Paul Millichip

There is one letter from Paul Millichip to Ruth Borchard, dated '29th May 1960', sent from West Hampstead, London NW6, in which he writes: 'I am sending you under separate cover, the self portrait which you asked me to paint, for £20, when I addressed the Redhill Art Society on the 4th  of March. I do hope you like the picture which is, I think, in line with my other works.' In her notebook, Ruth wrote 'Ldn Gr' [the London Group with which he exhibited yearly from 1954 to 1959] by his name.

Dated 1960, this self-portrait is a record of the artist - who was born in Harrow, Middlesex in 1929 - aged around thirty-one. The chunkily impastoed, predominantly cream palette with structure and accents made up of greens and yellows, exudes, curiously, a delicate, translucent air, like watercolour. The face itself appears on the verge of dissolution - its features conjured up by sparse 'washes' of oil, soft-edged pools of pale colour.

The painting's unaffected naturalness - and the figuration of the artist as a tranquil, open-spirited young man of nature, almost literally a Green Man, at once gentle yet also resolutely upfront in poise - is heightened by the 'natural' attendant colours - redolent of earth, sand and vegetation - washing over chalky white, the pristine background to it all.

The composition is unusual in that the head and neck of the artist are not placed just off-centre, as it the case with so many self-portrayals, but radically to the right of the picture. The left-hand side of the picture is left almost empty with some abstract washes and stains of yellow and green, endowing the picture with a resonant breathing space, an airiness of light and spirit which takes up quite half of the painting. In this context, the artist's surname and the date ('Millichip '60') written in black script in the bottom left hand corner takes on a strong, self-identifying role here, playing a signal note in helping balance out the overall composition.

In 1960 a photograph, showing Paul Millichip and family, was taken by the mainly London-based (after 1945), Russian-born photographer of Armenian heritage, Ida Kar (1908-1974)  - who also in 1960 became the first photographer to have a retrospective exhibition at a major London art gallery (the Whitechapel Art Gallery), which displayed her hauntingly pensive photos of the post-war creative avant-garde, including artists such as Picasso, Braque, Moore, Severini, Paul Nash, F.N. Souza (q.v.) and Bridget Riley, and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S. Eliot, Iris Murdoch and Eugene Ionesco.

In 1999, Kar's photo of the young Millichip family was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery for their Photographs Collection. The relevant NPG archival note records that this photo - which charmingly evokes the artist's family life and his dynamic creativity in one finely choreographed image - 'was taken just outside his studio room at his West Hampstead flat before a solo show in 1960 at Gallery One. The works seen were all in the exhibition and were concerned with figures in movement, both singly and in groups. Millichip, whom Kar photographed with his first wife, the painter Felicity Evershed [they married in 1955], and children Diana and Robin with pet cat Mr Greibson, remembers: “Ida Kar was an Armenian of very positive temperament and outlook - fiercely aware of her abilities and talent.”' 

There is another, slightly earlier photograph of the artist in his studio - looking boyishly serious, with fair, crewcut hair and a handsome profile - and an illustration of his painting Girl on a Swing, accompanying an extensive article on him, by Philip Gibbons, in Art News and Review (10th October 1959).

At an exhibition, 'The Metropolitan Scene' at Gallery One, London in 1957, Millichip showed other paintings, such as Children in a Doorway and Boys on Scooters, in which human figures are abstracted against blocks of near-white paint. These elongated figures, with spiky limbs, stylistically resemble 1950s British figurative sculpture by Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler. Ruth Borchard kept a catalogue for Millichip's 1961 exhibition at Gallery One, with its cover illustration of a painting of children, who, dancing in a circle, evoke the gawky grace of childhood. His medium then was mainly oil paint with sand on board (In his 1960s self-portrait, embedded grains of sand are seen to flicker all over the canvas surface).

In a letter to the author (October 2001), Millichip recalls Victor Musgrave, the Director of Gallery One and also the founder of a remarkable collection of (mostly modern British) visionary and Outsider art:

       Victor Musgrave ploughed a rather lonely furrow, both as a dealer and gallery owner during the 50s and the early 60s. He started a small gallery in Lichfield Street in the 50s and as a penniless poet, he just about made ends meet and showed the most avant-garde work in the U.K., a policy which continued until he shut up shop after about ten years. He pioneered the showing of artists from Britain and abroad who were 'cutting edge' at the time but are now considered mainstream. No other gallery did this.

After a spell in Soho, D'Arblay Street, he found a backer and moved to more salubrious quarters in North Audley Street. At all these venues he pioneered shows of surrealism, kinetics, conceptual art, 'Other [or Outsider] Art', etc., and was the first to show Yves Klein, Bridget Riley, Enrico Baj, Francis Souza (q.v.) and many others.

In 1947, Millichip enlisted with the R.A.F. for his National Service, but was invalided out the following year. He studied at Leeds College of Art from 1948-50, where his teachers included the Professor of Painting there, Maurice de Sausmarez (1915-1969); in late 2015/early 2016, 'Maurice de Sausmarez 1915-1969: A Centenary Exhibition', a visual exploration of the work of this pioneering educator and influential artist (later Principal at Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, London from 1962 to 1969) was held at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (part of Leeds University Library Galleries). At Leeds College of Art, Millichip was awarded a travelling scholarship, and visited France. But, as Philip Gibbons noted in Art News and Review: 'On returning home he contracted pneumonia. This led to an affection [sic] of the lung, and the result was a spell of nearly two years in a Yorkshire sanatorium. At the time, illness seemed a cruel check to his career, but looking back on the experience the artist recognises the value of a period of withdrawal and the opportunity it gave for reading and reflection.'

From 1952-54, he studied at Brighton College of Art, where he was taught, notably, by George Hooper (q.v.), whom Millichip says 'was easily the most sympathetic tutor at the college - the rest were boring old R.A.s. He also took the trouble to befriend and help his students. Where George was lively and 'expressionist' in approach, Maurice de Sausmarez, who had taught me at Leeds, was precise and careful in his attitude to observation from nature. He was assisted by Tom Watt, a strong Scottish colourist. All these painters must have influenced me at the time.'

It was at Brighton that beaches, wrote Gibbons, were 'the first subject to obsess his imagination [...] He was intrigued by the relationship of human figures to the larger areas of space enclosed by the piers or breakwaters behind them.' In 1954, Millichip was appointed a teacher at Great Yarmouth School of Art; his subject became, as Gibbons noted, 'figures in action [against] the flat and desolate landscape of Norfolk around him'.

For over forty years, he has lived and worked in Buckinghamshire, setting up with his second wife, the painter Shirley Bradford, what has proved to be a successful painting centre in a seventeenth-century tithe barn in the market town of Winslow. His two books, The Travelling Painter (1990) and Painting Light and Shade (1994) - both published by B.T. Batsford, London - explore aspects of painting at home and abroad in widely varying conditions. Working mostly in recent years in watercolour with collage and crayon, he paints from sketches he makes on trips abroad to countries such as India, Morocco and Greece.

Another self-portrait, painted just a few years ago, shows the artist in a green jacket with red and blue sleeves, set against a brilliant, abstracted yellow backdrop, with greenish-brown stripes. Clearly more naturalistic than the 1960 picture of himself, it is still as fresh and sensitive. He wrote in 2001: 'Painting portraits is a very occasional activity for me and painting a self-portrait would probably imply that I've nothing better to do with my time!'

In his recent work, predominantly made using watercolour and collage, he says: 'My main concern is with expressing ideas through pictorial dynamics, with figures in rooms and landscape as two main themes.' In Epiphanic Room (2000), he depicts a naked man (whose head is not visible) set in the corner of a bare room. His body is conjured up with a delicate calligraphic line, with spare, pale watercolour washes. Above his 'invisible' head is a raging expanse of purple and black wash. In more recent watercolour-and-paper-collage landscapes, the sweeping, molten colour blocks are curiously reminiscent of the coalescing forms in his early, much paler paintings, whose medium was oil-and-sand.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004