Eternity in a Mile End Bus Stop:The Paintings of Doreen Fletcher.

"I am an artist interested in the pockets of life that others ignore".

Bus Stop, Mile End (1983)

Doreen Fletcher's 1983 painting of a bus stop in Mile End is, like much of her work, a wonderful thing to look at. Fletcher sees beauty where others may see pretty much nothing at all. She finds it in the street architecture of bus shelters, signage, and garage forecourts but she also finds it in the unexpected intrusion of nature into the fabric of the city and in the way light and shade play off on each other to create feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, or melancholia. I'd call her the Carvaggio of Canary Wharf but only because I enjoy alliteration and that's the nearest London area beginning with C that I can find to Mile End.

Fletcher moved to the East End from Staffordshire in 1983 and spent the next twenty years painting what she saw around her. It was the time of the YBAs, conceptual art, and Saatchi's slightly odd positioning of tastemaker so, of course, Fletcher's work didn't really get a look in.  

To the extent that I'd never heard of her so I was grateful when my friend Jack invited me along to see a retrospective of her work in the rather wonderful Bow Arts Centre (a new gallery to me), a converted nunnery that's as much social space as art space, coffee and cakes were available.

London at Work (1989)

After the Hurricane (1987)

It was the right place for the exhibition too, what with so much of Fletcher's work being set locally. Some I could recognise without the titles, others were trickier. 1987's After the Hurricane (thirty-two years ago, really?) looks like the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to me and, obviously, Canary Wharf at Twilight from five years later is instantly recognisable. It dates from before the Shard, before the Gherkin, before the Walkie-Talkie. Before London became a high rise city. It reminded of the time when the Canary Wharf tower was one of the most exciting things to pick out on the skyline.

But Fletcher's work is not so much about large imposing architecture but everyday experiences. Canary Wharf, if you live in the East End, is still part of your everyday experience and so may be the Greenwich Foot Tunnel or that bus stop in Mile End. But what raises these works above others is the loving detail. From a distance they almost look like photographs though, up close, it's pretty obvious they're not. They're almost too real and, somehow, perhaps because most of them were painted thirty or so years ago, they evoked in me a feeling of nostalgia, of time passed, of time lost even. Much as I loved them, they made me feel a bit sad.

Canary Wharf at Twilight (1992)

St George's in the East (1991)

While it was good to spot old friends like St George's in the East (I recently curated and narrated a guided Hawksmoor walk that took this beauty in) it was the depictions of buildings like Rene's Cafe and the Terminus Restaurant that reminded me of my first trips to London without my parents, with friends like Pat Still (using a family railcard!) or on my own to buy clothes and records. These are just the kind of cafes we'd stop in for chips'n'beans and a can of Coke and though a few remain, not least in London's outer boroughs, they're now thin on the ground, possibly non-existent, in places like Soho and Camden.

Rene's Cafe (1986)

Terminus Restaurant (1985)

Limehouse Library (1988)

It's saying something when a painting of a sign outside of an Esso garage in Limehouse can transport me right back to the eighties. I almost wanted to pop in for a can of Quatro, a Curly Wurly, and a packet of Love Hearts (which still taste great, btw).

The Albion reminded me of wandering round trading estates in Bethnal Green trying to find little galleries in converted warehouses. I love that you can see the top of a train passing over in the background. It gives a sense of both the commotion and confusion of London and how, sometimes, even in the middle of it, one can find a kind of pleasant solitude. Alone in the eye of storm and strangely comfortable with it.

The Albion (1992)

Salmon Lane in the Rain (1987)

The reflective rain on Salmon Lane, the shadows cast by a railway arch, the turrets and towers poking out from behind walls, a tree and a pub reflected in the canal, a gasholder, these are things very familiar to all Londoners. Things, if we're not careful, we start to take for granted. By making these her source material, Doreen Fletcher is helping us to see them with new eyes.

Under the Railway Arch (1988)

Twilight, Mile End Park (1983)

Mile End Park with Canal (1986)

Foot Tunnel, North Woolwich (2017)

When you leave an exhibition like this, you start looking at your surroundings differently. More critically but also more appreciately. As if you've gained some kind of new awareness. For me, Fletcher's newer works (North Woolwich Foot Tunnel, Plaistow tube station) don't quite work as well but I reckon if I was to look at them again in thirty years (yeah, like I'll live that long) they'd have a very similar effect now to that Mile End bus stop. 

There are things in them that, now, look too contemporary. Things I'd probably avoid if taking a photograph. Fletcher's great gift appears to be see what the past will look like but in the now. It's a shame it took decades for other people to come round to realising this. I certainly wish I'd been aware of her work sooner.

Winter Sunday Afternoon, Plaistow (2019)

Carwash, Salmon Lane (2017)

Dental Surgery, Forest Gate (2018)

Metalworks, Chaseley Street (2017)

House, Whitfield Avenue (1977)

One work that just gets better each time I look at it is 1977's House, Whitfield Avenue. A seemingly ordinary, to the point of banal, abode in a suburban looking part of, I presume (no further details are given), London. Set just off-centre, it's something you'd rush past and barely notice even though it looks like somewhere your friends' parents may live.

But in capturing the extraordinary within the ordinary, the beauty within the plain, the easiness of unease, and the uneasiness of ease, Doreen Fletcher has proved herself not to be merely a technically skilled painter but an emotive alchemist too. If William Blake can see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour then why shouldn't Fletcher, and myself, see it in a painting of bus stop outside a vernacular blue building in Mile End?

The Beckton Fox (2019)

Thanks to Jack, Mat, and Katie for a lovely afternoon fuelled by tea, vegan burgers, hilarious chat, and, of course, some really rather lovely art. Mine's a 99.

Ice Cream Van, Salmon Lane (1998)