Our documentary celebrates the life and work of Pat Porter (1944-2022), a prolific painter whose intimate still lifes, landscapes, and portraits were created over decades but never publicly shown during her lifetime.
Set against the moving backdrop of her Rutland house and studio, the story unfolds through the voices of her four children, allowing the viewer to explore this long-hidden body of work — delicate, deeply personal pieces that capture the quiet intensity of a woman devoted to observing the world around her.
Though she exhibited only a handful of times during her lifetime, Pat Porter’s still lives and interior scenes reveal a prodigious talent that is only now receiving the recognition it deserves. Porter (née Reynolds) studied at the Slade School of Art in London in the mid-1960s, where her tutors included Euan Uglow and William Coldstream; Derek Jarman was a fellow student, as was her future husband, the painter Tony Porter. Upon graduation, the Porters left London for rural Northamptonshire, where Pat continued to paint, balancing her art while raising a young family.
Porter’s work, which underwent a number of significant and often radical evolutions, drew on her intense observation of the domestic world immediately surrounding her, always working from life rather than memory, photographs, or the imagination. Her still life oils – at times so heavily impastoed to reach a point of near-abstraction, at others Cézannesque, or picked out with Matisse-like flattened colours and outlines – demonstrate an enduring dialogue with artists of the past as well as the objects she surrounded herself with.
