While at Chuggaton, although relatively isolated in comparison to London, Marr continued to actively develop his artistic practice. He attended life drawing classes at Barnstaple and Bideford and experimented with modelled and direct carved sculpture. He also led his own art classes at Barnstaple Polytechnic, and even took seriously to pottery, setting up his own wheel and kiln. Despite the various tangents that Marr explored, during these years his painting still constituted the foundation of his career. Yearly exhibitions with the London Group and the National Society continued, although he held his distance from their organisation. Major shows in Belfast, Bristol and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle in 1964 and 1965 served to build Marr’s reputation through this vital decade in his life. Flowers in a Jug speaks of the eclectic experiences of Marr’s life at Chuggaton. When compared to his earlier still life [cat. 24], it shows a reduced depth of field, no table or context is indicated. All our attention is directed towards the vertical momentum of the blooms, and rather their stems, in streaks of green-yellow and blue-grey. The rapidity of these marks ought not to be taken for granted. Colour is sustained unbroken along the strokes. Each carries with it a purposiveness unbound by a destination for resolution or consummation: flower heads burst into life regardless of where stems may relate, and vice versa. Technically, this effect was reliant upon Marr’s preparation of his canvas and appreciation of the materiality of his medium. Recalling how he learnt from Bomberg the importance of priming his canvas while in Cyprus, so that a loaded brush would carry across it, Marr also remembered how Soutine once said, ‘I like to paint on something smooth. I like my brush to slide’. Both these figures are present in Marr’s work, particularly in the steep downward perspective he assumes in front of the flowers, as if in a cramped space like Bomberg’s wartime studio [cat. 9]. However, this work ultimately illustrates Marr’s total submission to his subject that allowed him to escape the shadow of these two titanic predecessors. Increasingly, he began to embrace the notion of accident, divesting himself of responsibility for the nature of the work produced. He entered into a state of extreme sensitivity and receptivity before the motif. Flowers in a Jugs is, perhaps, the clearest illustration of this working practice, which institutes Marr’s alternate interpretation of ‘the spirit in the mass’. In order to discover what he and his teacher considered the purpose of their work, as Marr said recently, ‘I just have to work and see what happens’.