A Delicate Life
Embroidery by John Craske
Julia Blackburn, intrigued by John Craske’s life and work, set out to discover more about them, but her research turned into a personal and expansive quest, a way of cherishing memories and connections. Threads - The Delicate Life of John Craske makes much of disappearance and absence: ’I cannot find what has been lost, no matter how often I search for it’, she writes; ‘all I can do is to hold a few facts and images in my mind’s eye and let myself drift in whatever direction I am taken. Maybe that is already a way of getting closer to my subject, because John Craske knew a lot about drifting and I need to keep alongside him’. At the centre of the book, he is not its circumference.
Born in 1881, in the town of Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast, John Craske went to sea at the age of 11, but as a young man he worked mainly in the fish shop where he and his wife, Laura, smoked haddock and herring. Craske was always delicate; in 1917 he made a third attempt to enlist in the army, but while training he became ill, no longer remembering his name or who he was. He just wanted to go home. Sent to an asylum, he was in due course collected by Laura, who signed a form taking responsibility for his welfare. Craske never fully recovered; from then until his death in 1943, he would fall in and out of what was described as a ‘stuporous state’. Sometimes he was so unwell that he was scarcely in touch with the world, although he would eat and drink; when was better he could talk and work with his hands. ‘Have I been away again?’ he once asked Laura after a prolonged spell of insensibility. No one knew the cause of his illness.
In about 1923, Craske began to make pictures of the sea and the coastline, painting on cardboard, wrapping paper, doors, mantelpieces, jugs, and crockery. He also made toy boats. Later, when he was not able to paint, he made embroideries while sitting upright in bed, supported by cushions. Their subjects are the same as those of his paintings – fishing boats tossed about in rough seas or beached on the shore, a lighthouse illuminating a ship in a storm, sailors being rescued by breeches buoy. Blackburn remarks that Craske’s tempestuous waves and listing boats seem to capture not only the precariousness of the sailor’s life but of human existence itself, rather like many of the scenes painted by Alfred Wallis, the Cornish fisherman-artist with whom he is often compared. In 1940, having heard news reports on the wireless about the evacuation of Dunkirk, Craske began his most ambitious work, a panel about ten feet long and two wide, now in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. It shows boats coming to the aid of soldiers on the beach, men wading out to the nearest of them, and aeroplanes dropping bombs into the sea, as well as explosions and smoke. It has a curious mood, as if Craske were watching from a distance, high up in the dunes, gazing at the turbulent scene with amazement and calm detachment. The piece was unfinished at his death, a large area of sky left unstitched.
Craske made paintings and embroidery without ambition; he cared little about whether or not they were well received and regarded. By chance, though, his work caught the eye of the poet Valentine Ackland, who introduced it to her lover, Dorothy Warren, who ran a gallery in London and gave Craske a show there, and to her life partner, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Ackland and Warner began to collect Craske paintings and embroideries, buying his work regularly, encouraging their friends to do so too. Warner was perhaps the most committed of all; eventually, determined that the work should be kept in East Anglia, she bequeathed most of it to the tenor Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten’s musical and personal partner. As a consequence, it now belongs to the Snape Maltings arts organisation in Suffolk.
Craske appears to have been self-taught as a painter, but it is possible that he was encouraged to take up embroidery in hospital or at the asylum, because after World War I it was often prescribed as occupational therapy for soldiers and others who were recovering from distress and trauma. Embroidery, a quiet, personal, and detached activity, was perhaps especially well suited to Craske’s states of half-consciousness, the dream-like condition in which he usually lived. Just as his engagement with the world faded, however, so did its memories of him; not deemed to be a particularly significant person, many of the details of Craske’s story, as well as his work, have been scattered and lost. ‘I didn’t know when I started this book and I still don’t know now, if John Craske was an important artist or an unimportant artist’, Blackburn writes. ‘I am not sure if it matters either way; his work made life meaningful for him and he went on doing it, almost to the moment of his death’. Besides, as the friend who first told her about Craske’s work once remarked, ‘I don’t think people take embroidery seriously, or at least they didn’t, especially not when it’s been done by men’.
For further exploration:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/13/life-on-rocks-john-craske-saved-by-sea
Music for Smalls Lighthouse, by Plinth: https://iamplinth.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-smalls-lighthouse
Embroidery by John Craske