Margaret Hudson-Ware's Let me see the paralysed man walk
Of the many pieces I love to visit at the Gallery, Let me see the paralysed man walk by Margaret Hudson-Ware is particularly special to me. “Ms. Hudson-Ware” was my art teacher from age 14 to 17 at Cashmere High School. She was a very stylish, bird-like woman – a kind of Coco Chanel in a pant suit. In the eighties, she managed to look utterly timeless; she sculpted her cheeks with burnt umber blush, a colour I could only imagine she’d mixed herself. The whole palette of her clothes and make up was very much what you see in the colours of this work.
She influenced me greatly in those years of learning about art. She made us fill the page – be bold, she would say. Be bold! What a message to give to a young girl. Look at what Max Beckmann does, she told us, he fills the scene with jutting angles! No tiny little scared scribbles, just large, bold scenes crammed with gesture and energy. I was ranked last in art at the start of that first year; by the end of the year her teaching had inspired me so much that I was first. We all wanted to please her. I’d spent the whole year terrified of her, but I remember her saying to me at the end that she appreciated how much hard work I’d put in. Hard work? Who knew that hard work was what art was all about? I thought you just got to muck around with paint! That work ethic really set me up for a life in music. I learned you really had to put your back in to what you did, and work, work, work.
It wasn’t until after I’d left school that I saw a retrospective of her work at Christchurch Art Gallery. Standing in front of her painting now, I feel proud to have been taught by her. Her influence on me was profound, and through her work I see that everything she ever said made perfect sense. Be strong, be bold! Fill the page! Work hard! Don’t apologise! To this day I don’t know where her drive came from, but she really had a lot of it. The ultimate hard-working female artist with so much fight in her.
Related
Exhibition
Refugees
10 May – 19 October 2003
A striking collection of new paintings by prominent Christchurch artist Margaret Hudson-Ware.
Collection
Margaret Hudson-Ware Let me see the paralysed man walk
Margaret Hudson-Ware described the canvas she painted on as “a plane on which the essences of life are poured and fixed”. She found the subjects for her works in a variety of places, drawing on everything from classical mythology and biblical stories to contemporary newspaper reports and fragments of overheard conversations. Always, she was motivated by an intense fascination with the human condition.
This painting began with a parable from the Gospels, in which Jesus preached in the town of Capernaum. Several men brought a paralysed man to him, but they were unable to pass through the large crowd. Eventually, they lowered the man through the roof and Jesus, seeing their faith, forgave the man his sins and healed him. Hudson-Ware saw this work as depicting “the timeless issue of human experience and all human interaction, with the forces of good and evil vying for possession and power”. As is typical in her practice, the composition is crowded with figures. Some relate to Jesus, such as Mary Magdalene, transformed by grief, shown at the left edge, while others represent contemporary archetypes: bullies, war-mongers and oppressed innocents. Hudson-Ware placed her “artistic guide”, German expressionist painter Max Beckmann, in a suit at the right and also included a portrait of herself as the central figure climbing the ladder: “clumsy, naïve, trying to live”.
(September 2017, written when this work was exhibited to mark the artist's death.)