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"Dorothy was so pleased about the
exhibition"
ROBERT Stones said: “I find it very hard to
know what to say this evening, but I have to say that Sarah Hope
(Secretary of Nantwich Museum Trust) very kindly sent me an e-mail that
really gave me my opening line. She said that if Dorothy had been given
a choice I think this is how she would have wanted to sign out on life.
“She follows in the footsteps of Sir
Kyffin Williams who died in 2006 while staging an exhibition.
“She was so pleased about the exhibition.
On Tuesday we had the Museum Trust AGM here and I thought it was just
me, but when I spoke to various people afterwards everybody apparently
had the same problem with their eyes and minds being averted to the
pictures hanging around the walls.
“Dorothy had a lifetime following the
arts, embracing poetry, dance and music. All these things can be seen in
her paintings. She included movement, which also includes sport. She was
commissioned to paint Liverpool football team. While she was so
embroiled in her work – she was on the touchline at the training ground
– when she was hit on the hand by a stray football, and it injured her.
This showed true dedication to her passion of painting.
“You might think that her interest was
only in classical music, but in recent times she became very friendly
with Russell Pritchard, who is a member of The Zutons, a Liverpool Indie
rock band, which demonstrated her great passion for embracing arts in
all walks of life.
“The paintings of the ‘dribbles’
represented the sounds in her own mind, and if you look at painting
number 17, you will see that - when someone suggested they didn’t
understand what the painting was about (that one was about the sound of
a piano) – she painted a little pianist sitting at a grand piano in the
top left hand corner (right).
“She also painted quite a lot of her work
with a feather. This stems from the wartime period when she found that
artists’ materials, particularly paints, were hard to get hold of. She
developed a technique that suggested there was more paint on the canvas
than was actually being used. She felt that using a feather that was
part of life was giving life to her pictures. It is possible to see on
some of her work the remnants of the feather amongst the ink or paint.
“She hated people using the word
‘picture’, and said the word was ‘painting’. She also hated the word
‘sketch’, insisting that people should use the word ‘drawing’.
“A show case in one of our
galleries has
several drawing books and one of them is dated June 12, 2008,
demonstrating that she truly was drawing up to the end.”
Robert thanked Judy, Rachel and Hugh,
her son and daughters, for allowing the exhibition to go ahead. He later thanked
Barry Astbury (Nantwich Museum) and Chris Large (a friend of Dorothy’s)
for putting up the paintings. Chris also wrote the programme which
accompanies the exhibition. |
