User:MrsGraceCampbell94/sandbox

Gracie Campbell (10 May 1921 – 14 September 2015) was a Scottish artist who, along with sisters Annie and Isobel Brodie, was a founding member of the underground 'Morning Coffee, Afternoon Tea' art movement, based in Dundee, Scotland, from 1970 to 1984.

Early life and education
Gracie Campbell was born Grace McArthur in Dundee, Scotland. The second youngest of four sisters, she was brought up by her mother Wilhelmina (nee Pringle) and father Henry McArthur in the working-class district of Stobswell. As a child, she attended Maryfield Primary School, then Stobswell Secondary School for Girls.

Throughout her school years Gracie showed great promise in art classes and won several local competitions with her landscape paintings. She was also a skilled seamstress, having made most of her clothes as well as those of her sisters. In 1936, Gracie won a scholarship to study fine art at Dundee Technical College & School of Art (now Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design), but with the death of her father in August that year, she was unable to take up the offer and left education to work in a local jute mill.

In 1939, she met electrical engineer John Jameson Campbell (JJ), and they married on 30 December that year. When JJ was drafted into the RAF, Gracie's interests in art were put on hold to bring up their subsequent children – a girl and four boys.

The episode
After her marriage, Gracie’s role in life was that of a dutiful wife and mother. After the war, JJ held a middle-management post with watchmaking firm Timex. Like many men of that era, he was the main breadwinner and, having no income of her own, Gracie was reliant on her husband’s housekeeping.

In 1969, their daughter Flora emigrated to South Africa with her husband and daughter. Gracie was left heartbroken at having to be a long-distance grandmother. Two months later, following an argument with JJ, she ran out onto the nearby dual carriageway, causing a minor crash. Years later, on recalling the incident, Flora attributed her mother's ‘episode’ to a mix of depression, early menopause and mid-life crisis.

After hearing about the incident, Flora's mother-in-law, Annie McLean (nee Brodie) introduced Gracie to her sister Isobel. Both were friends with Dundee-born landscape artist James McIntosh Patrick, who taught painting classes that the sisters attended. Isobel suggested Gracie try Patrick’s classes, an idea that was initially scorned by JJ, but who was subsequently persuaded to let her attend as a form of art therapy.

The Dundee Girls
Gracie thrived in these classes, and her work always sold well in the group’s shows, but she quickly grew bored of the endless still lifes and landscapes that were the mainstay of the class. She attempted to attend painting classes at the art school, but JJ forbade it as, ‘that’s not for the likes of us’, anxious that 'a man of his position' would be embarrassed by the increasingly avant-garde direction of her art. However, her practice underwent a dramatic change when, after voicing her need for a more critical, advanced class, Patrick asked his students to create work based on the manifestoes of two female artists: Mina Loy’s ‘’Feminist Manifesto (1914)’’ and Valentine de Saint-Point’s ‘’Manifesto of Feminist Women’’. While most of the class continued with their landscapes, Gracie and the Brodie sisters took to the task, producing work and a manifesto that Patrick described as “… ranging from tentative dissent to full-scale feminist anarchy”. The first public show of the Dundee Girls, as they subsequently referred to themselves, was at Patrick’s own Perth Road studio, to which he had invited several members of the Scottish art scene, including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), Pat Douthwaite (1934-2002) and William Crozier (1930-2011). Gracie and Annie never invited their husbands.

Buoyed by the encouraging responses from Patrick and his contemporaries, the Dundee Girls vowed to carry on with their work, but faced a dilemma of where to exhibit – keeping their activities secret from their husbands was paramount and they couldn’t always rely on Patrick’s generous use of his studio. It was in 1975 that Patrick invited the Dundee Girls to a talk given by Russian artist Alexei Masterkova at Dundee's art school. Alexei’s aunt was the abstract expressionist painter Lydia Masterkova (1927-2008), a leading figure in the Lianozovo Group in Russia. The Dundee Girls were intrigued by Lydia’s life as a painter, in particular the difficulties she had in exhibiting her work publicly – the Lianozovo artists were also members of the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists and because they worked in applied and graphic arts, this meant they were not allowed to hold painting exhibitions as that fell under the domain of the state-approved Artists’ Union – so they resorted to holding shows in their apartments, events that were advertised through word of mouth. This eventually led to the formation of the AptArt movement (1982-84).

Morning Coffee, Afternoon Tea
Inspired by this creative subterfuge, Gracie and the Brodies adopted this mode of exhibiting by hosting private shows to selected guests on an appointment-only basis at their homes or special venues, while their husbands were at work. These shows were known as 'Morning Coffee, Afternoon Tea', after the most convenient times that they could hold their exhibitions – 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 4pm. They sent out special invitations for guests to come for morning coffee or afternoon tea, and their work was displayed around the home or in the garden. Coffee and tea were dutifully served to guests while the viewed and discussed the work.

The Dundee Girls hoped that other women like themselves – housewives, whose creativity were repressed by family and societal norms – would be encouraged to join them, but although the group gained a semi-cult following, it only ever attained a stable membership of five.

Artworks
Gracie's new direction centred around her role as wife and mother. Her manifesto, I Am An Artist, was a 100cm x 100cm piece of plywood that consisted of loosely applied layers of phrases and roles attributed to her in the Dundee vernacular, such as 'dachter', 'wee wifey', 'mither' and 'erse-wiper'. The first phrase, I Am An Artist, was written in pencil, then obliterated with the subsequent layering, using paints and whatever substances that were to hand, such as tea, coffee, earth, threads, sticks and dust. The top-most phrase is a triumphant 'Artist' in glitter.

The series Housewife's Lip contained works that reflected a strongly feminist intent, centred on housewife tasks, but with a deviant context. Neatly Pressed White Shirt is a man's white shirt that has been ironed carefully with starch to include as many creases as possible, hung on a hanger. This was based on JJ's insistence of having a clean white shirt carefully ironed every morning for him to wear at work that day. Granddaughter Shirley recalled: "If he found any creases, there'd be hell to pay", describing one instance when after discovering a crease in the collar, he threw the shirt on the floor in a temper and stormed out the room, leaving Gracie, with the iron in one hand and the shirt in the other, muttering, "Eh'll pit a crease in his bloody neck!"

The crowning glory of the Housewife's Lip series was High Tea for the Birthday Boy, described by Isobel Brodie as "the gastronomic union of Miss Havisham and Mad Hatter". An array of food sculptures, made of varied materials, are assembled upon an uneven dining table in a in a chaotic display that appears frozen in time, like a film still.

Gracie's last work, Unknown Direction, saw a return to landscapes and comprises a set of six chalk-on-blackboard drawings that arranged together depict the River Tay at night following a storm. Gracie initially used these to plan her work, because they could then be quickly rubbed out if JJ was around, but then began to incorporate them into her work. "That the larger drawings were made up of separate boards was intentional: it meant that she could make sizeable works that could be quickly dismantled and hidden if necessary, and they could also be easily transported to other 'Morning Coffee, Afternoon Tea' sessions without raising attention." Unknown Direction was carried out while JJ was recovering from a heart attack. Shirley described the work as marking a dark period in the family's history, with JJ's life hanging in the balance, and Gracie reflecting on her married life that, "... despite aw the cracks, w'ir guid the gither".

Influences and style
Pat Douthwaite, William Crozier, James McIntosh Patrick, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson