Festival on the Wall
Fay Hutchcroft
If you could devote a room in your house to Fay Hutchcroft's paintings, you wouldn’t need to go to Glastonbury Festival. You’d be there. Which could save a lot of money in tickets...
Fay’s huge portraits of festival-goers with their wild variety of hair, body, and foot apparel conjure up the festival atmosphere in an extraordinary way. It’s not just the fabrics, rips in clothing and polished toenails that do it. Or even the security bands on the wrist, and the mini-programme in its plastic pouch hanging from the neck. It’s the body language. The way people stand, and the festival slouch. It’s the attitude.
People are there to enjoy themselves, and by heck that’s what they are going to do, whatever the weather, however much mud they have to wade through. They are dressed to be seen, and they relax. But there’s a kind of grittiness, and resignation that comes through between the smiles. A variety of facial expressions reserved for the festival. And they’re caught in the portraits.
Fay reckons you would simply not catch the same body expressiveness in people walking down the street, even in Glastonbury. Though she’d quite like to try it some time, she says. At the festival, she lures people up to her white canvas backdrop, where she photographs them. In 2004 it was part the Art Café project. Back at home she enlarges the black and white photographs to create life-size images. Then she gets out her paintbrush.
Somerset Art Weeks provided the first opportunity for a comprehensive showing of Fay’s work. Now Strode Theatre, which doubles as a local exhibition space, wants to exhibit all the paintings she has. It is a great way to view social history. Watch out Glastonbury Festival aficionados and potential investors in art as social history!
See also www.fayhutchcroft.co.uk