My letter this week celebrates the unique gifts of the painter and designer Dora Carrington – known all her life by her surname. Although she painted furniture, tiles, even pub signs, anything, in fact, that came to hand, for me, her greatest achievement are her landscapes. Look at the stunning view above – the terrain both real and somehow animated by interior fantasies. Those black swans!
If you want to know more about her life I urge you to watch the brilliant film Carrington. It documents her tortuous, unrequited love for the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey. A delicate, funny and ultimately very moving portrait of their life together, the film score by Michael Nyman perfectly captures the longing of her predicament, as here, in one of my favourite pieces of music, ‘Outside Looking In.’ So aptly titled for a painter whose art also made external reality reflect interior desires.
