Mew Gallery: Wedding Breakfast




		This photograph is about time - the passing of time; the stillness of a precious moment in the lives of two people, my parents, at the threshold of their lives together. It is about a day in July 1921 set aside for their marriage in Wick, the grey town in the north of Scotland. Now that they are both dead and this theme in my work is well established, I take a long look in order to find the reason for its appearance.

"Wedding Breakfast" first appeared in 1970, again in 1979, re-appearing in 1992. These intervals in themselves become a source of mystery. George Scott Moncrieff said in a review in the Times Educational Supplement of 6th May 1972:- "Thora Clyne's 'Wedding Breakfast' is anticipatory: no guests have yet arrived, yet her canvas breathes a delightful quality of airiness and imminent excitement."



"Wedding Breakfast" on Watford watercolour paper (22"x 30") unframed £650		"Wedding Breakfast" Oil on canvas (22"x 30") frame brown and gold £750

This pause, this moment of punctuation in a summer's day, is an invocation of the future and an evocation of the past. It is about the generation to come and presents a bitter-sweet memento to myself, the contemplator of an occasion I was not a part of. It generates wistful thoughts of the parents whose beginnings together I never knew - for myself, the late child, it is about the beginning of which I have lived to see the ending.

My grandfather David Laing, an amateur photographer, took a photograph in the dining room of the Station Hotel before the guests arrived. Himself the owner of a small hotel at Mey, he was no doubt appreciative of the atmosphere created for the bridal couple as well as wishing to make sure all was well with his camera before taking the wedding pictures.

I am drawn into this room again and again, with its unfathomable perspective dissolving in pale soft light. I find it to be a source of infinite expression. I can visualise what is beyond and outside the windows, the riverside and the distant green fields, so well that it becomes part of me and of my own myth.

I discovered the grey and white enlargement in the store-room along with many items from the past. My parents' move from farmhouse to retirement further down the coast deprived me of much. The hoarded attics were left behind. Now several lives and moves later, I hold on thankfully to all that remains:- a wax flower, a satin bow, a menu card and the softly focused photograph, copied and enlarged and brought to new life.

Strangely, this photograph, although unimportant to me for almost thirty years, was kept and never discarded. Like a good investment, it was quietly waiting for the time when I would recognise its worth. I can only say, something connects when I paint this theme - perhaps a link with my grandfather, himself a Sunday painter and participating in his own ethereal way.



Above picture available as folded card with envelope (5"x 7") £1. 20		Above picture available as Lithograph (12"x18") framed £140 unframed £100