The 400 small canvasses that dominate the area were done on 400 consecutive days as a kind of diary that became an obsession. Having seen it on Tuesday, I had hoped Frieda would be there to ask if they were assembled in the same arrangement every time or if it's random or chronological or by theme. It's possibly by theme but, having noted some of her key to the colours used, and she is nothing in these paintings if not a flamboyant colourist, I was glad to see that orange and yellow, that predominate = happiness with friends, exciting news. Blue = serenity whereas red and black have inevitably more ominous overtones, but it is yellow that she would have been needing to re-order most regularly.
It would, of course, have to be one on the top row that I wanted to have a closer look at but that is just some natural perversity in my, and plenty of other people's, make up. But colourful abstraction overflows both in its immensity on first sight and the realisation that these are quite detailed works individually. As a journal of such a period, it is seen all at once and, on closer inspection, day by day but you take away from it a very positive charge of vibrant energy and vitality that seems to be what Frieda is.
The catalogue, which is pragmatically entitled a price list and is not an art book, lists sixty-seven other paintings and so we shouldn't assume it's all about 400 Days. I would have been reluctant to ask about her family, the subject having been covered so thoroughly and distorted in so many ways by any who think they can use it like some case history but Frieda doesn't seem to want to evade the issues. Epoch-making and legendary poets though they were - and to my mind it is Sylvia who left us the more convincing body of work- Frieda is entirely herself and strong and confident enough not to be living in their penumbra even if one could hardly have blamed her if she had to. Here are paintings explicitly titled For Shura, Brother's Birth, and any number of others, like Playing Gods, whose titles could refer to potential traumas but the most tempting of them is Embryo which one wants to relate to Sylvia's poem You're, which is quite possibly about Frieda as embryo herself.
A favourite of mine was Love Poem for a Motorbike, one of the least colourful and, strangely, because I personally wouldn't share any love of motorised two-wheeled transport. It would be either that, at £3.5k, or the already sold Memory Loss 2 that I'd have bought if I had landed the ITV 7 today.
Words in paintings can work. One thinks of Hockney's We Two Boys Together Clinging or Ceci n'est pas une pipe but the several paintings here in which Frieda includes sometimes a whole poem perhaps risk being neither one thing or the other. If a painting can suggest words, although it's often better if it doesn't, poems can certainly bring pictures to mind so whether paintings benefit from being the ornamental surround to a poem remains for others to advocate one way or the other but Frieda, it seems to me, is a natural painter. Like Callum Best, Julian Lennon, Ziggy Marley or Franz Xavier Mozart, she had an open invitation to celebrity but an impossible job on if she ever thought she could achieve more than her parents did in their discipline.
But nobody has to and this exhibition shows how she is much more Frieda than she is Sylvia's daughter. Having long been more of a Larkin man myself, I'm delighted to recognize that man doesn't have to always hand on misery to man although you would have to take a bit of a detour to get out of Chichester Cathedral to avoid passing the Arundel Tomb which made Larkin go to such lengths to undermine his resonant final line, 'what will survive of us is love' that many readers refuse to accept is qualified and re-qualified until it is an ironic echo of an untruth.
Larkin didn't believe it, not on the evidence of that poem, but Frieda brings a generosity to art and life that puts the likes of Larkin and I to shame with our hard-won English self-deprecation. Let's have a holiday from that, a sabbatical, some respite, some letting of our hair down.
Get there if you can.
