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Loading... Drawn from Life (edition 1984)by Stella Bowen
Work InformationDrawn from Life: A Memoir by Stella Bowen
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First published in 1941, this autobiography of a well-known Australian artist tells of her childhood in Adelaide, her marriage to writer Ford Madox Ford, her life in England and France in the 1920s and 30s, her development as a painter and her struggles to make a living after the breakup of her marriage. Includes a biographical introduction by her daughter. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)759.2The arts Painting History, geographic treatment, biography England and British IslesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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(And it was also clear to me that I had to buy my own copy, though Amanda's Virago edition is much nicer than my 1999 Picador, because the Virago editions includes reproductions of Bowen's portraits, showing what a superb portraitist she was. See some of them here.)
The first chapter covers Stella's childhood and adolescence, and the bereavements that prompted her escape from the stultifying life mapped out for her by the social expectations of the era. She recalls her birthplace as...
Inspired by a charismatic art teacher called Rose McPherson (a.k.a. Margaret Preston), Stella set sail for England in 1914. She had a regular income inherited from her mother; and a return ticket and her uncle's arrangements for her to be chaperoned in London. But when her younger brother Tom subsequently cabled from Australia that he had enlisted and that her return was optional, she sold the return ticket and made a life for herself free of all ties to Australia.
It was war time, but what seems to us with the benefit of hindsight to be a shattering experience, was something Stella appears to have lived through without much emotional impact. She admits that she and her friends did not grasp that they were living in an epic and that the war turned out as it did. She was a pacifist, and she volunteered with some infant welfare work, but she spent most of her time at art school, quickly shedding her uncle's arrangements in order to share a studio with her friend Phyllis Reid. At the Westminster Art School she was taught by Walter Sickert, of whom she said that four minutes with him was worth four months criticism from elsewhere:
[I wonder, as we make more and more use of technology that allows us to 'fix' things, if Sickert's virtue still applies anywhere at all.]
It was when Peggy (her former Chelsea hostess) asked the young women if their big studio space could be used for a party, that Stella met Ezra Pound. He turned out to be only the first of the notable people that became part of her life. She went on to meet a Who's Who of London Bohemia: T S Eliot, Arthur Waley, Wadsworth, May Sinclair, Violet Hunt, G B Stern, Wyndham Lewis, and Yeats. These people, and Ezra in particular, added to her education, introducing her, for example, to the work of authors like James Joyce.
Stella's descriptions of people are superb, all done with a painterly eye. Here she is describing her friend Mary Butts, also doing volunteer work at the Children's Care Committee in the East End:
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/23/drawn-from-life-by-stella-bowen/ ( )