A Tribute to Marion Milner

Marion had drawn and painted as long as she could remember and she described herself as a Sunday painter. (But she took her painting seriously enough to go and work for several periods with Cedric Morris who was a very distinguished teacher, of Lucian Freud among others.) As everything she did was caught up in everything else - because she was constantly placing her different activities in the context of each other, seeing how they could illuminate each other, painting couldn't remain a separate, self-contained enterprise; she recruited it, famously, to her self-reflection, with characteristic courage asking why she found her painting so unsatisfying and what that might betoken.

For instance, she wrote on the use of colour:

I noticed that a smear of paint on the left of the palette after painting, where white merged into red, blue, brown, was interesting and alive; whereas the picture painted with the same colours but carefully separated was dead.

She then observed that matching the colour of her green paint and the green of the object to be painted produced ‘a terribly dead effect’. What was at issue was not only the effect of fortuitous merging as opposed to the controlled separation or matching of pigments - a basic issue for anyone who falls in love with the medium of painting - but how this could be a matter of what was alive and what wasn't - and why the taught techniques of painting seemed to stifle vitality. (Her thought in this passage on paint is expressed in a way that seems to relate it back to infancy, to her account of the infant's disillusion that its gift of faeces ‘is not as lively, as beautiful, as boundless as the lovely feelings they had in giving of them’. It is the true artist, in love with his medium, who can overcome the disillusion and give life to it.)

Perhaps the problem of the medium of painting became, for her, unresolvable - something that could be released only episodically from the puritan constraints of taught technique. Whether this was