Eastern Daily Press August 1st 1998. The Magazine (p 6-8) Cover story

Champion of real artistic talent.

For two decades, an old caravan standing within a few hundred yards of
the Norfolk shore has been a showcase for painters of exceptional
promise and talent. No less remarkable is the galleries redoubtable
owner, I M Birtwistle.  COLIN CHINERY has taken the road to Burnham
Deepdale. Photography GRAHAM CORNEY. 

That first exhilaration of marsh and dune slips away as you drop down
the coast road into Burnhan Deepdale. And suddenly, it is on your
right; a small weathered off- cream caravan that might have been
beached into retirement after distributing teas and Cromer crabs in a
Norfolk layby. 

Slumbering it is not. For this is the home of Deepdale Exhibitions, no
stock tourist gallery trading water colours of Morston or the windmill
at the nearby Overy Staithe, but for twenty years and outstanding
exponent of original talent.

A brisk notice discourages with regret, the patronage of anyone
suffering from a heavy cold; another berates the tiresome impediments
officialdom places in the path of small scale entrepreneurship. This
is a conviction gallery.

Suitably clear-headed, we enter the caravan and the remarkable
paintings that make up the world of I M Birtwistle.

Mrs Birtwistle, who like PD James and C V Wedgewood, whom she knew,
eschews the use of the Christian name, is the founder and presiding
spirit of Burnham Deepdale Exhibitions. For 40 years she has exercised
a fine connoisseurship on behave of the public and the young and
exceptional talent she nurtures and champions with tireless spirit and
the staunchest loyalty.

IMB lives on the other side of the road from the caravan in a
converted public house. She is 80 now, a slight figure of still
compelling vitality, humour and lightening mind, discreetly attended
by two live-in helpers.

After running galleries in Suffolk, this poet and former professional
photographer came here towards the end of the seventies, caravan in
tow, and launched into Deepdale Exhibitions.  Her philosophy is
undeviating; to show paintings that she would like to buy herself  -
typically, colorful and textured, with a bias towards impressionism
and abstraction. "I have always wanted to show the excitement of paint
when in the hands of outstandingly gifted painters."

Of the familiar run of tourist belt galleries, IMB is
characteristically forthright. "I admire enormously the people who
paint, but I have to say that a number of galleries are cowpats, in as
much as when you walk in you wish you hadn't."

She is amazed by painters "happy to churn out year after year
platitudes and cliches which result in a kind of 'Paintak' in the same
way piped music is stultifying 'Musak," and contrasts such
presumptuousness with sterner self-discipline of musicians.

"Before you are able to sell you should have put in years of dedicated
work. If you think about selling, you are finished. That is death, and
this is why you have to have the standards that you have.

"It wouldn't be tolerated if that was someone playing the piano. They
would not dream of going off and giving a concert." One speculated on
how conventional tourist gallery owners regarded her. "Oh I should
think they loathe me!"

Her first gallery was at Walberswick, in the village WI hall. Living
near London at the time, she had seen a Wilson Steer painting in the
Tate of boys fishing from the village bridge. Attracted, she bought a
house there in 1956.

Someone had written that she arrived determined to wrest the local
artistry from dilettantism. "Oh absolutely, sitting by the edge of the
road with their easels, hoping that everybody would look at them while
they were painting their gatly paintings. I though 'this is too bad,
we must get Walberswick to what it used to be; a center of good art.

Mary Potter and Jeffery Camp were among established artists living
close by, and - "terribly supportive" - they would drive over to IMB
and her exhibitions in the hut. Shortly after she set up a gallery in
her garden. "I suppose at the time we were practically the only
professional gallery outside London. People like Mary Potter were well
known in London, but they were terribly humble and sweet. I've always
founf that; the greater the person, the bigger their humility. If they
are not, watch it!"

From the start, IMB typically disdained the Olympian detachment of the
archetypal; dealer. Instead she would go to a studio and choose what
she wanted to exhibit.

Mary Poter was an exception. " She used to bring her stuff over and
fling it down  over my raspberry canes and said that if there was
anything I liked, I was to show it. She never had any side at all."

As David Lee noted in the magazine Art Review, IMB is one of those
enthusiastic gallery directors who has down immeasurably more for the
promotion of young talent than numerous metropolitan fat cat "names."

"I am proud of all the people that I sell. I find it a
privilege to handle this sort of talent, to share this work with
people and introduce them to it. Everyday is fantastic." 

Many of her customers are second home professional people, but Arts
Council and East Anglian Tourist Board are assuredly not among her
visitors, a point of scorn for IMB.

"We are the gallery that dares to handle up and coming painters, and
actually sells them because very few people manage to get the sort of
response we get here; people from the City of London and abroad, who
'rise to the amazing standard' - to quote them - that they find here.
"

It seems extraordinary that they can recognize us, and yet we get a
total brush-off from the Arts Council. They are totally bored, and put
there money on wild and weird things or on established people who
don't need their help. As for the East Anglian Tourist Board, they are
bored to death almost to the point of rudeness."

Among the talents who flourish despite this stated-aided indifference,
such as Petrina Ferry, Judith Foster, Margaret Matthews, Tim Mathews,
and Phil Tyler, David Greenall is perhaps her chief protégé. A former
Hull "decky-learner", Greenall took up painting in his spare time when
he was 28. The one day, in 1982, he walked into IBM's gallery, a
chance meeting from which has grown a close and successful
collaboration.

Recognising his talent immediately, IMB persuaded him to go to art
school- although he was now 34 - and after a foundation course at
Norwich, Greenall spent three years at Winchester.

Now living on the Isle of Lewis, Greenall's career has been a triumph
of one man's talent and application, and one woman's perception and
faith.

"Actually we are not a business. We are an exuberance and an
excitement. I don't believe in money. If you think about money you are
never going to succeed. If you think about the excitement of what you
do, then eventually the money will come. And it has, thank God, and so
I have been able to keep a lot of painters off the dole and show them,
and it's been a great thrill and a joy."

On this cool, slate-hung summer morning, we are sitting in IMB's
study, a log fire, a few paintings, zsome witty, intimate bronzes by
Rod Stracey - another late-flowering notable she encouraged - the
walls loaded to the ceiling with books.

But these past 15 years they have lain unread, for, since the age of
49 IMB has had failing eyesight. Two years ago she became completely
blind. "I'd rather have lost my legs than sight. I feel I could be
pretty nifty in a wheelchair, which would be more dignified than being
a shambling old bat.

"Of course the agony of blindness us the total lack of privacy. There
is absolutely no area of one's life that is not exposed. When you hang
up your car keys you know that your life instead of being a wonderful
telescope going out, the telescope has come right in and you become
inches rather than vistas.

"I don't believe in all this hearty false heroism of 'isn't it
marvelous to be blind' or whatever. Accept what it is, understand it,
and then get on with it. Maximise your potential with in the context
of whatever disability you have, but don't pretend it's a jolly great
garden party because it isn't."

Struck by this devastating fate, how does she communicate with the
geography and quality of a painting?

I can hear, feel, sense a painting, but I can't be asked about it. I
have to let it work within its own time. Suddenly I can hear a
painting on the wall, and say 'My God that's a stunner, what's that
painting over there?" And it's always the best one. Isn't that
astonishing? It is nothing to do with me, it's one of those freak
gifts.'

In the old days going to a junk shop, she would suddenly feel her
antennae rising. "I'd say 'ah, in that corner there's something
magical!' and I would find some wonderful old painting, some marvelous
print, something quite exceptional."

IMB attributes this to an extra-sensory perception. Driving ambulances
in Kent during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, she called one
night at a country club for supper.

"I was desperately hungry but I couldn't get out. I was immobile.
There was this barrier."

She learned later that the satanist Alistair Crowley was inside at the
time holding a black magic and devil-worshipping "mass". "that sort of
thing has happened to me lots of times."

The war time ambulance was two steps removed from her life in the
Lancashire countryside of the 1030s. The Birtwistles were a very old
Red Rose family, and social life was basically hunting, lots of
parties, swimming in private pools, marvelous picnics, glorious
skating parties, tremendous dances and balls."

But in 1937, and against a parental opinion which roundly favoured
home and hounds, she enrolled in the legendary Reimann School of Art.

"It was way ahead of other art schools. I was going to be a designer.
I really never found I had anything to say in paint eventually. I had
things to say as a poet, but nothing to say as a painter, but I have
always been obsessed by painting."

The Reimann had moved to London from Germany following its closure by
Hitler, but, for all its prestige, it was to be a short exile, and
folded in late 1938.

"London fell apart after Munich," recalled IMB. "There was the most
terrible feeling. Everybody felt doomed and London was covered in a
sort of cloak of horror. Everybody knew that something terrible was
going to happen."

IMB went home the next year to celebrate her 21st birthday, a Union
Jack flown from the roof. "Summer had come and gone, and as soon as
war was declared we thought 'My God, we must get that flag in!' So I
went up to the roof, and I remember lying on the tiles and thinking,
it's never, ever, going to be the same again."

Returning South she worked unpaid in the Catholic Soldiers Club in
Aldershot, then  joined the mechanised transport corp - "known rather
rudely as the Mechanised Tarts Corps" (the Ritz or the Berkeley Grill
having doubled up as its unofficial headquarters) - and posted to a
Manchester garage.

"We weren't allowed to get dirty. We were woman and they thought we
weren't the same as they were. In desperation, I shoved my arms right
into a tank of oil and said, 'Now will you let me?' Then we got down
to it."

Later, driving ambulances in Kent, she stopped one night in Tunbridge
Wells to read a road map  illuminated by a sky reflecting the fires
burning in a blitzed London.

Driving for the US Army in Cambridge, her passengers included Generals
Patton and Bradley., her dancing partners, Clark Gable. "It wasn't a
great thrill, I might tell you. He was a crashing bore, terribly
pleased with himself."

In the Mandrake Club in London she drank with Dylan Thomas, "drunk of
course. I admire his poetry and think he is terribly underestimated."

IMB's famous passion for encouraging and communicating excellence in
the arts emerged later in the war after she had gained a commission in
the Wrens. (In 1995, she returned her war medals to Downing Street in
protest at the introduction of means testing for home care services
for war veterans and pensioners)

She opened an arts center and studio for those "who might not
otherwise have had a chance. I wanted to guide my Wrens to an
understanding of art, to open their eyes to all these great things and
give them the sun. You know if people are given half a chance to see
the sun they will rise to it".

There were lessons in drawing and painting, on history, literature,
the ballet. Exhibitions were staged, and twice a week IMB gave
gramophone recitals. A number of girls went on to Oxford and
Cambridge.

Poetry is a passion and an exceptional talent, and between the ages of
28 and 35 her work, acute, often haunting, and with a lyricism
untouched by the merest sentimentality, with published in a large
number of leading journals, including the times literary supplement,
New English Weekly (edited by T S Elliot), The Spectator, Tribune
(edited by Alan Ross) and Poetry Review, edited by Muriel Spark, a
close friend.

During a three months hitch-hiking holiday in Spain in 1951, she
arrived in Majorca, and heard that Robert Graves had read her poetry
and wanted to meet her. She spent three weeks in and out of his house.
"I was fascinated by him. It was like being caught up in an electric
storm."


One suspects that for IMB the brilliance of the Graves milieu palled
before a certain paganism, especially uncongenial for one whose
Catholicism forms the basis of her life. " The fact that I'm a rotten
ambassador for what I believe in is neither here nor there. One tries.
One falls."

She recalls scrabbling up the mountainside at Medjugorje, the Balkan
village where, as millions believe the Virgin Mary has been appearing
daily to six people since 1981.

She was accompanied by Damien, one of her three "splendid" sons who
recently gave her a large and joyous family party. (there are four
greatly-loved grandchildren). Suddenly "there was a kind of peace
which made me realise for the first time that eternity would never be
boring.

"I used to think, 'oh gosh, imagine singing for ever' or whatever we
are going to do in heaven?' But it was so wonderful to be held., to be
contained in this incredible, unbelievable peace. And one knew
irrevocably, without any doubt that Heaven IS, that there is no doubt
about heaven. There is this other country beyond this one, and this
has made it possible  by the grace of God, to be blind and not go
mad."

Once during the war she had driving Alexander Fleming to a high level
meeting, after stopping for coffee she had been "stupid enough" to ask
the great man how he had come to discover penicillin.

"He said it was in the details that the others had overlooked. And I
like to think that detail and never taking 'No' for an answer are the
reasons for the gallery's success."

And so, in part, it might be said, for IMB's other personal triumphs.
"Being blind and living in q terrifying vacuum, I have taken great
comfort in this quote from Shakespeare, when Desdemona tries to
explain her love for Othello to her father , and says, 'I see his
visage in his mind.' Isn't that stunning, beautiful? And I live on
that."
Burnham Deepdale Exhibitions.  Telephone 01485 210781