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Edna Lumb was once mistaken for a government inspector. She turned up
at a factory, ready to paint its machinery in action, and wondered why the
staff were so reticent.

There is normally quite a different reaction to this slight artist when
she arrives with a transit van full of easels and paints. She talks to the
workers about the machines they operate. ‘If the machines work, I want to
see them working.’ Even when she paints mills and factories that have long
since stopped work she is aware of the people who used to be there. ‘When
I go into an engine house that is derelict, it’s so still and quiet and
dead, but you can conjure up the activity, as you can when you go to Roman
remains. I was struck by this in the 1950s when I went to Maiden Castle
(an Iron Age fort) in Dorset – you can see how it really was.’

Lumb has an extraordinary ability to see past the grim clanking machinery
or the dereliction that others see, a skill demonstrated in her current
retrospective at the Science Museum in London. ‘For me, the elegant Victorian
interiors are rather like churches,’ she says. Her picture of the accumulator
house in Tower Bridge (1972) is dominated by a long flight of steps leading
up to three windowed galleries, and is strongly reminiscent of the interior
of a medieval cathedral. The works are sometimes brightly coloured, but
the darker ones, in deep browns and blues, also draw the eye.

The vantage points she chooses to work from often emphasise the symmetries
of large machinery in a very satisfying way. Lumb frequently includes the
ceiling or the top of a building, drawing the eye up from what it would
settle on naturally. ‘When people see the paintings, they begin to see the
attraction (of industry),’ she smiles. ‘They say, ‘I never thought of looking
at it like that’.’

Victorian buildings are not the only ones she paints. ‘I’m fascinated
by Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs,’ she says, referring to London’s latest
building developments. She painted the foundations of Canary Wharf in 1989,
and can now see the laser beams played on the completed tower from Blackheath,
near her home in southeast London. Four years ago she travelled to America
to paint for a fibre-optic cables manufacturer. She went into the ultra-clean,
dust-free rooms where the cables are assembled, dressed up in the all-enveloping
overalls required, with her paints and easel. ‘Anything could be interesting
in the right light, the right circumstances and the right time of your life.’

She works standing up at a wooden easel, often very close to the action.
The noises and smells are very important, whether it is the roar of a working
machine or the silence of an empty building. Sometimes she works in considerable
danger: ‘I was in a rope race shaft, behind the ropes, and someone told
me what happens when a rope breaks – the whiplash. It’s horrifying when
you think about it, but I feel I have to do it.’

Caroline Krzesinska, the senior keeper of arts and exhibitions for Bradford
City Council, assembled Lumb’s retrospective for its first showing at Bradford
Industrial Museum last year. ‘Edna is immensely important to us as a documenter
and recorder, because of the subject matter – the rapidly disappearing cotton
and wool industry,’ says Krzesinska. ‘Many of the mill interiors were just
being wiped away by the 1970s.’

Lumb has not studied mechanics or engineering formally. ‘It might have
killed the enthusiasm. I think I’d be quite afraid to learn about machines,
though I know about cars and car engines.’ In the late 1950s she bought
one of the first Lambretta scooters to be imported into Britain, and maintained
it herself. But Krzesinska tells a slightly different story about Lumb’s
knowledge. ‘Any topographer or photographer could do the job. The point
about Edna is that she’s an artist with tremendous technical understanding.
The accuracy (of the work) gives it a base authenticity with a sense of
illumination. I see her as breaking new ground.’

Lumb says that she has ‘not found anyone with the enthusiasm for nuts,
bolts and machinery that I have. I’m rather glad I have it.’ In the 1970s
and 1980s there were several projects to place artists in industry, and
some were very successful. But, says Krzesinska, ‘Edna pioneered this type
of work. She had been working on sites long before these arrangements.’
Industrial landscapes were once much more popular, according to Jane Garnett,
a fellow in history at Wadham College, Oxford. ‘A guidebook to Leeds in
the mid-19th century has an interesting engraving of warehouses, and discusses
where they could best be sketched from.’

But it is difficult to gauge Lumb’s standing in the fine art world.
‘Edna will say she suffers from a pigeonhole problem,’ says Krzesinska.
‘So far the people who have reviewed her work outside Bradford have been
sciency.’ When I was researching this article, I telephoned several national
art galleries to ask if they could recommend an industrial art historian
to place Lumb’s work in context, and no one knew anything about industrial
art.

Art has dominated Lumb’s life since childhood. She was born in 1931
and grew up in Leeds, which was then dominated by factories and mills. Her
parents were farmers and her mother’s father was a corn merchant. She is
the youngest of six children, following three girls and two boys. ‘There
was quite a gap between me and the next sister, and I liked the boys’ toys.
I didn’t like dolls, except a black one. My brothers had Meccano.’

Then, when she was eight, war broke out. ‘There were all these balsa
wood model aircraft, and I loved building them. And you could buy soldiers
and aircraft guns and trucks, so I did what they (my brothers) did.’ She
says this probably stimulated her interest in machines and industry.

Lumb’s formal training began with a junior art scholarship at 14, followed
by a senior scholarship, a four-year diploma and then a year of teacher
training. For 11 years she taught art in a secondary school, and in 1964
became a full-time artist. She retained her interest in industry throughout:
‘Quarries, slag heaps and pitheads brought a sparkle to my eye in my dreary
schoolteaching years.’

Until three years ago, she worked tremendously hard, not noticing the
passage of time, often working longer hours than the mechanics and frequently
at weekends too. The retrospective gives just a taste of her life’s work:
‘For every two or three of a series of paintings (on display) there will
be at least 20 or 30, sometimes 70. You can’t put all your life’s work on
»å¾±²õ±è±ô²¹²â.’

More recently, she has been forced to slow down. Breast cancer was diagnosed
in 1989. In 1990 it spread and is now terminal. This year she has been juggling
the opening of the exhibition, press interviews and further painting with
chemotherapy every three or four weeks. She has just two weeks each month
when she can work, because of the treatment. But when she describes the
illness, and the effect it has had on her working patterns, she is as frank
and unassuming as she is when talking about anything else.

The chemotherapy makes Lumb tired. It makes her eyes run, and she has
to cart huge amounts of tablets around with her. ‘As the cancer has spread
to my lungs, I’m chary of working in the places I used to work in, such
as Bean’s foundry (1980) and Helmshore waterwheel (1985) – it’s so damp.
I tend to think I can work the same, but I can’t’

Painting a series of viaducts is something Lumb wants to do soon. She
has already painted all the Thames bridges between Teddington and Tower
Bridge and some of the beautiful bridges of Bath, where she has a studio,
and York. She has five large sheets of paper waiting for viaducts. ‘I’ve
already started sketching in the North Country. Also I want to do Clifton
Suspension Bridge (Bristol) and the entrance to Box railway tunnel.’ The
entrance to the 3000-metre long tunnel is a huge black hole in the side
of a steep green hill, just outside Box in Wiltshire. It was built in 1841
by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 13 years after the great Victorian engineer
completed the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Lumb finds the scale of her subjects exciting. ‘I’m sometimes asked,
why not put the people in? But the people are so small.’ She has done portraits:
in 1969 she was commissioned to record an airlift of food into Biafra during
Nigeria’s civil war, and in 1976 she painted drought survivors and old people
at a home in Ouagadougou, in what is now Burkina Faso.

Her first trip abroad was on a travelling scholarship. ‘I chose France.
I’d never been abroad before and I went on my own at the age of 19.’ France
has since become her favourite country for painting. ‘I love Paris, the
chimney stacks and rooftops. And the way the colour changes as you go south
– it becomes more and more ochre. Because it’s such a big country you have
virtually every landscape.’

Lumb has said that when she tries painting roses, she finds herself
drawn towards the thorns rather than the blooms, but admits to painting
the pretty parts of France as well as the houses. ‘I do vineyards – the
pattern looks like velvet, and their scale is huge, as opposed to the little
²ú³Ü¾±±ô»å¾±²Ô²µ²õ.’

Of Britain, Lumb says that it is turning into a museum. ‘Ellenroad Mill
is a museum piece. The Helmshore waterwheel is still used to make materials
– to sell in the museum shop . . . We’ve destroyed a lot wilfully. It would
be difficult for artists now to paint the machines I painted, because so
many of them have gone.’

Edna Lumb: A Retrospective Exhibition is at the Science Museum, Exhibition
Road, London SW7 until 4 May. Entrance to the Picture Gallery is free.