You can analyse International Workers' Day (or Labour Day) from different perspectives, and art is definitely one of them. Throughout the years and in different posts we looked at portrayals of workers by different artists. Such paintings often reveal us the conditions of the people portrayed, but can also be inspiring for the attire of workers. In some of the paintings forming Stanley Spencer's "Shipbuilding on the Clyde" series, for example, you may find very inspiring knitwear patterns and textile references.
Spencer was commissioned the paintings of workers at Lithgows's shipyard in Port Glasgow on the River Clyde by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC). Completed between January and March 1946 from a study made in May 1940, the series, now part of London's Imperial War Museum collection, also included the "Furnace" and "Riggers" paintings.
Spencer portrayed in the fomer a group of men pulling a red-hot steel section from the furnace in the background. The perforated floor where the "dogs" used as pins (on the left side of the painting) should be inserted to hold the template in position, is one of the many patterns in this painting. The other patterns can be spotted in the various jumpers the men are wearing: the painter expresses the individuality of the shipbuilders by potraying them wearing a variety of garments, from intarsia sweaters to sleeveless jumpers, some of them characterised by a colourful patchworked motif.
There are references to fabrics and textiles in the rigging loft painting as well, that was started in Autumn 1941 and finished in June 1944. The rigging loft was the area where ropes and canvases used in shipbuilding were prepared. In this canvas men and women can be seen rolling, hand and machine stitching large tarpaulins or coiling and tying ropes to required lengths, or hand-splicing ropes using long needles and a vice.
Heavy jute aprons appear in both the "Furnace" and the "Riggers": Spencer pays great attention to the materiality of the fabrics and textiles he uses and you can almost feel or imagine their coarse texture, their consistency and thickness. The artist depicts the various jumpers of the men in detail also in the "Riggers"; women wear instead more colourful attires including floral tops in pink and white, and the ones making tarpaulins seem to be almost engulfed in the textiles they are stitching.
For Spencer, depicting these moments meant also pondering about the sacredness of work. Portraying the workers in the rigging loft for the painter was indeed almost a religious experience. As he wrote in his diary: "I was as disinclined to disturb the atmosphere as I would a religious service, even more so as in the religious service it is prescribed that you should not do so, whereas here there seemed something in the very work itself that made me feel for the respect and peace."
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