this otherwise cheerless show: Godfearing is a striking diptych in which Conroy attempts to loosen her stylistic restraints to tackle themes of motherhood. Still, dragged down by the weight of so much pre-show expectancy, even this well-realised work seems meek and insubstantial. One departs the gallery wishing the artist had chosen to express more of what it means to be a woman in the modern age.

The talk in the first-class lounge was all about ‘this business’. Five men in dark flannel suits, whose faces were so similarly tapered I expected they were brothers, were constellated on the club chairs near by, turning through The Ocean Times and debating the articles of the day. Their wives were elsewhere on the ship (I heard mention of a bridge game somewhere on the promenade deck, a concert happening in the cocktail bar) and the five of them, it seemed, were damned if they were going to pass up the opportunity to converse about men’s matters over afternoon Tom Collinses.

First, there was the bantering about ‘this business with the Pioneer satellite’ and how it proved that the American space programme would be nowhere without the help of British engineering. Then it was ‘this business with the train crash’ and how, in their glib assessment of the tragedy, such accidents ought hardly to be possible in a place as vast as California, where surely there was enough land for rail and road to never intersect. I could not decide what bothered me more: the ignorance of these men or their total lack of courtesy towards other passengers. Even the drone of the ship’s engines — that incessant rumble I had still not learned the skill of tuning out — was preferable to their chirruping and complaining: ‘You’d think they’d have laid on something better than the Archie West Trio, wouldn’t you?’ one of them said. ‘We heard all the same acts last year,’ said another. ‘Getting a bit tired of the Verandah, too.’ ‘That whole place is looking tired.’ ‘Oh, absolutely.’ ‘I wish they’d stop trying to foist that onion soup on us at breakfast, as if it’s such a bloody wonder of creation.’ ‘Oh, good heavens, yes.’ ‘Probably the same batch they’ve been feeding us since ’55!’ ‘Certainly tastes like it.’ ‘Ha-ha-ha.’

I hoped the purser or a steward might come along to quiet them, but the lounge was fairly empty and the crew were otherwise engaged. It was easier to move to a different spot. There were plenty of other rooms where I could sit and finish my book. And if I could not find the peace to lose myself in reading, I had a brochure’s worth of ‘on-board facilities’ to distract me from my troubles: swimming pools and restaurants and a cinema showing Gidget , all of which I would have traded for a single hour of painting in my dingy Kilburn studio.

I had already tried the smoking room: too much chatter in there, and not much oxygen. The library had suited me just fine, until the pitching of the ship began to make the books slide fore and aft along the shelves, giving me a dose of seasickness. I had gone to ward it off in the salon before the crew manager arrived to direct the preparations for the evening’s cabaret dance and everything got noisy again. The ship was over a thousand feet long—‘a floating city’, according to Dulcie. It had thirteen decks and enough cargo space to hold the luggage of two thousand passengers. So how was it that I could not find a single place on board where I felt comfortable?

It did not help that Dulcie had arranged a suite for me, when I had asked for a much simpler room in cabin class. We were sailing to New York because she was terrified of aircraft (‘A hangover from the Blitz,’ she said) and I agreed to go with her because I did not trust myself to fly alone. The gallery was covering our expenses. Dulcie claimed that she would only sail first-class on someone else’s shilling, so she booked two of the dearest rooms the Queen Elizabeth had available. Thanks to her, I was committed to spending the entire voyage in the company of wealthy cruisers I would never have spoken to by choice: tiresome New Yorkers returning from family weddings in ‘charming little towns’; well-dressed London couples with an appetite for exaggerating the splendours of the ship’s decoration (‘We haven’t seen another tapestry quite like it — and so many exotic woods! We’ve been bowled over!’); obnoxious men of industry who slurped their gimlets and left shrimp-tails on the tabletops. Everywhere I turned, I saw haughtiness and self-absorption, and heard the sneering tones of people who reminded me of Wilfred Searle.

I had found no respite at all since leaving Southampton. My suite was the only place on board where I had total privacy, but this presented its own problems. The room was dwarfing and elaborate — so grand that the bedcovers were made of a fabric more decorous than the evening gowns Dulcie had loaned me for the trip — and, although I slept well enough each night, I could not settle there in the daytime. It was not that I pined to be down in tourist class where I belonged, because sailing the Atlantic was a much less poetic experience than Melville had led me to believe, and I was very glad to be away from the cramped quarters of the lower decks. In fact, the suite afforded so much shelter from the goings-on about the ship that it made me jittery, vulnerable to my own thoughts.