When Pauline Caulfield graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968, her bold, brightly coloured, screenprinted panels were considered by some to be the strongest pieces in that year’s show. At that point, the textile artist’s name was still Pauline Jacobs but, one week after graduating, she married the artist Patrick Caulfield, seven years her senior. The two had met a few years earlier when he was her tutor at the Chelsea School of Art in London. “My fellow graduates were working out what they wanted to do and how they were going to afford to live,” she says. “And I was buying champagne and choosing a dress for the wedding.”
The marriage lasted a little over 20 years, during which time the couple had three sons and were at the centre of the glittering London art set. “John Hoyland was our close friend and neighbour,” she says. “We knew people like Peter Blake and David Hockney. I was overawed by all this greatness – I was happy not to have to put my head over the parapet. No one stopped me from making art, but I was busy raising the children – and that’s how it went on, for decades.”
Then Patrick left her for another artist, Janet Nathan, whom he would marry and remain with until his death in 2005. It was, Caulfield says, “a catalyst”. She had never entirely given up her craft and now she felt its pull. “I knew I wanted to go back to art,” she says – not full time, though, because she needed to earn money. So for 25 years, she combined art with working as a receptionist and then a librarian. And then, 10 years ago, she was made redundant: another catalyst. More than half a century after being one of the brightest stars of the Royal College of Art, Caulfield’s moment had come: she became a full-time artist. And this week, a show of her work opens at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.
Poignantly, eight of the pieces in the show are remakes from her original 1968 Royal College collection: pairs of screenprints including Airmail, edged with the trademark red and blue edging of an airmail missive; Bunting, a riot of turquoise spiked with cherry red; and Garden, grass-green bordered with flower-coloured blocks of orange, yellow and blue. “When I came back to it, I decided to remake everything from my graduation collection,” says Caulfield. “It felt like I was completing something I’d started years ago. I still loved the work.” Glance at her website and you’ll see why: those 1968 pieces are as breathtaking now as they were then. There is also a film about her latest piece, Noren Curtain, powder blue intersected with pink wavy lines.
Another work in the Edinburgh show is more curious: a priest’s chasuble, bright red with wavy blue lines, looking as much like a poncho as a religious vestment. Caulfield was raised Catholic – her parents were converts, friends of Evelyn Waugh in fact – and when she returned to her art, she made vestments for, among others, the Catholic bishop of Plymouth, Christopher Budd. As well as the red chasuble, Caulfield was very keen to borrow another, a stunning gold number, one of her favourite ever pieces of vestment art. But when she asked the diocesan offices in Plymouth if she could borrow it, word came back that it wouldn’t be possible: Budd had loved it so much that, when he died last year, he was buried in it.
Today, Caulfield is much in demand for her stunning wall hangings and statement curtains: when I visit her studio-cum-home in London, she shows me how she creates her pieces, spreading pigment on to giant pieces of canvas like icing on a cake. Strong colour is everywhere in this house where she lived with Patrick for so long, and where he created his art as well.
Caulfield seems way younger than her 80 years – which is good, she says, given that she’s still at the dawn of her career. Does she feel, as her reputation blooms late in the day, that she should have taken the initiative earlier and not left the stage to Patrick? “Absolutely not. I was the person who drove the car and organised the birthday parties and looked after the children, and I enjoyed all of that. I’m certainly very glad I had Patrick in my life. I wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise.”
All the same, she remembers during her schooldays setting down what she wanted to do with her life. “I wrote a big A then three possibilities: author, artist and actress.” While she didn’t write M for mother or W for wife, she enjoyed those roles. Now, in her ninth decade, she’s back to A for artist.
• Pauline Caulfield Textiles is at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 8 March to 20 July
