From the Garden to the Page

Pauline Webber’s pastel flowers on paper are so vivid that they look as if you could reach into the picture, pluck one out and bring it home to put in your own vase.

Drawings of tulips, lilies, gerberas, and other dramatic varieties line the walls of her attic studio in the Swampscott home she shares with her husband, and their cat, Bosho.

The pictures capture a natural air, how the flowers fall, how they are arranged, yet with a fresh perspective. One drawing wraps a corner. In another the flowers to one side are in black and white; Webber had left to attend to something else and when she resumed the drawing the flowers had died. So, although she never formally finished the picture it works the way it is, unfinished.

This sense of ease does not come easily. She says, “I find it’s quite hard,” adding that “sometimes you look at something and you don’t really look.” In her attempt to capture what she sees, “drawing’s really important.” She “starts by studying things and … looking at things,” taking steps back every now and then, sometimes taking photographs along the way to judge her progress.

“You keep at it until you find it works or it doesn’t.”

Webber likes “drawing from life,” adding that the more she looks, the more she “starts to understand things.”

From England, Webber moved to the United States 5 years ago and to Swampscott 3 years ago with her husband, who is the curator of Japanese art and screens at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and an expert on Japanese works on paper.

Webber herself is a paper conservator by profession, with a distinguished education and work history. Posters, lithographs and even wallpaper come into her purviews.

After receiving a Masters in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art, she landed in the conservation department at the renowned Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as an apprentice. She eventually became the Head of Paper Conservation, a post she held for 11 years, and was then the head of Paper, Books and Paintings for 3 years. In addition, her own work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the ICA Galleries in London and the Beaux Art in Paris.

When Webber first arrived in the States visa issues kept her from being employed. She refocused on her own art, which fills her home. She also volunteered at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, in their conservation department.

Now, her papers in order, she works on a freelance basis doing paper restoration projects; she spent 6 months restoring and readying for exhibit at the Peabody Essex a Chinese wall paper she had first seen while working at the Victoria and Albert in London. She says of paper conservation, “It’s my profession and I love doing it.”

She acknowledges that her current work on paper and the intensity with which she immerses herself into the images are not an abrupt departure from her paper conservation work, which involves prolonged attention to detail and the appreciation of different kinds of paper.

Locally, her pastel flowers can be found in the Gaga Gallery, at 459 Humphrey Street, where her show of pastel fish was a big hit last year.