Maggie Glover: Painter of honest portraits

David Griffiths reviews an exhibition at The Peace Museum, Bradford

Through her art, the late Margaret Glover interpreted and celebrated a lifelong commitment to peace. This exhibition includes some newly acquired pieces, and leads you to become aware of the considerable historical and political experience of her witness and engagement with the peace movement during her lifetime.

Margaret (the artist) or Maggie (the peace activist) was obviously an artist of the old school, who carried a sketchpad and notepaper with her wherever she went so as to record in quick freewheeling lines and coloured wash what, in this exhibition, look like life-drawn postcards sent home or potential illustrations for a journal and future painting.

She records a wide spectrum of public figures and peace campaigning events ranging over thirty years. Whilst there is a sensitive pencil drawing of Adam Curle, most of her portraits are in pen and ink and include actor Ian McKellan on stage at the Lake Wanaka Centre, New Zealand; Tommy Spree; Edward Thompson; and a tiny profile of Mikhail Gorbachev at a peace conference in 1994. One can imagine Maggie, in a quiet unobtrusive Quakerly way, capturing the essence of those she deemed important enough to record who shared her humanitarian beliefs.

Margaret Glover was born Margaret McKechnie, in London, in 1935. She was there when the second world war started and was evacuated to grandparents in High Wycombe in 1939 because of bombing raids by the Luftwaffe. So, early in her life she had experience of the effects of war.

She began her peace witness with the Lancaster Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and, after becoming a Friend, was active in protests at Greenham Common and Molesworth. This witness was to be a defining thread in her life and work.

Through her peace work, research and travels, Margaret Glover realised that many aspects of the peace movement were not well documented. Her Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) at Reading University involved collecting images of peace in Britain from the late nineteenth century to the second world war. It included a huge range of images and artefacts, from ‘high art’ to lapel buttons, and demonstrated the key role of Quaker peace posters in the developing culture of peace campaigning.

The exhibition shows that her perspective is one of ‘attendance’. A lovely collection of gatherings under the banners of gulf war, Green Party or concert in Bergen, all reveal her instant, vibrant, personal record of the occasion and its participants.

She identifies where she is placed in the scheme of things, some of the immediate and distant audiences sharing her experience, and the crucial focus on the staging of vital campaign messages that headline the occasion. Not content merely to listen to the speakers or the musicians, she wanted to record and interpret the moments of detail in her inimitable style and we, retrospectively, are the beneficiaries of her recollection and purpose; the occasion ‘rubber-stamped’ by Maggie.

Three well-considered oil portraits dominate the exhibition, and in style sharply contrast the ‘instant’ sketches that surround them. However, there is no diluted sense of life, energy and immediacy in their execution or effect.

The smallest of these is a self-portrait. She looks up at us with a wry smile from her easel as though grudgingly impatient to get back to more important work. Her brushstrokes are alive, confidently and skilfully capturing the surface detail of skin, fabric and impression of light and place.

Hugh Jenkins, at home by a window, sits comfortably in an armchair with white open-necked shirt, pillar-box-red open waistcoat, looking up from a copy of his beloved Stage resting casually in front of him. All of the epithets which describe his personality have been captured in the warmth of colour and texture: a humorous, kind, determined man with a high concern for humanity.

My favourite painting is of Pat Arrowsmith, standing proudly defiant with a bright-red industrial hard hat cupped in her right hand, a highly visible CND necklace displayed on her chest. She stares smilingly powerful from beneath a grey tousled mop with years of battles and future endeavour etched on her remarkable, beautiful face. I love the dashes of highlighting colours that mark the detail and convey all the energy, boldness and courage with which artist and sitter are mutually identified in their worlds of protest and action.

This uncluttered collection of drawings and paintings introduced me to so many personalities who have devoted their lives and talent to furthering the peace process. Alongside the other thematic presentations in The Peace Museum it represents an inspirational statement of Maggie Glover’s own peace activism, and celebrates her talent as an artist of some distinction.

The exhibition is open from 10am to 4pm on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays until 28 October at The Peace Museum in Bradford.

Further information: www.peacemuseum.org.uk

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