Edward Bawden and the British Working Class

Each of Edward Bawden's prints present two different types of compositions; one is of lofty open-aired spaces, and the other is a sort of down and dirty, in the trenches sort of place. We are a part of the nameless, and often faceless, working classes who toil each day to bring us our goods at the market, and swimmingly maneuver through the chaos of urban settings, transporting goods and livestock to market.

Bawden presents these dual compositions effortlessly. We are always looking up at the architectural grandeur of the spaces he presents, and then secondarily notice the lower(smaller) group of people walking with carts through a maze of crowded streets, or quietly, mindfully stocking their booths for the daily markets in anticipation of a good day's sales.

These colorful prints are full of lightness and optimism, maybe in the mindset that hard work will produce good business and lots of $$$. The neatness of his lines and overlapping characters is busy, yet never chaotic. These are well thought out compositions and one can easily imagine the sounds and smells that his scenes would produce. His work honors the working class' contributuions to a well-run society in a positive and methodic manner.

Edward Bawden, CBE RA (1903–1989) was an English artist known for his paintings, illustrations, graphic prints, book covers, posters, and garden metalwork furniture.
He taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had been a student, worked as a commercial artist and served as a war artist in World War II. He was a fine watercolor painter but worked in many different media. He illustrated several books and painted murals in both the 1930s and 1960s.

Bawden was born at Braintree, in Essex. He was an only child, and spent much of his time drawing or wandering the countryside with his butterfly-net and microscope. He studied at Braintree High School, and began copying drawings of cats and illustrations from boys' and girls' magazines. Later he attended the Friends' School at Saffron Walden, and there, he was recommended to study at the Cambridge School of Art, which he attended from 1919 to 1921.

He became interested in calligraphy and in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Doyle, William Morris and other artists of the day. In 1922 he received a scholarship to the Royal College of Art School of Design in London, where he earned a diploma in illustration.

By 1930 Bawden started working for Curwen Press, producing illustrations for clients such as London Transport, Westminster Bank, Twinings, Poole Potteries, Shell-Mex, the Folio Society, Chatto & Windus, and Penguin Books. In the early 1930s he was discovered by the Stuart Advertising Agency. Around this time Bawden produced some of his most humorous and innovative work for Fortnum & Mason and Imperial Airways. He also worked for The Listener.

Most of his subjects were of scenes around Great Bardfield. In 1938 he collaborated with John Aldridge on a range of wallpapers that they intended to be printed commercially. The project left little time for other work during the year, and war intervened before the wallpapers could go into production.
During World War II, Bawden served as an official war artist, first with the British army in France and then in the Middle East. He was posted to North Africa as a War Office Artist. He painted landscapes and portraits in Libya, Sudan, Cairo, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Palestine and Lebanon.

After making a series of studies of the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, he was recalled to London. After the ship he took sank, he was held prisoner in a Vichy internment camp in Casablanca for two months before the camp was liberated by American troops. When he eventually returned to Britain, Bawden did portrait work. He returned to the Middle east in September 1943, as a Ministry of Information artist to work in Baghdad and Kurdistan, before he joined the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit; where he traveled to southern Iraq and Iran.

Bawden returned to England in 1944 for a short time before traveling to Yugoslavia, by way of Rome. He went to Ravenna, then Greece, Austria and Florence before travelling back to England in July 1945. Helived in Great Bardfield, Essex from the 1930s to 1970. While living at Bardfield he was an important member of the Great Bardfield Artists; a group who shared a love for figurative art. He continued with his illustrations, completed a series of eleven murals for the First Class lounge of the P&O liner Oronsay and participated in a series of traveling exhibits. From 1970 to1989, Bawden moved to Saffron Walden, where he continued to work until his death.

Public Collections:
Fry Art Gallery
The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford
London Underground commission
Morley College mural
Mural for Queen's University, Belfast

Teaching:
Goldsmiths, University of London
Royal College of Art
Royal Academy Schools
Senior Lecturer at Leicester College of Art and Design

Honors:
1946 – Awarded CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire)
1947 – Associate of the Royal Academy
1949 – Royal Designer for Industry (RSA)
1949/50 – Guest instructor at the Banff School of Fine Art, Canada
1951 – Trustee of the Tate Gallery
1956 – Elected Royal Academician
1962 – Honorary Associate of Manchester College of Art
1963 – Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art
1964 – Silver Medal from the Society of Industrial Artists
1970 – Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art
1974 – Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex
1979 – Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers

The vanGogh of South Africa: Phillemon Hlungwani

Phillemon Hlungwani was born in 1975, in Giyani, Thomo Village, in Limpopo and now lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He comes from a family of artists, and says that ‘art chose him’. He works in a variety of printmaking mediums, and also draws with charcoal. He attributes his mother as the impetus for his career, because she gave him charcoal from the hearth in their home. He says of his female subjects: ‘In my art I used to depict women that symbolized my mother. She is the one who encouraged me to make art. The women in my art are shown working because they are equal’.

Hlungwani work expresses his Christian and cultural beliefs. He feels a strong spiritual connection towards trees as a place for prayer and worshipping them, so trees are often represented in his work. His work often depicts the Tsengelendotwe tree found in his environment. It bears a fruit which they would mix with the fresh milk from the herd and drink as a milkshake. His landscape images refer to self, family and his cultural history.

Utilizing his upbringing to inform his work via traditional customs and cultural practices of his community, Hlungwani draws images of himself as a young herdboy tending the family goats. He understands the bushveld landscape intimately from his early years and he depicts scenes of small town life and a hard work ethic as few artists can or want to experience it for themselves. 

As a point of comparison, the ‘plein aire’ painters of the Barbizon School, and the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists understood suffering and toiling under the sun to paint their pictures. Yet, theirs was a point of observation –something not a part of their own experience. Hlungwani, very much in the same vein as Vincent vanGogh did with his drawings of the miners and potato farmers, shows us a way of life for the people from his village. He shows us the quiet moments crossing town with one’s good for the market, or a child following its mother to and from town. He shows us the family working together , tilling their fields and trying to raise a decent crop to feed the clan. 

Hlungwani’s depictions of the living conditions of his people - ramshackled clapboard homes in a hot, dry country, sting with a sense of poverty, and cultural awareness, for we understand that the artist describes a current situation in South Africa, not some quaint historical telling of a time long past. These renditions of South African life are are minder that the world hasn’t entirely caught up to a 21^st century standard of high-tech living. The town may be poor, but they are unified in their existence and look to be at peace and accept their existence as being what God intended for them. There is a quiet working of the land and one feels as if we were looking at one of Paul Gauguin’s rural Normandy-inspired pictures.

Still the curious thing in Hlungwani’s work isn’t the subject as much as what’s going on around the subject. He fills his skies and compositions with swirling dotted lines and circular arcs that surround the people walking to work; creating a dance of lines that equally encircle a tree in a field and a woman carrying a basket on her head. The abstractions of these lines activate his compositions in a way we are not used to seeing. It’s as though the marks could be a preliminary method the artist uses to begin drawing his subjects, but they are left in the picture, not erased or cut out of it, so they must have more significance than originally thought.

They could be trails of flies or bugs surrounding the subjects or maybe they have something to do with the state of chaos that surrounds us all. They could be that and more, but they would appear to be something ‘other’ than what one sees in this earthly realm. They would appear to be  traceries of some human presence or spirit, some soul that surrounds the subject – letting us know , as we see in Tintoretto’s ‘Last Supper’, that there is more in our daily realm if we but look for it.

His work effortlessly segues between media showing a mature vision. His work is deceptively simple and drawn with tenderness, still there is a sinewy strength to his line which so perfectly suits his subject and the results are astoundingly direct and sensitive.

Hlungwani is a young artist well on his way to becoming a promising star  as he gains critical attention. South Africa has a notable printmaking tradition, and has produced many fine artists that mainly show within the country, but Hlungwani’s work speaks about his roots and beyond his cultural borders with his life-sized prints. They are accomplished,  impressive and ambitious. Hlungwani has started to exhibit his work outside of South Africa and one senses that this artist will make as fine a mark as vanGogh did with his drawing s and the spiritual component present in his Starry Night. Hlungwani is generous with his time and teaches and encourages younger artists to pursue their dreams. He is a printmaking gem that will grow more brilliant with time and prestige.

Education:  

            Johannesburg Art Foundation, 2000

            Artist Proof Studio printmaking certificate, 2000.

            WITS School of Art, 2004

Commissions:

            Murals for the Johannesburg Development Agency,  South African Governmental            

            offices, MTN,The Standard Bank Art Gallery, Bell Dewar and Hall.

Awards:       

            King Korn competition winner, 2000-2001

            Finalist for the Absa Gallery competition

            Ampersand Fellowship, 2009

Professional Experience: 

            Coordinator and facilitator of APS professional artists program

            Teacher of papermaking

            Facilitator of Paper Prayers workshops

            Coordinator of NOAH’s arks art teaching project