Everyday epiphanies

Another book that I found in the RA's bookshop was Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary.

Swanwick described herself as "part of a small tradition of English panting that is a bit eccentric, a little odd and a little visionary." This tradition begins with William Blake and Samuel Palmer and continues through Stanley Spencer and Cecil Collins to artists such as Albert Herbert, Ken Kiff, Norman Adams, Evelyn Williams, Carel Weight, Margaret Neve, Roger Wagner, Mark Cazalet, Dinah Roe-Kendall and Greg Tricker.

In the book Paddy Rossmore writes that Swanwick had in common with many other artists in this tradition, "the pursuit of the hidden reality behind appearance or - more specifically in her case - the connection between religious phenomena and psychic (or subliminal) processes." "She talked of 'biblical goings-on' in her late work" and "painted many pictures which relate to the great religious themes and stories from the Old and New Testaments." Rossmore argues that her late work "would seem to belong to that tradition in visionary painting whose strangeness is accompanied by a facility for penetrating spiritual insight and understanding."

The work of many of the artists in this tradition seeks to reveal everyday epiphanies, heaven in ordinary life, and Swanwick was no exception writing that she felt that "many people narrow life much too much" and so in her pictures she tried "to put the real thing, the miracle of it - indefinable because everything is connected."

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The Kinks - Days.