The following article first appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Green Pebble magazine (www.greenpebble.co.uk). Published with permission.

If there is one contemporary Suffolk artist whose star appears to have risen as fast as the town she paints, that artist is Mary Gundry. A figurative water colourist, Mary Gundry’s now-familiar idyllic images of children playing on Southwold beach and crabbing in the shallows of neighbouring Walberswick can be found on cards, calendars and mugs throughout the region. What is less known outside Southwold is that her family portraits are on countless East Anglian living room walls, commissioned by parents eager to capture their offspring’s childhood.

Indeed, if commissions are an indicator, it must be possible to credit Mary with single-handedly making watercolour family scenes fashionable in the Southwold region. She is in such demand, her calendar is full for up to six months in advance.

This writer first came across Mary Gundry’s work in the unforgiving heat of the Middle East. There, surrounded by formal Islamic art, it seemed both incongruous and amusing to find two large watercolour paintings devoted to children enjoying a breezy Southwold seaside.

Quickly amusement was crowded out by nostalgia for the familiar settings of home. These portraits were inescapably English; their subject matter, composition, light and palette made it virtually impossible for the imagery to have been from anywhere else. She captured Englishness so well.

It was also evident the artist was not simply ‘competent’ at figure drawing, but extremely accomplished. Her subject matter may have been infused with a feel good factor – hardly the material of modern day ‘serious’ artists – but her technique was mature and confident.

The cumulative effect was that the two paintings evoked a primal, parental response. Forget hoodies, gang violence and bullying. When seen through Mary’s eyes, children were children in the purest sense; as parents would wish them to remain, forever. The children in her paintings were focused, relaxed and innocent. They still played as their parents and grandparents played, with sticks and buckets and inquisitive minds.

Unforgivably nostalgic? Contrived?

Perhaps. Except that a trip to Southwold beach on a sunny summer’s day will reveal gaggles of such children in their floral swimsuits and pirate t-shirts, and the galleries selling Mary Gundry’s work will confirm what so many spontaneously say – people love Mary’s work.

She has an uncanny ability to tap into what ordinary people yearn for – innocence, aesthetics and permission simply to be happy. And because her technique is so refined, she neatly avoids the trap of being cringingly melancholic.

The child of a professional photographer, Mary Gundry was born with an eye for composition and an insatiable appetite for watching people. It is no surprise that many of her subjects have their backs turned to the viewer – Mary doesn’t want them to pose, she wants to capture them as they are, preferably after they’ve forgotten she’s there.

‘When I first started painting children, I would happily walk along the promenade and just take pictures,’ she says in her new studio in Blythburgh. Changing social and legal pressures mean she doesn’t do that any more; nowadays she only works with children she knows.

‘I love to watch them. Especially the age group 2 to 5, when they are so innocent. I love the way the tips of children’s ears just turn over, and the proportions of a small child, and the roundness of the head and the nape of the neck…’

Mary stumbled into her niche some 14 years ago when a friend, aware of Mary’s interest in figure painting, encouraged her to visit Southwold from her then-home in Stradbroke, Suffolk. Her friend advised her to watch the children climbing the cannons on Gunn Hill, convinced the scene would interest her.

The rest, she says with a depreciative laugh, is history.

Self-taught as an artist and working for Anglia Television in Norwich, she began painting watercolours of beach scenes and selling them through rented gallery space in Southwold during the summers. Eventually she left her job, bought a small gallery on the High Street and began promoting art in earnest. It was, she says, the right decision. The gallery helped to introduce her art to the wider public and soon she had an extensive waiting list for commissions, as well as a burgeoning art business selling other local artists’ works.

It was also around now that Southwold experienced a renaissance. It became a favoured destination amongst London-based weekenders and suddenly Mary had more work than she could comfortably manage. She was receiving requests for commissions as often as three times a week.

‘I don’t have business acumen,’ she insists as she discusses a period when she not only painted and ran a gallery, but also published and marketed prints, cards and calendars to markets beyond Southwold’s reach; demands that would test even the most astute business person. ‘The business did well despite me. Thankfully I had a great gallery manager.’

Two years ago she sold the gallery. Once more, it was the right decision at the right time.

Today, Mary is back to painting lovingly rendered portraits that sell faster than she can create them. But she also seems acutely aware of the precarious line between needing to make a living and wishing to be a free-spirited artist. She explores new techniques but there is a cautiousness to her as she works with the richness and luminosity of her new passion – oils. The paints are new but her subject matter is still often children on the beach. And in typical Mary Gundry style, she makes the transition look easy. The paintings dance, as do the children. It is clear that over time her oils could surpass her watercolours, possibly catapulting her into a new strata as an artist, but it will not be through a process of wild abandon. She is too disciplined for that.

Recently Mary allowed her attention to shift to another age group; adults. Like the children, they are at play, and according to Mary they are a wonderfully dynamic subject matter. Several new oil paintings are of the crowds at Ascot, with the trials and tribulations of winning and losing at the races clearly apparent in their body language and hinted at in their facial expressions. Mary has simplified her palette to just a few colours and the paintings display a strong narrative, supported by shape and nuance. Hats, top hats and tailored suits give each piece vitality and rhythm. When the horses thunder past, they proceed in a blur of hooves and dirt.

She now talks of extending her focus to include other leisure activities involving crowds. Football, for instance. Like Ascot, football matches should provide plenty of scope for capturing human interaction, family dynamics, and a canvas ‘full of lots of little cameos’.

The dilemma for her, as always, is who will buy her paintings. For someone who claims to lack business acumen, she certainly has a marketing hat firmly perched on her head. But perhaps there is more to it than that; perhaps it is her uncanny empathy for how others feel – an empathy that sets her paintings apart – that makes her more conscious of the customer, her market, than some.

Recently a visitor to one of Mary’s exhibitions wrote, upon
leaving, ‘We smiled, laughed and gave thanks’.

This delighted her; it struck a chord. Perhaps, for a moment, she felt what so many people experience when they view her work. Uncomplicated pleasure. The kind that can never have a value placed on it.

Mary has a studio at her home in Cherry Tree Cottage, Church Road, Blythburgh, Suffolk and welcomes visitors. Tel: 01502 478573. Her work can also be viewed at the Holkham Art Gallery, The Ancient House, Holkham, Wells next Sea; Cork Brick Gallery in Bungay, Suffolk; the Regatta Fine Art Gallery in Holt, Raveningham Art Gallery near Beccles; and Southwold Gallery in Southwold.