James White • Pauline Bewick: Painting a Life
Wolfhound Press, 1986. Hardcover. 160 pages. Brick red cloth with gold foil title to spine. Frontis black-and-white photo of Pauline Bewick. 52 color plates. 71 b&w illustrations.
Good+ A sound copy. Slightly unbalanced. Bumps to top corners and fore board edge. Mild scuffs to bottom board edge. Roughly 15 leaves section bumped and corner creased. Spotting to terminal pages. Bright dust jacket shows moderate wear at extremities, verso tanning and light dampspot. Clean pages free of markings.
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Pauline Bewick's earliest memories are of the intense pride her mother took in the little pictures she painted and of how, as a
schoolchild in Kerry, her difficulties with reading and writing were overlooked, not through negligence but in the belief that her true medium was drawing.
By the time her formal training as a painter began in the Dublin College of Art in 1950, Pauline had already established her unique
facility for making observations directly with colour from life and her ability to translate even the most abstract ideas into
recognisable and potent images.
In Painting a Life, James White provides a lively account of Pauline Bewick's extraordinary childhood and her early years as set designer for the Pike Theatre and
creator of a successful children's programme for the BBC. With fine insight he traces the steady development of Pauline Bewick's
talent and her growing reputation as a painter and illustrator whose work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Brussels, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US, as well as in
Ireland.
Working closely with the artist, James White has assembled this splendid retrospective of Pauline Bewick's life's work, which ranges from examples of work done in childhood sparkling with promise
to come, to the early interior scenes set in Dublin and London and the more recent landscapes of Kerry and Tuscany where, with instinctive brushstrokes she captures the sensual power of human and animal and plant life. (From the Front Flap)
