Audrey Melville Barker, 'Brighton Beach', 1953.

'Brighton Beach'
Audrey Melville Barker (1932 - 2002)
Oil on Hardboard
620 x 1270
1953
Low Commercial Value
Exhibited at New English Art Club 1953
2013.001

This painting has a huge sentimental attachment for me because it was made by one of my most loved and dearest friends during what she would have referred to as her career as a brush painter. She would have been 21 at the time. Most of her work from this period was dispersed by sales and she failed to keep tabs on it. After her death I took possession of her archive at the request of her executor Alex Frazer. I still store a proportion of it in the barn but made an arrangement for the important material in it to be selected by and transferred to the ownership of the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) at Holton Lee. Alex speculated that she might actually have been cross about this because of the god bothering that they do - but having turned down establishment honours for her 'service to the arts' - we were agreed that she is an artist whose contribution needs preserving somewhere. This painting was among that archival material and was left to Alex. He offered to sell it to me at the time but I didn't have enough money. So it was kept in my cellar at Aynam Road in Kendal. On a later visit, after we had moved, Alex generously gave it to me so I had the frame restored and glazed. It is in poor condition with a lot of surface damage and crazing. Despite being dark and discoloured it is a joyful painting, very much of its time, and it depicts a toy dog of the type that Audrey loved. While I knew her she had a selection of such dogs (all highly strung ankle biters) the last of which 'Harry', a pomeranian, was put down and cremated at the same time as her - his ashes being dropped into the river Irthing near Lanercost together with hers.

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