Marjorie Arnfield - Biography

Biography

Marjorie Arnfield was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1930 and brought up in Sunderland, attending Sunderland Church High School.

Her grandfather, great-uncle and two uncles were regional architects, responsible for many public buildings in the North East of England, including the Sunderland Empire Theatre. While attending Sunderland College of Art, and King Edward VII College of Art, University of Durhamshe was taught by distinguished British artists such as Lawrence Gowing, Quentin Bell and Victor Passmore.

She travelled extensively in the Mediterranean with her late husband, Ron Arnfield. In her paintings of scenes from the Greek islands, France and Spain, she sought to capture the vibrancy of the sun and the natural colours. She also used colour to depict emotion, for example in her mining paintings. Arnfield portrayed the energy and excitement of football when she was invited by Sunderland Football Club to watch one of their games in their new stadium, and then paint a picture of the match.

In a catalogue for an exhibition of Mediterranean Images at the Pierrepoint Gallery in Newark, Nottinghamshire, England in September 1996, Arnfield wrote of the visual inspiration of her passion for the Mediterranean: "Vines dotted in rows across spring landscapes; distant mountains; poppies, stark, clustered among ochre grasses; cyprus trees forming punctuation marks; mediaeval villages, pantiled roofs; ultramarine skies....fishermen crouched mending nets; images seen and felt, evoking a spirit of place."

Arnfield's "well-developed sense of place and sympathetic observation of people" were highlighted in the catalogue of an exhibition of her work, People and Places, at Kirkbride Gallery, Peebles, Scotland in September 1998. She spent many years teaching art to adults and schoolchildren in England and Scotland. She also took adults on painting holidays to France and the Greek islands. Disabled due to rheumatoid arthritis, her husband Ron assisted her over the years with her exhibitions and teaching.

Sheila Smith, a British poet, included two poems she had written about Arnfield in "Woman Surprised by a Young Boy," a collection of poems by Smith which was published in July 2010 by Shoestring Press http://www.shoestring-press.com/2010/06/woman-surprised-by-a-young-boy/ The first poem, "Silence is Very Loud", refers to a visit Smith made to Arnfield's new studio after Arnfield's death, and to her old studio. The second, "Death of a Painter, for Marjorie" talks about Arnfield's unique vision, her ability to see in a landscape something that no-one else could see. The title of the collection, "Woman Surprised by a Young Boy," refers to a painting by the English artist Eileen Cooper.