Pat Porter, then Pat Reynolds, studied at the Slade in the mid- 1960s. Her teachers included William Coldstream and Euan Uglow, while Derek Jarman was a fellow student. It was at the Slade that she met her husband, Tony Porter, also a painter. After they graduated, they left London and set up home and studio in the East Midlands, where they remained for the rest of their lives.
Pat Porter
She could work anywhere. After her death, Tony recalled her making drawings in a moving car of landscapes she glimpsed through the window, while her son Charlie remembers her drawing at the opera, oblivious to any irritation her scratching pencil might be causing. But the studio was her home base, her centre of operations, a place of daily experiment and practice. For the final two decades of her life, her studio was in a converted garage next to her cottage in Rutland, where a north and an east-facing window provided her with steady infusions of light.
Bowl with Shiny, Thick Glaze, oil on canvas, 2021
The constancy of her subject matter makes the stylistic shifts her still lifes underwent very marked. In early paintings there is an intense preoccupation with Cezanne, an interest in producing tones and marks that convey dimensionality, weight and light. Her abundant gifts as a colourist are deployed to convey attributes that go far beyond strictly surface appearance.
After a while, this increasingly tense approach seems to break apart, to give way to paintings that are much less careful, and much more mysterious, exuberant and directly engaged with light and space. But it would be a mistake to assume that this process is directly chronological. According to Charlie, Pat would regularly return to old styles, experimenting freely with form.
Celery, oil on board
Pat shared her preoccupation with bowls and jugs with Cezanne and especially with Morandi, who spent his life depicting humble domestic vessels and containers, depicted in wobbly, enigmatic groups and soft, restrained colours. Pat’s containers are equally modest and unshowy, often glowing but rarely bright. A teapot emerges from a blue wash of light; a brown bowl barely escapes the brown wall behind it. Another, darker bowl is lacquered and gorgeous, against an almost abstract backdrop of mauve and grey.
Cherries, oil on canvas
Writing this, I’m struck by how ancient the jug and the bowl are as objects, how many generations of human hands they’ve passed through. Unlike the technological devices with which we share our contemporary lives, they are representatives of deep culture. The oldest surviving jug is 4000 years old, while the oldest bowl dates back a staggering 18,000 years. They speak of resilience, containment and abundance, but also carry a counter-note, a minatory tremor of fragility, emptiness and lack.
Still Life, oil on canvas
Jug and bowl. The jug might be empty or filled with flowers; the bowl could contain fruit or vegetables – even a raw egg. Pat Porter’s work ranged over many subjects over the decades, including landscapes and portraits, but these two humble domestic vessels, painted in the studio, served as a returning cast, a source of inexhaustible fascination.
This is one of the tensions in Pat’s work I find most interesting. She depicts scenes of vegetal abundance. Her jugs contain roses, peonies, anemones, tulips, lilies, gladioli and cornflowers from Columbia Market. In her bowls you might find lemons, apples, apricots, celery, cloves of garlic or a slice of ash-coated cheese. But this abundance is often undercut by the sobriety, even sombreness of her backdrops, painted in drab, mournful tones of purple, brown and grey. The orange lily, set against festive lattices of green, is a real rarity.
Rose, oil on canvas
In the looser paintings, this sharp distinction between the precisely rendered object of scrutiny, set firmly at the front of the picture plane, and the downbeat, indistinct back regions, undergoes an exciting revolution. Depth vanishes. Edges blur. Either solid objects melt into air, or else air itself achieves solid status. Jugs swim in rooms of light. Lemons emerge through curdy waves of sunshine.
Jug, oil on canvas
There’s another shift I haven’t yet touched on: a set of images in which the objects are all edge, emblazoned on flat regions of colour. It is a world away from those prior experiments with articulating and making visible every inch of depth, every gram of weight. Jug white gray mauve, blockily three dimensional, banging out from an orange pool that gives way abruptly to navy-blue. Things are no longer hesitant, emergent, nebulous. They blare.
Yellow and Black Still Life, oil on canvas
Pat was wed to subject, not style, and only wed to subject in that it was a site for experiment, a controlled zone for her to investigate far larger questions of object status, light and gravity, those entwined mysteries of perception. The relationship between object and eye, the strange process of rendering a dimensional universe with pigment and flat canvas. Still life sometimes suggests a modesty of ambition as well as subject matter but these are seriously ambitious paintings. Her subject was seeing and she threw everything at it.
