Life through the kitchen window!

Glossop-based artist couple Ghislaine & Michael Howard have brought everyday life in the town centre onto the walls of the Indoor Market Hall.

Painter of everyday drama

Ghislaine, described as a painter of “powerful and expressive means”, is based in a converted former Tripe Works just yards from the Market. From her kitchen window she watches people crossing the car park and walking down the street, sketching the anonymous figures who later become the subjects of her paintings now on display inside the refurbished Indoor Market Hall.

The canvases show people walking, pushing open doors and carrying heavy bags all ordinary movements, but captured at what Ghislaine calls “unguarded moments”, when posture and gesture reveal mood, effort and emotion. “I’m really struck by just how people hold themselves somebody who looks tired or who’s carrying heavy shopping,” she explains.

Art rooted in shared experience

Ghislaine’s focus, she says, has always been “shared human experience” how we move, relate to one another and navigate both intimate and public spaces. Her subject matter often begins in her own life from her well-known works on pregnancy scenes in hospitals and depictions of older people and then extends outward into the wider community.

A pivotal moment came when, as a child, she saw a reproduction of a Van Gogh drawing of an old man with his head in his hands, an image that moved her to tears and convinced her that art could be “about feeling”. That early realisation still guides her “Whenever I showed a drawing… I’d say, ‘Has it got feeling?’” she recalls.

Images from the paintings on display at Glossop Indoor Market

From cathedrals to the market hall

Though the Glossop market paintings are small and immediate, they sit within a career that has taken Ghislaine’s work to major galleries and cathedral spaces. She first came to wide public attention with “A Shared Experience”, a groundbreaking exhibition on pregnancy and birth at Manchester City Art Gallery and has since created significant religious and socially engaged works including “The Empty Tomb” for Liverpool’s 2008 Capital of Culture celebrations and the touring cycle “The Stations of the Cross / The Captive Figure”.

Her 25-foot “Visitation Altarpiece” is permanently installed at Liverpool Hope University and she has worked on commissioned projects with organisations such as Amnesty International as well as with theatres, prisons and women’s refuges. In 2008 she was named a Woman of the Year for her contribution to art and society, underlining her national standing beyond Glossop.

Market hall becomes community gallery

For Ghislaine, showing work in her hometown carries a particular resonance. “To have the paintings on the wall in the place you live, among the community that you’re part of, is really special,” she says of the market hall display. The newly revitalised indoor market, which she describes as “fabulous” and “a focus now in Glossop”, has effectively become a public gallery where shoppers encounter art as part of their everyday routine.

The exhibition also anticipates the opening of a new upstairs gallery space, Four Corners Art, where Ghislaine is due to exhibit work soon. Just a couple of streets away sits her own studio gallery, housing many of the large-scale works that travel out for major exhibitions before returning to the town.

Inviting the viewer in

Ghislaine’s paintings invite viewers to place themselves inside the scene, much as many people do when looking at the industrial townscapes of L.S. Lowry, to whom she is often compared. “Paintings, you bring something to a painting,” she says. “A painting is there and you can inhabit it, but you need to give it time.”

In the Glossop Indoor Market Hall this summer, that invitation is extended to see their neighbours and perhaps themselves, reflected on the walls in the fleeting gestures of everyday life.

It’s a family affair

Ghislaine’s husband Michael Howard, who is also an Artist, distils the High Peak landscape into pocket-sized paintings, turning brief walks above Glossop into vivid studies of weather, memory and movement.

Michael met painter Ghislaine while studying fine art in the 1970s, later living in Paris, London and Newcastle before choosing to return to their native North West around 1980, she to Eccles and he to Liverpool. A proud Liverpudlian, Michael preferred northern skies to the allure of a permanent life in France and over time his work as an art historian and her painting career have “melded together” into a shared way of life.

His recent book, Being There, brings together poems and paintings that explore how people inhabit their environments, aiming to capture not just views but “the wind, the air, the smells, the looks, the movement and movement of the clouds.” Many of his small works have been produced in about ten minutes during dog walks from Rowarth Way to Kinder, each pause in the walk becoming a rapid encounter with the changing landscape.

Michael often draws with a fountain pen, embracing the fact that ink cannot be rubbed out and likening each drawing to “a letter to yourself, only it’s a drawing,” where commitment replaces second-guessing. The speed and decisiveness of his mark-making mirror the shifting clouds and sudden rain he works through, so that each piece records both the terrain and the moment in which it was seen.

He insists the work is a “family affair,” inseparable from Ghislaine and their long partnership that began in an art school studio and continues in their shared creative life today. A selection of Michael Howard’s swift, lyrical paintings and drawings can currently be seen at Glossop’s indoor market in the Market Hall, offering locals a chance to slip a fragment of their surrounding hills into a pocket.

The paintings from Ghislaine & Michael can be seen on the walls inside Glossop Indoor Market.

Community Reporter Mark Andrews talks to Ghislaine Howard.

.Community Reporter Mark Andrews talks to Michael Howard.