Madge Gill, Hermione Burton, and creative fire

how to deal when your fire's burning low

I’ve been thinking about motivation. 

I have some postcards stuck up above my desk. Two of them are reproductions of Hundertwasser paintings, but I’ll talk about these another time. One is of a photograph I saw at an exhibition of Elton John’s private collection of modernist photography at the Tate (who knew that EJ has one of the all-time greatest collections of modernist photography?). It’s this one: https://artscouncilcollection.org.uk/artwork/nude-1936. It’s not a proper reproduction; I just copied down the name of the picture and the artist while I was in the gallery and then google image-searched it and printed it out on A4 using a basic office printer😬However, it is good enough for the wall above my desk. I love her: I love the deep shadows in the doorway, and the angles her legs make, and the dimples on her skin, and the whorl of hair on her head, and the delicate hairs on her legs, and the tiny hint of pube. She keeps me company. 

The other two postcards are by Madge Gill and Hermione Burton. They’re from the same source, though I got them over ten years apart. The Madge Gill postcard I bought at a temporary exhibition in about 2010 called the Museum of Everything. The Hermione Burton card I got a few months ago at the Gallery of Everything, which is a permanent gallery in Marylebone that seems to have grown out of the original Museum of Everything concept. 

The GOE claims to show ‘SELF-TAUGHT, ART-BRUT, SPIRITUALIST, VERNACULAR AND OTHER NON-ACADEMIC MATERIAL’. In 2009, when their first show opened, it was called ‘outsider art’, but since then that term has become less common, perhaps because it seems patronising to speak of people as ‘outsiders’ just because they didn’t want or pursue or know about the mainstream art business. Either way, outsider art (or ‘art brut’, or ‘naïve art’) is hard to define, but not hard to identify. There is a clear line between artists who don’t think about what others are going to think about their art - and who don’t, in some cases, even think of themselves as making art - versus professionalised artists.

The Madge Gill picture is a doodly line drawing (in what could be Biro) of a woman in an Edwardian-style dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a frilly front, floating against a background of differently patterned and textured surfaces or planes. It gives the sense that reality is sort of collapsing behind her or folding in on her. There are chequerboard and herringbone patterns, and to the right of her some cube-shaped patterns that imply steps. She’s composed of patterns too, so that she seems part of the dream, collapsing into it or emerging out of it. Her birds-nesty hair is scribbles; her skirt and her sleeves are dense swirling clouds of Biro. The swirls around her head could be feathers in a hat or they could be clouds or random decorative designs. The only empty space is in her face: her eyes and nose and mouth are small and delicate and pretty, floating in this pale face, with a slightly concerned and vulnerable expression. She’s looking up, into the swirling air above her. 

I’m not as interested in the techniques or the style of outsider artists as I am in their motivations, though. 

Madge Gill was born in Walthamstow but lived most of her life in East Ham, around the corner from where I live now - although I didn’t know that when I got the postcard (or the flat). She’s probably the most famous English outsider artist, and she has at least some minor status as a local celebrity, though the only physical sign of this is that there is a car park named after her round the back of Primark. (‘Madge Gill Way’ is a mere siding off ‘Ron Leighton Way’; unsurprisingly, if you want a proper road named after you it’s more effective to become a Labour politician than a spiritualist artist.) When I started looking for signs of her in Newham, I did find this Madge Gill walking tour of the borough. Then I walked it. It is, in all honesty, not very interesting. The house she lived in until her death in Plashet Grove has been knocked down, so no blue plaques there - or on any of the other places she lived in the area. She’s not even named on her own headstone in the cemetery. On the other hand, I quite like the fact that there’s a car park in her honour: there’s something both mystical and prosaic about her art that a car park seems to satisfy, where a street-name or a park wouldn’t have the same effect.

She had a crap childhood, by the sounds of it. Gill was hidden away for much of it, because her family were ashamed of her illegitimate birth. Then she was sent to a Barnado’s orphanage in Barkingside (even though her mother was still living) and eventually transported to Canada as part of a scheme for sending ‘orphaned’ teenagers abroad as cheap labour. At 18 she made it back to London, made a not-very-happy marriage to her cousin Tom, and had three sons. Then came a traumatic period when she was pregnant for the fourth time, gave birth to a stillborn baby girl, and nearly died herself. She had a long illness and lost her left eye. After this, she started to make art. 

Gill had always been interested in Spiritualism and mediumism but in 1920, aged 38, she began to spontaneously channel a spirit called Myrninerest. Entering a trance, she would go into bursts of creativity where she drew, knitted, crocheted, wove fabric, or played the piano. Compelled or possessed, she kept working in all sorts of media but eventually settled mostly on ink-drawings and woven tapestries. She made huge numbers of drawings as well as heavily-decorated cushions, quilts and dresses. The drawing on my postcard is dated 1945, when she would have been 63 and, at this point, quite a well-known artist, showing work at the Whitechapel Gallery and hosting seances at the house in Plashet Grove. She rarely sold any of her work, though, and it all stayed hoarded in her attic until she died in 1961. 

Madge Gill is unusual as an outsider artist for having been quite successful within her own lifetime. Hermione Burton, on the other hand, was pretty much unknown to the public until her paintings, which had ended up spread around several charity shops in Bedford, were found by an artist who appreciated them and made a film and exhibition about her. (I won’t describe the exhibition or Burton’s life because there’s a pretty good review of it here).

The picture I have is Phoenix Rising From The Ashes, a self-portrait where her head floats in a black sky beside planets (or bubbles?), above a burning fireplace. The fireplace is like a window into an ordinary reality, but the floating head and planets and blackness are outside of it, like there’s been a breach in space-time. It has a mood and a feel to it but it seems more mysterious and oblique than the Gill picture. Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t lived with it as long; I think the woman in the Madge Gill postcard used to seem more meaningless and incomprehensible to me, but the longer you live with an image, the more you notice about it and the more significance it seems to take on. The Burton picture is mysterious because it seems to be filled with very specific, personal symbolism that just doesn’t mean anything in particular to me. 

I’ve been trying to work out why I keep these postcards here, above my desk. I think, much of the time, we don’t think very much about why we like what we like, and why certain objects hold meaning. Why am I intrigued by outsider artists? Perhaps I like the superficial weirdness or otherworldliness that a lot of the images have. These types of images feed my imagination. But I like lots of perfectly mainstream visual artists for the same reason. So what is it about outsider artists that makes me feel differently obsessed? 

I learned very early on as a child that making things - pictures, stories, poems, whatever - was a sure-fire way to get the best kind of attention and praise from everyone around me. Parents, teachers, strangers, anyone. (I didn’t come up against too many harsh critics in primary school.) Before long, I think I got to a point where I didn’t tend to make anything much unless there was some prospect of feedback. I kept a diary and notebooks and journals, but creative projects that didn’t come with a solid deadline and the expectations of others, often didn’t get finished. There wasn’t enough intrinsic motivation - enough creative fire burning underneath - to keep it going. There is a long-running argument that when extrinsic motivations like praise or money replace intrinsic motivation for an activity, people do less of it. I don’t think that means that I’m incapable of that creative fire. I just think I gave it the wrong kind of kindling for so long that the fire forgot how to burn. 

In comparison, outsider artists are people who have never needed an audience in order to create. Both Gill and Burton had long periods of illness which seemed to spark a need in them to burn off whatever troubles they felt internally in the form of art. In both cases, while they were happy to be acknowledged for their art, other people’s approval was ultimately irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean that creating with other people in mind is a bad thing, or unhealthy. Thinking of a future audience is inevitable and productive for most artists. Also, art is a form of communication, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be seen and wanting to make art that will have an effect on other people. 

Still, if your feelings about creating have become too bound up with the need to be approved of, it seems worth trying to reignite the sort of creative fire that would compulsively churn out painting after painting, story after story, building up an internal world that makes no sense to anyone else in the world, and isn’t really supposed to.