Visual, Physical, Spatial - The Work of Robin Greenwood

'Truth and knowledge… arise out of observation and experience rather than manipulation of accepted or given ideas.’ John Locke (Philosopher of the Enlightenment)

The National Curriculum was implemented in 1988-89 by Kenneth Baker during Margaret Thatcher’s free-market-ideological government.

Michael Gove and Nick Gibb (Ministers for Education during the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010) had concerns with what was perceived as a lack of attention to ‘knowledge’ in the curriculum and the dominance of ‘progressivist pedagogy’.

‘Things were so much better back in the sixties, don’t you think? So much deeper and more thoughtful, more serious, and profound. We didn’t, back then, have much of an idea about how to ‘use’ art so shamelessly to ‘express feelings and ideas.’‘

‘The history of abstract art must be open to being problematised in order for us to move on.’

‘The problem is getting the spontaneity into the finished work, rather than into the processes of creating it. The latter is the stock-in-trade of the abstract artist, but it’s easy; the former is much more problematic since a spontaneous working method in no way leads inevitably to a spontaneous end result.’

Robin Greenwood

Somehow the seemingly random statements and quotes above form a series of dots to be joined up to reveal a context and perhaps even a tentative explanation, for where Robin Greenwood- as I see it – was coming from; and also, for why so many contributors to the comment threads beneath essays and reviews- both his and others’- seemed to be riled by certain of his comments or ripostes. For me, however, it stands to reason that if you are an artist working with restless energy, asking demanding questions of yourself on a daily basis within the cut and thrust of studio work, you will be equally forthright and demanding when assessing the practice of others, let alone the wider scene.

Robin was first and foremost a sculptor, and used painting, perhaps, more as a ‘cri de cœur’ (though he did say how integral it had become to his sculpture – indeed it was painting that occupied his last period of work, when the physical demands of making sculpture became too much). He worked tirelessly, all the while under the shadow of his obviously failing health, and for that reason alone we should look very, very closely at his work; the sense of urgency and attack in his most recent work is at times startling to see.

Over several years, this zealous ambition of his gradually took hold. I had always been a frequent visitor to the shows he curated or hosted at the Poussin Gallery and saw some of his own work there. I was co-opted into writing reviews after having contributed a few remarks on comment threads on the remarkable, yet now sadly absent, Abstract Critical.com: a true baptism of fire. Abstract Critical evolved into quite the bear pit for robust, sometimes heated exchanges around abstract art – both contemporary and historical. The reappraisals of mid-century transatlantic art sometimes emerging during exchanges on the site were, for me, eye-opening. As I said to Robin on more than one occasion, I simply didn’t see any of it coming. There were no sacred cows; the hegemony of modernism in abstract painting and sculpture was dismantled, very little was left standing. As Robin saw it, a great many established luminaries had little to offer today’s artists. The latent pictorialism of abstract sculpture took the main brunt of his disaffection, and colour-field flatness as a perceived anaesthetic feature of abstract painting followed quickly after; colour as content was, for Robin, ‘not enough’. Three-dimensionality was the big problem to tackle in sculpture, and deep space the problem to confront in painting (this latter preoccupation of Robin’s seeming to diminish as time went by). Acclaimed artists would often be measured up against Robin’s favourites from the figurative pantheon – painters such as Tintoretto, Constable, Rubens, or Courbet. He often used these artists’ achievements as a ‘jabbing-stick’ to provoke his readers (and other artists). He was challenging us to look again, to demand more and stop simply accepting the status quo and the critical consensus. I was stunned at both the depth of the debate, and the heights it reached. Abstract Critical was a much-needed jolt to the senses at a time when I was looking to reassess my own work.

Robin again invited me to participate in the follow-up site, Abcrit.org, which in turn spawned a sort of Poussin Gallery Mark 2 in the middle floor of his building in Bermondsey (the ground floor having been given over to his studio). He was unfailingly generous to artists that had been excluded from the mainstream of the art world (whatever the hell that is): artists that eschewed the compulsion that is now so sadly prevalent in both the teaching and promotion of art- that of imposing literary narratives on the work in the hope that doing so will deliver ‘meaning’.

Showcasing serious abstract art always requires some serious heavy lifting, whether that be through provision of the necessary financial investment, space, time, or promotion; all of which Robin undertook with energy and integrity. To be clear: you are working against the prevailing culture, which favours the sugar-hit of stage-managed controversy; and as such, you will invite ridicule, disdain, and hostility.

I got to know Robin’s work better through the Brancaster Chronicle crits – the studio discussions he co-founded, which became an annual series of firstly audio-recorded, then filmed critiques around pairs of artists’ works – a chance to sweep out the space, stand back and let the wider world in. These days, though rigorous, were always good-humoured and insightful. At times they were unfairly derided as being carried out in a sort of clique spirit, but nothing could have been further from the truth; several of the artists went back a long way together to their student days, but many more did not. We were quite a disparate bunch and had in common simply the desire to share where we were at a given moment, and to know what others thought of it. It was very much the ‘old school’ critique, not in any way theoretical, rather, an honest appraisal of what the work was ‘doing’ visually. This would be regarded as a formalist approach by some, yet it revealed a connection with how art courses had been run; how all of us had in our own ways, been taught, before the monetising (and diminishing) of education set in.

Brancaster introduced me to artists I had not met or known. Some I mostly agreed with, others less so – that was surely the point? The healthy debate, the disagreement as much as the accord, were in the days’ DNA. I was fascinated by the sculptors’ development, and especially by the ways in which Robin was wrestling with his own work – partly because of the struggles I was having with mine.

I think Robin’s insistence on ‘getting the spontaneity into the finished work’ best explains his thinking on the kind of approach and level of ambition needed to make good art. He set about working in ways which discarded any notions of configuration, or of the weighing up of one part in relation to another- what sculptor Tony Smart calls ‘flower arranging’– taking him to the point of literally rolling the sculptures over and cutting and welding as if working blindly, which in a way he was. Visual complexity was the goal, and it is a hard-won quality, as so often in this ambition, works can manifest as merely ‘complicatedness’ – it’s a fine line, perhaps, but one on which Robin, fully aware of the pitfalls, was happy to tread. It was also a question of: just how far can we go here? His work seemed to be a clarion call for resistance to what he saw as the comfort blanket of most modernist sculpture, rebuking the notions of lineage and continuity in search of a more ‘human’, more meaningful art form – that in his work, as I mentioned, often looked to certain achievements in painting rather than sculpture as ways of dealing with complexity and three-dimensionality. Such a scrutiny of the problems besetting sculpture was a jolt for me and one which compelled me to take a second look at my own assumptions about painting. Issues which had murmured around the periphery of my thinking started to clarify, somewhat.

Robin – quite rightly – felt an artist must do all the work to provide the viewer with freedom: the freedom to continually discover something new in the work, or rather something that ‘presses’, redefines and reveals unseen or unknown visual qualities. This is not a common goal. Carefully controlled and imposed narratives are the order of the day: I believe they are also a bi-product of a willfully, ideologically-manipulated education system that runs like one of our toxic rivers right the way through from primary to postgraduate level and even beyond. I vividly remember my late father (a Reader in Mechanical Engineering at Cardiff University) speaking with horror of how he had been compelled to adjust his teaching to include his ‘aims and objectives’, as if he was some sort of battlefield general briefing his troops. The banality of this systematic controlling of scripted outcomes stinks to this day – and we seem to be still knee-deep, wading through this effluence.

Getting back to clearer and cleaner territory: space within fully three-dimensional forms was a holy grail of Robin’s, but I noticed in his most recent work that it had subsumed itself into a concomitant fact of abstractness, aimed for in the sculpture as a whole, rather than as an isolated ambition; space would happen, but it was not something that needed dealing with in isolation. It was the material that needed dealing with, and the space would follow or rather open up accordingly. An openness was thus achieved through the pressures being delivered by the handling of the material.

I saw Robin as an artist who gravitated more towards the sensibility of Northern European art. As he was often at pains to say, he was not ‘into’ colour as such, in his painting. He was more ‘into’ the facts of paint-as-stuff, and mark-induced detail that sought to activate, and disturb, all parts of the field. I enjoyed the energy in his paintings, perhaps seeing them as protean, seeking freedoms through an improvised, almost insouciant mark-making. The best of them had a strength of purpose and a sly eye for nuance. It was great to see one selected for the John Moore’s- although (and this is in no way a criticism of the work, which was very good) I did wonder if the selectors thought they were picking a landscape of sorts – such is the demise of proper ‘eyes’ on a work, these days, a state of affairs that was evident when you saw what else was on show there.

Robin has written that ‘a ‘free-floating’ intentionality in the micro-content of the work is key to my personal approach to making abstract sculpture.’ This attention to the making of such ‘micro-content’ was evident in his paintings, also. He used the familiar tools of brush and palette knife and added to these collagic techniques, attaching pieces of canvas, pre-painted or excised from other paintings – working from a stockpile of discarded canvasses in much the same way as he would from his steel scrap pile). It was an intensely purposeful but frequently wilfully indifferent form of handling, intended to almost blindside himself into creating surprise and incident. His best paintings have a richness in their colouring that only their creator’s long and thorough assimilation of the principles of major figurative painting could have made possible. Cézanne was such an important artist for him, as was Pissarro, their sophisticated responses to three-dimensional space were often singled out for praise. Robin once described Pissarro wonderfully, as ‘possibly the best artist at painting the rise and fall of the land.’ I was surprised to read that Matisse, the supreme colourist, was Robin’s favourite painter; yet it made sense once it dawned on me that the paintings of Matisse that Robin championed sported spatial ‘pressures’ rather than luminous surfaces. The magnificent ‘Safrano Roses at the Window’ of 1925 was a particular favourite.

As enjoyable as his painting was, it was his sculpture that spoke with the most authority; the wheeling coils of steel looping around disjointed hunks of found pieces of steel or sometimes roughly hewn, sometimes delicately cut with ‘drawn’ contours of heavy steel plate, which created space through their animated edges and planes. These planes or edges perhaps sometimes meeting the surprise of bolted-in wood, all of which could be jutting, twisting and at times brutally lumbering into evermore complex masses of form. Look closer, though, and very thoughtfully-made, poised adjoinments abounded. The sculptures could often look thrown together, almost haphazard at first glance, yet they possessed a fully resolved logic; not a built or configured one, but a hard-wrought and discovered one. These are works which offer a great lesson, and a direct challenge to modernist sculptural orthodoxy. Movement is pivotal; they compel a physical, moving visual engagement. His hanging sculptures rendered all debate around use of the floor or plinth and how to draw attention to gravity moot by sticking two fingers up at it.

The last works I saw had a much leaner, pared-back quality. Several were on plinths and made solely in steel, with a more emptied centre than in previous sculptures. The steel was twisted, surging into, or holding, space. They were focused, containing their energy through twisting steel ribbons and linear components which moved around the periphery, punctuated by shorter, more abrupt found elements, many of which implied facets, planes, and angularities of negative space in the heart of the work. Skeletal and open, their structure was immediately apprehend-able, yet continued to change and surprise as you engaged and moved. Appropriating a definition coined by Nicholas Maxwell, Robin remarked: ‘The freedom of the constructed parts of the work to embody manifold potential actions is ‘the capacity to achieve what is of value in a range of circumstances’. Far from destroying any intended meaning in the work, this more fluid thinking uncovers spontaneous and unexpected aspects to three-dimensional expressivity that can better contribute towards visual/physical/spatial structures absolutely unique to abstract sculpture.’

Open sculpture can impart such spontaneous and unexpected aspects to expressivity, but what could be perceived as its freewheeling spontaneity can also lapse into incoherence and jumbled-ness if the scale is unconsidered. In these works, the scale was measured and successful – larger pieces of steel added much-needed changes of pace and weight, stopping the work from becoming too ‘fizzy’. They were hugely assured and hugely rewarding – and at times unsettling, even.

I will miss the visits to see Robin’s work in his studio. I will miss the wit and erudition of his writing and debating, to say nothing of his kindness and unfailing generosity – both professionally and personally. I never really disagreed with Robin’s views. Perhaps I did, as regards the broader definition of what colour is or could be; something I am only just beginning to come to terms with – and this prompting to ask deeper questions about my work is something that I am indebted to him for. Yet this is now, sadly, a debate that cannot happen between us. I am naturally an optimistic person, beaten into a rigidity by the times, at times – as we all are, I’m sure. It’s a bleak scene to behold at the moment, and it just got a little dimmer, with the studio lights not shining in Bermondsey as they once were. Freedom in our work has never been so needed, or so under threat – as it is in our wider lives, also. Robin knew what had been lost – if you had not experienced the environment of a better time in which to be an abstract artist you might not realise what had been taken away from you. The ambition, on the part of all of us, to put this freedom back where it belongs would be a fitting tribute to him and one from which we’d all benefit.

Two last thoughts:

Bob Dylan’s reasoning behind his sculptures’ being based on gates was, apparently, that ‘they can open and close’. ‘Who knew?’ said Robin. That made me laugh out loud.

We exchanged messages in which I ended up saying ‘If I was a sculptor, but then again, no…’

His reply? ‘That’s a little bit funny.’

[FOR THE ONLINE ARTICLE PLEASE CLICK HERE]

[excerpt from] Tributes to John Mclean 2019: (Published by Abcrit) →

John was a fearless colourist; and a great legacy of his was his forthright use of colour without any obvious suggestions or allusions of place – I know he was relaxed if anyone perceived any such inference and sometimes his ordinance survey titling of a painting could send you north of the border in reverie. His paintings, though, are really about pictorial relationships: mini plays with responsive ‘actors’ playing out a pictorial drama – there’s never a lazy line or an incomplete character portrayal; they are very poised and deft – that’s why people wax lyrical on their humanity, as they are so relatable and generous in spirit.

The work gradually looked less lyrical after he returned from his time in America, with areas of flatter colour, inflected through their handling, which pivoted against one another, rather than the previous “signature works” with seductive brushstrokes in colour chords, floating on washy, atmospheric grounds. His great friend, the Canadian painter, Bill Perehudoff was working similarly at the time in this sequential and slightly formulaic way and it comes out of Jack Bush – the “figure-ground” sensibility, which I presume John had fully assimilated through his frequent visits to western Canada. He told me at one point he thought Bill the best painter alive. I think he found his true voice though when he got past this influence.

His work developed into more emphatic coloured areas and smaller eccentric shapes, quasi-geometries with sectioned spaces and brushy glyphs. At first, I thought some of them were too decorative – especially if there was a spiral in them; they seemed to be too obviously looking for the finish line. The best of them though, use a dark/light contrast as a spine for the colour, and the black never drops off; it’s always energised, which is a litmus test for a colourist.

I used to do a lot of framing for him when I was starting out, and he’d be making subtle edging decisions. He’d look at how shapes spoke to the sides and particularly the corners to restate the tautness of the surface. He used shape as the main vehicle for colour; facture became more important over the years too. The final ones he was making (truly astounding in light of his physical incapacity) revisited his earlier more lyrical palette: vibrato handling in medium-suspended transparencies but now allied with harder, abrupt edges and scrapes into flat, metallic pigment-infused areas, which contrast with jostling strokes — the use of line as a structuring device possibly came out of his printmaking. He had a cunning sense of space and used line and stroke in nuanced ways to set up junctions, dialogues or suggest more discrete pockets of space within the whole.

I’ve read lots of analogies to music and dance circulating about his paintings; but if you really want to get John’s work, I think something he used to say about his aspiration for a painting is the most revealing: ‘Painting is like drumming’. Look again at his paintings, and see that shock of the colour, how it maximises the surface tension: ‘We break the waters’, he used to say. He was very reluctant to go on the record about this; I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him now.

[FOR THE ONLINE ARTICLE PLEASE CLICK HERE.]

In conversation with John Mclean →

When I was first asked to conduct an interview with John McLean, I liked the idea of it, but had some reservations, as I knew how immobile he was becoming and how much of a struggle he found speaking. He could only whisper, and was being fed through a tube. In spite of this, he was going into the studio every week to paint and I really didn’t want to upset his routine. I knew I could ask him, though – John was fantastically generous with his time. We coordinated things through his wife Jan and picked a suitable day. I went with my wife Caterina and our two youngest kids – John loved to see the children and used to buy them funny little gifts. Jan, Caterina and the kids went out for lunch and left John and myself to do the interview.

I know John’s work well, and we discussed so much over thirty years (most of it unprintable – he could be hilariously critical of abstract painting at times). Essentially John had a flair for colour, and, if needed, a really deft touch: if a painter doesn’t have these, it shows. In this shared sensibility we formed a camaraderie. His circle of painting friends, many of whom knew him longer than me, also reinforce this view of him.

He never courted fame, yet should have had a much higher profile than he did. He was just beginning to be collected in a really significant way in China. The climate for advanced abstract painting is so airless and stultifying in this country; it has to have a twist or be narrative-friendly, it seems. John just got on with it, made his work and stuck the proverbial two fingers up to ‘the scene’. Thankfully, enough people and galleries did exist with discernment and support for his work. His shows were always a real highlight for me, and early on, they also provided me with a source of much-needed income, as he would pay me to make the stretchers he required and stretch his canvases too – usually over the course of a week. A fun memory was being introduced to the delights of a pastel de nata in a local Portuguese café in Stockwell.  

John is sitting in a recliner chair in the corner of his Barbican flat. He is unfailingly cheerful, and points to a few small canvasses on the walls dominated by a fresh light green, with a sandy facture and some simple scratched shapes, circles and triangles. They’re set into zones and areas. I nod, pick one up, say ‘this one’. John ponders it and nods. I chat about his Christmas card: a black and white linocut with an unusual shaped design. I had taken the liberty of scanning it, colourising it, and emailing it back. He really liked this, and we had flirted with the idea of doing more. When I showed him how the colour could be changed on screen, he was intrigued and it offered him possibilities to make his own changes to colour. A small, fun, side project was how we saw it. I cannot conceive of any other artist I know accepting my response. John was so devoid of any pretentiousness or ego. This cannot be stated loudly enough – it’s vital to understanding his work.

He motions me to get his scrapbook out and we look through it; there on one of the pages is an ancient stone carving with the same design. The book is a wonderful aide-memoire of cuttings, photos, funny postcards of paintings, cartoons even (his father Talbert worked as an illustrator and cartoonist as well as a painter). John would often make funny little cartoons and send them out to people. He’d framed one I sent him back, of him sitting on his new toilet which lit up –I’d added musical notes coming out, commenting too on the ‘correct foreshortened positioning’ of the knees. That was John: always able to find something significant and even encouraging in the slightest of gestures, to make you smile.

I show him the iPad and run through the idea of recording things. He thinks it’s a good one and we get started.

This was how it was done:

I had written out a series of questions, and also jotted down, from his own comments, a series of abbreviated model answers which I felt were the sort of things he might say. I had bought an iPad for the occasion, with these phrases typed up on screen. John could use the pencil to type, and he practised this effectively- it was tiring, though, and he preferred to nod, or edit and tweak the answers orally. His voice was reduced to a whisper but his brain was razor-sharp. He still had that twinkle in his eye and he laughed by pursing his mouth and narrowing his eyes.

I am conscious that the text will not flow as a fully voluble conversation would; but this was the situation we have to contend with, and this is the best I can come up with. We look at stuff online too. He says a lot about paintings by raising an eyebrow, pursing his lips, smiling, nodding, whispering ‘good’ or the odd ‘shite’.

John is on the record as saying so much about his work; and it’s also  pretty evident from his actual paintings what he was about as an artist. As he had said, ‘I hope my paintings speak for themselves’.

We had planned to do two sessions, and I went into the studio a few weeks later to see what he had been up to. I had a series of questions about these works and his thoughts about them, how he was adapting to his immobility. Unfortunately, this second interview session never materialized, as John’s health had deteriorated, and I finally received the news that he had passed away. I have still not come to terms with it really.

At the end of this first and only interview, there is a postscript in which I write about his latest work. It held so many fascinating developments and was, I felt, laced with a certain heartbreaking quality too.

Emyr Williams in conversation with John McLean

EW: When we first met, you were living in New York. You were back in London and Mali Morris brought you to my degree show. I remember you bought me a drink in the pub afterwards and said to me ‘you look like the kind of man who’d like a whisky’, and we became friends after that. I really liked ‘Opening’, the painting you had in the Tate, done with the squeegees, and such lovely open colour and subtle surface nuance. It inspired me as a student and helped me to approach the colour work of Morris Louis, but in a more personal way – getting more variety out of the handling of the paint, which I enjoy doing. Louis’s work was such a touchstone for me.

JM: That painting was up for a week recently for my birthday. It was badly lit. I first saw Louis’s work in London in the early 1960s; and Noland’s. Their directness opened up things for me. It took a while for me to fully assimilate it and to get rid of unnecessary intricacy in my own work. Also, later, seeing Sam Gilliam’s wet-into-wet painting, and working as loosely as that helped me more to come to terms with the directness and scale of Louis and Noland, also Pollock of course. You were a pup back then. The work blew my socks off.

EW: Would it be fair to say at the time we met, in the late 1980s, your work was more North American in its sensibilities? I know you’d been to Emma Lake Workshop in Western Canada on a number of occasions and become great friends with Bob Christie, Bill Perehudoff, and landscape painter Greg Hardy. I went in there in 1991, not long out of Uni. You had put a word in for me, I’m sure, as it was on your suggestion I went.  Kenneth Noland was a visiting artist there. He had an astonishing eye. I remember also being amazed by the set-up some of the artists had -their studio sizes, their use of materials (making their own gels for example). Bill was such a generous man too. He gave me a lot of his paints to use as I didn’t have much money. His daughters Cathy and Beccy – both fine painters – bought small paintings off me to help me on my travels. You and Bill were great friends.

JM: I’m not sure if I put a word in – I think I might have done (he winks). I met Bill and his wife, the landscape painter Dorothy Knowles, at a party given by Tim Scott in 1980. Bill’s work enthused me as much as Jack Bush’s, which I first saw in 1964. I’d first gone over to Emma Lake as guest artist in 1981. Bill and Dorothy bought a painting from me in 1983 when we were in Saskatoon. They had heard Jan was taking other people’s washing in for ironing. They guessed we were hard up. Bill’s paintings are an inspiration to me. He had an amazing eye for colour.

EW:  Bill’s work was so beautifully tuned. As you know, I visited his and Dorothy’s studios after Emma Lake with the painter Gerry Faulder and was blown away by the whole place, that each of them had a barn for a studio and another for storage. Noland had been there the week before, after leaving the workshop, and had cropped a lot of Bill’s paintings at the top edge to take away the ‘float’ (Most of Bill’s paintings were two-metre-plus squares, and had blocks of colour surrounded by large, atmospheric washes.) Bill was living with them to see if he agreed with Noland’s decisions. I have always felt Bill’s colour was Russian in sensibility; yours deals with the issue of facture in a more expressive way for me. You connect the surface with the colour at every moment of the painting. I caught a glimpse, when I came in today, of the Edinburgh Fine Art show leaflet – that painting ‘Blue Berry’ is startling in its colour and touch – that’s what I mean I suppose. I don’t think anyone else could have painted that.

JM: Thank you.  The way paint goes on is dictated by how the painting is going. I enjoy the inference of movement in painting too.

EW:  The precedent of Jack Bush is evident in your figure-ground approaches in the late 1980s, which have a greater involvement with touch as a determining factor on the weight of colour as well. You’d set them up with a soft ground and then stain in an atmospheric darker hue which was full of incident to create an exposed, glowing zone, then onto that add bars of colour in direct weighted strokes, often with higher-keyed hues jostling with softer tertiaries and earths to connect back to the ground colour. I often notice a clever twist, with some bars of colour reading as breaks – a positive working as a negative, so to speak. How did Canada affect your colour?

JM: The light in Western Canada is as bright as anywhere on earth. Our light is more subtle, so colours tend to relate tonally. My colour often had a close tonality to it in the 1980s, but I moved away from that as the decade went on.

EW: We met in New York in 1992 at the time of the of the Matisse retrospective and you kindly organised for me to meet Greenberg at his apartment (which was memorable). After that show, and when you had returned to London, I thought your work was also moving its centre of gravity back to Europe. Matisse of course, but also Miró whose opening-out of the painting’s space seemed so significant. I remember cat-sitting for you when you and Jan went to see the centenary show in Barcelona the following year. You also gave me the use of your studio. We used to play table tennis in your dining room, which also doubled up as a studio. You’ve been so supportive and generous, John –  giving me work stretching your paintings for shows too when I was broke.

John McLean, ‘Strathspey’ (1993), acrylic on canvas, 224.5 x 157.5 cm. I built the frame and stretched this one. It hung around the studio for a couple of days with a painterly edge around it where the black stopped. We looked at cropping in to remove that edge and discussed it quite a bit, seeing it was more about the drama of the colours and the ‘hoop’. Eventually, John agreed that the broken edge was overcooking it, and the simple top-to-bottom contrast was best. It’s one of my favourite paintings by John. The red just nudging into the black: it’s typical of his clever understanding of colour and shape relationships.

EW: What was it about Miró that grabbed you?

JM:  By the early 1990s I was working in absolutely saturated hues. Plus, I saw that black was a colour which could energise the others. Miró and Goya also use black in such an expressive way. A couple of my preoccupations are: making the surface as rich as possible, and dramatising the space between things, as in Miró’s huge ‘Blue I’, ‘Blue II’ and ‘Blue III’ of 1961.

I now show John the following phrases, and he nods in agreement:

Pictorially dramatic        use of black

relationship between shape and space

opening out of the space

directness of colour and the electricity of strident decision-making

an emphatic insouciance in the drawing

EW: You say ‘things’. I know that a lot of your softer, brushed paintings of the early 1980s were sometimes compared to the atmosphere of landscape: the vegetal colours of the heathers, the moors and mosses for example. Thinking of the ‘shapes’ in your later work, does it bother you if people see them as connecting with natural forms?

JM: I have no issue with their having overtones of forms in nature and would even rejoice in that, but any shapes in my paintings are there for the painting’s needs – they gain their strength and meaning through their configuration, the way they connect with the spaces, the edges and the corners.

EW: How do you start a painting?

JM:  You have an idea but it’s inchoate.

EM:  I have a strategy rather than a definite plan.

JM:  You have to be on the lookout. You must be ready for a surprise.

John beckons me closer and whispers this:

From the crypt of St James’s in St. Gilles 

Came a shriek that resounded for miles

Said a vicar ‘Good gracious, Father Ignatius 

I’ve forgotten the Bishop’s got piles.

EW: (Laughs out loud) I think that’s the perfect ending!

Postscript

I’m at APT one Thursday morning a month or so later. Shiba, APT artist and John’s acting studio assistant, lets me in and we discuss the visit. We agree half an hour is okay. John has a freshly primed canvas to hand with a few areas of laid-in colour in vertical strips with a staggered arrangement to them. Around the walls and in groups are stacked many more completed works. I immediately lapse into the familiar routine of rummaging and looking. I feel totally comfortable in John’s studio – more than any other artist’s I know of – and drag works out. John indicates which way up and we take them in.

These new paintings are at once familiar and strange: many are split in half or thirds, with one or two areas having a series of loosely-smeared, almost phosphorescent colours, often leaning towards pastel hues. These colours are glazed, lucid and deftly applied. The paintings connect back to earlier work through their soft airiness and a similar lyrical, almost vegetal colouring; their surface is heavier though. Whereas once these colours would be stained with the brush in light touches, these are more spread-on, and suspended in a gel medium, which gives them a greater transparency and lustre. Against these jostling hues abuts a startlingly flat metallic pigment-infused area of ever-so-slightly shimmering charcoal grey (‘got some shit in that’ -JM), or a bronzed brown. The colour is taped in, with ledges or kinks which check the pace of the centre edge across the surface. John is in familiar territory here, and he uses these little kicks and kinks to set up mini spatial dramas in the jostling colour areas where these two worlds meet. It’s all about finding a surprise, something that knocks things out of the kilter of an almost-grasped visual logic, but ends up achieving a greater expressiveness through more unpredictable configurations of colour and drawing. Into these flat areas are introduced linear scrapes that echo the angles and contours of the pastel hues, adding an abrupt counterpoint. They should split the painting into separate units and break down any available wholeness; they don’t, the contrast creates unity.

I tell John how much I like them. We can’t really go through anything and I am conscious of the time. I kiss him on the head and leave. This is the last time I ever see John.

I’ve been thinking about his last works. Yes, there’s the overriding visual quality, but then I look again with the knowledge of the context in which those paintings were made. It’s a miracle they exist. John had mentioned Goya, and how much he enjoyed his work. Goya, for me, is the most human of artists. I have thought a lot about his work of late. It seems to be the end of the road for a painter – that’s it, it’s finally Goya, you ultimately get to Goya. I have an image of him at the end wandering the streets, tinnitus ringing in his ears, daubing mud on the walls whilst muttering ‘Nada, nada’.

I’m looking at a card with John’s work on it. On one side, the colours are soft, tremulous: are they fading in or out of focus? The other side is an emphatic dark zone with an almost clanging finality to it. It positively slams itself at you. I’m taking in the scrapes, which simultaneously look feeble yet also strident. I know how his printmaking has informed his painting and vice versa, and the scrapes connect with his use of lines in his prints, linear elements which also create incomplete but nevertheless perceived ‘units’ with the dark colour — they are devoid of bravado and are completely certain of their place in the painting; no need to rework too much, just get it down, get it said, move on to the next. Those scrapes are like cries, utterances trapped within the darkness of the body colour, the sharp edges that contain them are like prison walls and the triumphant removal of their pristine surfaces jolts your sensibilities – marks which are so clearly scratched in much the same way as a key would a posh car.

Many a commentator uses the term ‘simple’ when describing John’s colour – as perhaps they would of Matisse’s cutouts; it’s meant as a sort of backhanded compliment, yet no artist worth their salt ever made a really ‘simple’ painting, or ever made a ‘playful’ work for that matter – it’s a complete myth, this sort of narrative. Everything should be fully charged, fully committed to; either you mean it or you don’t.

John used to use the word ‘funny’ to describe works that intrigued him. Taking that word at face value, though, there is nothing remotely funny about these last works; these really are ‘last works’. When you know your time is running out, what do you do? Do you turn away from it, accept your fate, go gently into that good night? Or do you daub your daubs, embrace your ‘nada’ and just get on with it? …the bravest artists do.

If you really want to get John’s work, I think something he used to say about his aspiration for a painting was very revealing: ‘Painting is like drumming’. Look again at his paintings, and see that shock of the colour, how it maximises the surface tension: ‘We break the waters’, he used to say. He was very reluctant to go on the record about this – I never knew why. I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him now.

EW November 2019

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Patrick Heron: 2018 Published by Abcrit →

Patrick Heron at Turner Contemporary, Margate.

The hanging of this exhibition has had a lot of column inches devoted to it. The paintings looked really good in these spaces and in spite of the missing traditional chronological reasoning did not compete or confuse. The spaces are not huge, so it is easy to move back and forth, cross-checking things if so desired. I failed to see what the fuss was all about. I understood there were themes but to be brutally honest I didn’t pay attention to them and proceeded to wander around and take each work on face value. The signature Herons (the “wobbly hard edged”) such as the huge “Cadmium With Violet, Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian: 1969” looked immediately familiar and impressive. These works are characterised by their fully saturated higher-keyed primaries and secondaries straight from the tube, activated more by a literalness in the brushstroke rather than a painterliness per se. The brush being a markedly smaller than thought Japanese watercolour brush. Sitting uniformly on a white ground gives each hue the same reflective force. Complementary colours buzz optically against one another as their shapes flip-flop between positive and negative areas, à la Matisse’s cut outs. Heron’s optimism in an almost hedonistic colour, is supported by his wilfulness to drive each colour shape through to its conclusion in the same way as it was started – the brush scribble, more often than not. They have an insistency which, with hindsight, is possibly their undoing at times; in these works he seems to have put himself ahead of his own curve. By this I mean he understood fully what he was doing, not quite moving himself into the more profound areas of discovery – the speed of acknowledgment of each work’s merits is condensed into a shorter space of time. Colour will always surprise but they teeter ever so slightly into the realms of design (this is not to consider design in any pejorative way but to define its nature in terms of more predictive outcomes, for design has to have a preconditioned purpose at its heart).

What is significant in these paintings though was his rejection of North American modernist symmetry, preferring to connect with the checks and balances of European easel painting instead. The sheer bloody mindedness of putting huge amounts of a single colour is startling to see, yet they never become “fields” as such, as there is a familiar positioning and counter-positioning approach of smaller elements so characterised by the term “French”. Not really a surprise given his connection with Braque and his championing of Matisse. This affirmation of the easel and rejection of the field was ultimately what caused friction in his relationship with Clement Greenberg who was trying to get him to empty out his work more. I met Patrick Heron on two occasions and vividly remember the first of these as a student when he came to lecture and repeatedly reiterated his disgruntlement with Greenberg’s promotion of American modernism and its claim for a vanguard status. The empty spaces and cropped edges were an anathema to him. At its most extreme, cropping became a decadent taste exercise, shunting all internal relationships about and finding something in there to shout about – as there was usually always something in there, it seemed a doomed to succeed sort of endeavour. Heron saw more potency in the inter-relationships of surface to shape and shape to whole. In this take on painting, the application of the paint becomes ever more important. By coming down in scale on the brush Heron was forcing a more intimate engagement with his surface and a setting up of a stronger declaration of scale in the painting. Heron’s work is all about scale and this is an issue which should not be sidestepped by painters today. American painting post-Pollock arrived at a problem which set in with the self- cancelling nature that the quest for a neutrality of format created. The assumption was that such a neutrality was the ideal carrier of colour content. For a while this was fine, but as Noland himself discovered in his second version of his circles, made on 2 ft square canvases to address this shortcoming, much of the colour field paintings kept the viewer at an optimum distance and didn’t invite a “deeper” engagement. This is a moot point for a painting is apprehended at light speed. It could therefore be argued that such engagement is in fact not what it is about; the initial eye hit carries the content in one jolt. Yet it was the lesson of Cézanne that informed Noland to return to the closely worked instances of paint rather than more generalised areas. What Heron was after was an impact that reveals all but is built on a more specific set of internal incidents to get to that impact. There is a covert assertion here that the eye – vis-a-vis the brain – can indeed handle a greater amount of detail and inter-relational elements and still perceive it with that same wholistic  jolt. Heron would point – quite rightly – to late Matisse as a shining example of what colour, space and light can look like in a painting. The richness of internal area to edge, of colour to colour, of scale, space and ultimately light all invites and wallops in equal measure. In short, you can in fact have your cake and eat it.

Although Heron saw merits in American modernism: the energy, size and originality; what was missing was this closer intimacy of easel painting. Pollock was a game changer but ultimately the game ran out of time. We no longer aspire to make murals. An oversized work will create a physical sense of scale in the viewer, but it can shut down eye movement through the desire to envelop. Heron was right about scale and through his brush-scribble started to get at the principles of movement through detail. However, this detail needed something to work with and against – enter the employment of shape. Details can be created in more nuanced ways, but we are in the early days of acrylic and still holding on to the palette. Brushes and mops meant a loss of the hand wrought so prized by Heron. He could see the bigger picture. To get at colour, an artist must first get at the paint. To get a sensitivity and feeling into the colour would also mean getting a sensitivity and feeling into the handling. A field that is empty is much the same as a field that is full (compare a Milton Resnick with an Olitski spray painting); it’s the flip side of the same coin though I would argue that the Olitski delivers the more seductive work every time). However, when the details are unable to create scale the work loses its potency for specificity and can lapse into an indeterminate pictorialism.

I sympathise entirely with his take on scale and its relational factor, furthermore, it being in direct connection with the proportionate size of his works. Indeed it was enlightening to read in the catalogue a quote hitherto unknown to me about just this fact when discussing a particular painting from 1959: …there had been a single violet lozenge shape in the middle of a dulled green ground (possibly a bit Gottlieb-ish)…“but I felt that this denied explicit and particular scale to the picture. It made it into a signal, a sign, which might have existed on any scale, from that of a postage stamp to that of an ocean liner’s design. It removed the explicitly 4ft x 5ft- ness of the picture! So I let the surrounding square discs return!” (In my previous articles on Space in painting, this was the exact point I was trying to make.) Heron may well have employed shapes which with time can feel ever so slightly of their time. I believe that is in part down to his reluctance to work paint over paint, preferring to keep it side by side, the eccentricities thus take the form of the containing shape which carries the brush-scribble colour.

Heron started out painting silks and the touch and delicacy of handling never left him. There are rarely moments in the show of a fully loaded paint work or even instances of really pushing the oils about and wrestling with the surface. Heron eschewed that approach, preferring more of a sparring rather than heavy hitting with his paint. At times there were some layered bits of colour when he did allow himself the opportunity rather than keeping colours alongside one another, painting off a white for each hue. Heron preferred the single skin of colour as it maximised the reflectiveness of the white ground. He felt colour on colour was potentially deadening in effect due to the resultant opacities and he detested acrylic paint. Though on this latter point I think he had yet to see how it developed in quality and what potential it now has for colour and surface.

The heat of the wobbly hard-edged paintings breaks up into an airiness in the “Garden” paintings. If my memory serves me correctly, Heron talked about a film being made of him in the studio (I think he showed it or stills and the work at the talk he gave when I was a student- was it a South Bank show?) A crew visited Heron’s studio and he made a painting for the camera  in a looser way to his usual draw and fill approach  (of which there is a BBC film of artists in their studios in the archive featuring Hoyland also),  The pressure of having to perform in some way became a liberation, making him trust his drawing and work straight with paint as line and area from the off. I could be wrong about this, but I have a memory of it.

These garden works are much more hit and miss due to the increased variables at play: line mainly and a breaking up of those discs into looser areas with staccato daubs massing or meandering around, in and out of zones of different colour. The white is all conquering, bleaching out much of the fuller potentials of the contrasting hues and at times, ironically in light of his protestations to the contrary, relegating them to elements of design rather than releasing them through the painting. In this they have connection with the gouaches on show: roll them up and they’d make great scarves. He asserted he did not design anything but the feel of design lingers. The white can be too imposing, but it was a relief to see examples of him weaving in other pastels or soft yellows to add a greater expressive nuance to the white by turning it into a “light” rather than  keeping it directly “white”. It is useful when handling colour to consider any hue with the letter “a” before it to broaden the target for the colour decision… just saying.

I would not identify Heron fully as a painter’s painter, myself, though there are numerous rewarding clues, not least the directness of the attack and the ambition for colour. He has a wonderful way of handling his paint which is subtle and sophisticated. He found abstract painting but never left landscape, in so doing though I am thankful he avoided the more questionable motives that many of his contemporaries tried to bolt onto their work: numinosity, angsty soul-searching, and all the rest of the existential baggage that artistic egocentricity has an unfortunate habit of parading forth. He preferred to consider the physical rather than the metaphysical; so issues of how we perceive space, distance, form, ideas about synthesis, responses to one’s environment occupied him to the end. Thank goodness for that. However, as a path for abstract painters, it is a bit of a windy trail down to a beautiful beach, rooted in the local and holding on the intoxications of ozone and eye-watering light. Colour, space and light were his goal. It still is the biggest prize; the symbiotic relationship of this triumvirate is still so protean in potential. However, I feel that colour on colour rather than just alongside is a greater challenge to now take forward. His use of scale, edge and the importance of colour at generating space through light is significant. Furthermore, his assertion that the true humanity of an artwork lies in its actuality, its concreteness and concomitant decision-making when actually painting, rather than the employment of subject matter to guide one’s feelings in some way cannot be stated loudly enough. He drifted in and out of our artistic landscape much in the same way as his shapes drifted in and out of focus: sometimes sparky and crisp, other times soft and muted. Always heartfelt and sensitive.

A day later I was on a street in what has become my hometown. I saw a kid standing on the kerb, face stained with the residues of a cheap sweet. He was staring at some gaudy Christmas decorations. If he’d had a brick I think he would have thrown it, but after a pause, he just wandered on and kicked at some grass sprouting up through worn paving stones. Just for a moment there was a mischievous menace in the air, whistling in on an icy biting wind…I don’t think that kid has ever owned a scarf.

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Space in Painting: Part two →

In my earlier article on Space in Painting and Sculpture, I wrote about a studio reflection on what I was trying to get out of colour, and I proposed that the space that can be achieved in a painting is related to the size of the work, but is not in any way compromised by it. A small painting which is good is as valid as a big painting which is good – the experience would be the ‘same’. In short, don’t go looking for pictorial illusions, but deal with the space you have available to you and maximise that. Let the space develop accordingly – illusions will occur with colour and do not need the added choreography behind them. I felt that the remark about the size of the painting could have been misconstrued as relating to a “quantifiable’ sort of space, when what I was trying to get at was the principle of bearing down on every moment in a work, making every bit of the painting equally significant. The problem painters have is that paint colour when united with its support will often lend itself to suggestions of landscape, buildings, objects or figures in ways that can often be beyond our control. This kind of suggestion was something discussed in a Brancaster forum on my own work – people commenting could see a torso in one of my paintings. To this day I cannot myself but I took the point that the colour was doing this and whether I intended it or not was irrelevant. It is a human trait to seek a logic in a pattern or configuration and many artists will play on this with evocative effects and an ambiguity of forms. My painting was probably not good enough and it “leaked” into suggestion or rather allowed itself to leak by not doing enough in itself, which is the same end. My conclusion was the same: I hadn’t worked the colour enough, which was quite frustrating with hindsight, as I worked for months on that damn thing.

When discussing space the word depth often pops up. Depth is a term that I feel needs greater interrogation when discussing painting. I cannot help but consider depth (in itself the most hackneyed term for illusion) to be created as a result of tone which promotes recession or form, which is surely figurative. Recessive colour spaces are due to conditions which emanate from figuration, landscape and aerial perspective – the violet blues forming the mountains or different sizes of forms indicating distance and so on. “Space” is a much better term when discussing colour in abstract painting, in my opinion. I have become convinced that space as a condition hinges upon movement. In painting, movement can be created through colour relationship – not ‘colouring’, which is passive, or “colours”, which connect with a designed painting, but the reactive quality of any given colour or colours to any other given colour or colours within an orchestrated whole and, ideally, without a hole. It is not in the brushed mark per se which is a sort of trapped movement, and it can equally well be in the ‘area’ as long as it generates some sort of energy, a pressure, a luminosity through its characteristics and relational qualities. Maybe depth is ‘captured’ because it is premeditated, space is released because it is discovered?

Abstract artists do not really know what exactly is happening when they are working (this needs a whole essay) – which causes a degree of irritation with some who keep trying to bring these probings in the dark back into some sort of contextual classification and fit everything into known prior achievements; it’s natural to want to compare but when the comparisons are shutting down the achievements of the work purely for an imposed contextual comfort blanket, the result is a lack of proper engagement and a closing-off of discussable possibilities. Art is not like that. It is much more of a wild animal. Depth can be controlled, space cannot. Movement is due to differences. “All lies in the contrast” as Cйzanne said. Difference can come through so many factors, but it is conditioned ultimately in painting through colour. Facture will determine how we experience colour in a painting and facture creates detail – subtle shifts in paint quality create detail within differences of hue which in turn can maximise colour relationships. Concentrating on colour in this way can open up space. Subtle really does mean subtle too, it doesn’t have to be souped up or winged around, as it can also be clean, clear and precise. There is no hierarchy of technique or approach. The proof is always in the colour of the pudding. Adopting a reductive approach has been the driver of much so-called ‘advanced’ modernist painting, until post, post-painterliness or whatever post is past came along. The problem has always been the raison d’ȇtre – to condense or heighten are often used to describe and define such reductive methods. I’m not sure, with hindsight that this is completely true – with a few notable exceptions. I have prized the achievements of Morris Louis, for example, since a student, but not the “Veils”, nor the “Unfurleds”, as distinctive as the latter are (I always get a frisson of excitement when seeing one with its instant recognisability). The “Stripes” were the most significant works for me with their disinterested colours and great drawing.  Those days are gone, though, but I do not think a throwing out of the baby with the bath water is the solution, as artists who have worked in reductive ways do exemplify the importance of specificity. Matisse was a precursor of this for abstract artists with his continual modification and finishing ‘hit’. Now would be the time to maintain that specificity but to find more engaging, ambitious, non-reductive approaches that create greater freedoms for the viewer; freedoms that also re-engage with the plenitude of detail and space when we simply look at the physical world. Stronger work needs, in my opinion, a real sense of organising and sorting out the wheat from the chaff or removing superfluous incident and delivering confident decision making, not reducing but strengthening perhaps – letting go of control and “giving oneself to the gesture” (Picasso) are not enough for me. There has to be more wilfulness without restrictiveness, rather than chance, which is a conformism in disguise. The Matisse illustrated is stunning not just in its colour and drawing or its ability to generate pictorial luminosity; they haunt me for their connection with how we see, too.

When we look at the space in our physical field of vision, we can take it all in in one go, however complex it is. In this instantaneous moment, we perceive movement – not in an A to B linear way by following form to form, but as spatial differences evinced through colour changes which are determined through texture absorbed by our retinas simply by facing front. Far to near, we get it all and work it out (texture is detail – in painting, a perceived surface). How we create movement in an abstract painting determines the space and the quality of expressiveness – which can never be depended upon to reach a resolution just by “having a go”. For it should also be pointed out that (curators take note please) trying to make art will not actually guarantee that it comes calling. You would think that every artist written about at the moment is able to make exactly what they want with complete success – batting averages that make them the Don Bradmans of art. The last thing a curator wants is failed or compromised painting (yet the truth of the matter is closer to this reality than the endless streams of success that seems to be hogging the walls – maybe this is why such trivial things get so much space and column inches? This sort of ‘art’ never attempts anything meaningful, so it sidesteps being criticised for failing. Irony is cool, as we witness in the latest Britain’s Got Art show, which is connected by the thread of having a go.

There are enough serious artists who thankfully challenge this mindset, although they are swimming against the tide. Information has become the lingua franca of art and like most texts these days it is pushed upon us rather than being something we seek so we become ever more indifferent towards issues communicated ‘at’ us; this forces outlandish positioning to make narratives have a more pressing urgency or relevance, and experience which was once at the heart of our engagement with art is relegated to the sidelines. “Have you seen” is morphing into “have you heard about”. I think (maybe hope) this desire for the superficial may be part of a wider phenomenon, the flip side of the current heavy horrors of ugly nationalism and all its manifestations. Are we seeing an inverted form of terminal lucidity? That moment when someone with a neurological disorder (without making light of afflictions such as this at all!) suddenly has a surge of clarity which fools you into thinking they are going to pull through when shortly after they don’t. Are we witness to a sudden coalescing of – hijacked – art forms into a parade of poppy notoriety when if we are patient things will return to a state of grown up rationality, and frivolity will be seen for what it is. Could this be the case with all this folly and anger? It would be nice for frivolity to play a role on the margins rather than centre stage – it’s a broad church after all. Is it just a matter of time until we can discover a new space in which better things can be enjoyed?

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From the Paint Face: Four 2018: Published by Instant loveland →

I wanted to pick up after my last essay on Degas with another great nineteenth century heavyweight who lived well into the new century; namely, Claude Monet, who lived a full sixteen years beyond Degas, defiantly painting his waterlilies, whilst the First World War, with its terrible bombardments of land and mind, erupted all around him; paintings that sought serenity, an absence of (or inability to see) a future horizon. Monet’s late, meditative paintings reveal a person who really could handle the paint. Technically speaking, he was total master of his medium: understanding not just how to manipulate oil paint in such swaggering ways, but also, how to achieve longevity in the chemical composition of his pigments. He even went as far as pre-painting colour onto absorbent paper to extract some of the poppy oil; thereby minimising the tendency of the oil to rise to the surface, and the subsequent yellowing of the colour.

Monet’s ability to render in paint was dazzling. One hears of him being regarded as the ‘greatest painter of all’. Cézanne’s ‘he is only an eye, but what an eye’ is possibly a more erudite observation (we’ll leave Braque’s ‘a half-wit’ to one side). Monet developed ever-richer tapestries of colour as his eyesight, like that of Degas, deteriorated; and we often find the greater the impairment, the greater the urgency to work.

Monet is such an accessible painter – quite possibly one of the most accessible painters. I remember the twenty-four hour ‘Monet-athon’ run by the RA many years ago: I left it until 6am on that last Sunday in the vain hope of a bit of viewing space; yet if truth be told, I was unsurprised to see post-clubbers rolling out of the Academy, bleary-eyed, onto Piccadilly as I queued to get in. His work is every art museum’s go-to money-maker, and this does tend to temper his status with many who are wedded to the unspoken principles of an ‘avant-garde’. None of this particularly bothers me; but there is something else in his work that makes me uneasy. My bugbear, I think, lies in the realm of Monet’s ‘pictorialism’. This needs unpicking, as it’s not pictorialism in terms of subject matter but pictorialism in terms of his use of colour; especially, and ironically, in his late, more celebrated works, as opposed to his earlier scenes which often shunt together architecture and atmosphere in such satisfyingly tactile ways.

Monet himself dubbed certain of his works as ‘too straightforward’. This calls to mind Clement Greenberg’s reservation about Anthony Caro’s ‘Sun Feast’ of 1969-70: ‘It’s too streamlined’.  I understood immediately what he meant by this insightful remark, and I think about it often when looking at the Nymphéas paintings, which, I feel, also have this quality about them. This, in turn, brings me back to Cézanne’s comment about Monet’s paintings being the product of an ‘eye’. These late works are rabidly pictorial, and their very virtue is the thing that unsettles me the most. Pictorial art ‘accepts’ from the outset: please ruminate on that remark. Colour decisions serve a pictorial unity which is aspired to from the start: each decision thus closes in, rather than opens out. If a colour jumps, it’s checked back rather than challenged by a subsequent hue. ‘Pictorial’ as a concept in painting, for me, is rooted in photography and the use of imagery, and ultimately, therefore, the figurative. In figurative art the pictorial often leads to the ‘capturing’ of a scene (how often do we hear a lay voice express this sentiment?) and a posturing of a stasis, which is in itself a negation of the fluidity of our visual field –  and thus, a shutting down of time. I suppose, when faced with the horror of war, who wouldn’t wish to shut down time?

In abstract painting, being pictorial can be construed as the acceptance of an ambition to make art rather than discover it through the making. Could it be argued that pictorial art is ultimately devoid of ‘doubt’? Pictorial abstract art flourishes in a Western liberal arts environment. It’s embedded in pedagogy. In fact, it could be further proposed that Impressionism was the foundation of such a construct- after its initial breaking down of the ‘Academie’ it ended up replacing it as the de facto painterly approach – yesterday’s heresies are tomorrow’s pieties, we could say.   Both Degas and Monet sought to make pictorial art and, as such, are fundamentally image painters – or would ‘filmic’ be a better term when one considers the tilting, cropping and panning of their foci? As they reached their maturity as artists, photography came into its own as the primary medium of visual communication. In Degas’ and Monet’s work we find suggestive colour, often employed to evoke a known atmospheric condition: lamplight or sunlight. Their worlds have a singularity of light: these worlds are ravishing to visit, as even the most tanked-up clubber, so used to the blaze of artificial light, will testify to. Yet, like a club, they are not places to concentrate and work in. I go to late Monet for pleasure rather than challenge.

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From the Paint Face: Three 2018: Published by Instant loveland →

The 1910s in painting saw the rise of the “crowded canvas”, as a post-cubist vernacular swept across Europe. Picasso and Braque had lifted the choppy brushstroke and earthy palette of Cézanne to re-configure notions of forms in spaces; and every artist and their cousin seemed to borrow their angularity and their planar colour-as-form approach, in pursuit of more benignly decorative outcomes, or, alternatively, having looked at the Fauves, began packing in gestural marks and ricocheted incidents rendered in simplistic, “emotional” colour. How often does the vernacular of an approach seem to be the essential quality that gets noticed, championed and ultimately used in subsequent art?

At the same time as so many younger artists were working out of cubism, some of the great artists of the late nineteenth century were either entering their old age or nearing the end of their lives: it must have been an intriguing artistic landscape to be alive in. These were the last years of Edgar Degas: a difficult character, by all accounts, who espoused some decidedly shady views (an all-too-contemporary mixture of misogyny and antisemitism) but one who must nevertheless be recognised as an artist of significance and influence…yet how he has been of influence needs further consideration.

Degas was a wonderful artist, true: but I have never been fully convinced that he was a great painter. There is often something technically lacking in his handling of oil paint, and his work can often look meagre in terms of its colour intensity: the paint feels slightly undercooked. Furthermore, the image seems to dominate: the paintings look too derived from photographs (even on occasions when they are not), and feel “monocular” in their visual weighting. His earliest ambition, in fact, was to become a history painter; in short, a painter of scene and narrative. Narrative compels an artist to work in the service of the subject matter, rather than meeting the fuller demands of the painting as a painting. I believe this ambition sets him at odds with what I consider to be the truth of painting: that it must be autonomous, and carry its content through its means, and not tangentially, by directing us away from these means to external and extrinsic phenomena. This holds true for all painting – both the figurative (which is about believability rather than illusory “realism”) and the abstract, which, if employed as a portal to other states or issues, only leads us back into the world of figuration anyway. Paintings need not try to evoke.

In early middle age, with his eyesight already failing, he moved ever deeper into pastel, sculpture, print and photography. The directness of pastel as a medium, in particular, now suited him far better: it allowed him to stay in constant contact with the surface of the image, whilst holding its colour throughout each gesture; whereas paint has to be applied with greater strategy. Paint is not as responsive to the drawn line, as it literally runs out and needs topping up; whereas a pastel line keeps going. Pastel can be applied effectively over extended time periods, whereas paint can end up like sludge if subjected to the same approach. It needs to dry, be scraped back, and reworked, in order to arrive at the same freshness that a drawing can evince almost by default.

Ingres – never the most painterly of artists – famously advised Degas to “Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist.” He clearly never forgot this encounter, as his development as a draughtsman was remarkable: his grasp of form- in particular, the human form- is the ‘spine’ that runs through his life’s work. Ironically, however, it was this very response to form that I believe stopped him from advancing his colour. Colour clothes form, as the saying goes, thereby preventing it from fulfilling its illusory connection with our perception of three dimensions; and conversely, when colour seeks to go off on its wild adventures, tone is often used to regain the articulation of form.

In Two Dancers, there is a terrific insouciance of handling: it looks as if Degas couldn’t care less. We are presented with a yellow wall- or is it a mirror?- one can’t be sure, because the frenzied blue suggestion of what looks like a figure of sorts floats in the top left corner; perhaps a third dancer? The yellow blazes above the ballerina tying her laces, and the shadows under the bench appear like charring on a sodden-looking floor. The picture offers a narrative of ghost-like forms lurching in the depths of some macabre burned-out theatre. The right-hand figure is agonizingly posed, and seems drained of colour, its life and anatomical certainty dissolving in bluish green. The image becomes ever more grotesque and compelling as we look at it; yet in spite of its hallucinatory intensity, we are returned to the world of form with a thud; the black outlines weight the figures, delineating and drawing them back from the spectral into the everyday: the blue scrawled figure is now nothing more than an echo of the harrowing journey.

Degas used colour remarkably expressively, and made some beautiful statements in pastels; yet in spite of their fulgence, they feel like coloured drawings, rather than works that possess the essential plasticity of a painting: he was, as he himself observed, “a colourist with line.” In these -admittedly highly seductive- pastels, the light is local rather than synthetic, and the colour is serving the form: in theoretical terms, it is orientating itself against the vertical axis of tone rather than moving through the spiralling orbits of hue.

I must say that even though I do not hold Degas the painter in as high esteem as, say, Manet, I think he was the greater draughtsman of the two; and I still gorge on those pastels, which are like cream cakes for the eyes – a delicious treat. That some of his drawings stand up to anything that came out of the renaissance was an opinion, I believe, that John Berger held. I wouldn’t contradict that view.

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From the Paint Face: Two 2018: Published by Instant loveland →

Paul Cézanne died in 1906, and his work became a touchstone of great painting for the century that unfolded, indeed, for our current one too – an oeuvre against which all works can be (often unfavourably) measured. “The father of us all” as Picasso said. I am aware that this is not a view held by all, or possibly even by the many, these days; yet to ‘get’ Cézanne is to appreciate the opportunity that the principles of his work provide us for a liberation in our own art and, as I will explain, how his work also offers a litmus test for the progressive values of a modern society.

The name Cézanne immediately conjures up images of choppy interwoven brushstrokes. At first glance, his mature paintings have the appearance of a distinctively systematic approach – every painting just screams “Cézanne”, but to generalise about his painting in this way is a misreading, as throughout his work we find a remarkable breadth of enquiry: the vast array of unique responses to complex vistas, outcrops and forests of the landscape around Aix; the meditative qualities he wrought from his mesmerising still-life works, or those unforgettable portraits; and let’s not forget the legendary sequences of monumental bather compositions he worked on slavishly throughout the latter years of his life. Although he worked with still-life and figures, Cézanne was ultimately a landscape painter. His table-top works became tumbling terrains; faces, furniture and clothing have a topography to them. In all his paintings we can see masses and volumes maintaining their structural integrity whilst being reconciled as worked paint upon the flatness of the canvas surface. Each volume realised by Cézanne has a massive presence akin to that of a geological feature. In all his work three dimensions are successfully and expressively translated into two through a rigorous synthesis. Witness how much tougher Cézanne was with his space than, say, Gauguin, whose exotic, ‘Cloisonniste” patchwork of colours-as-spaces feels far less robust and more generalised by comparison.

Cézanne’s subjects of landscape, still-life and figures are the keystones of representational art. In spite of this visual triad, he will forever be most remembered for, and associated with, the rocky terrain of Mont Saint-Victoire , a motif to which he responded with such an amazing amount of invention – one which lesser artists would seek merely to depict as a ‘scene’. If you have ever walked or driven through Provence near Aix and wondered “will I recognise the mountain?” you will surely – with hindsight – have ended up laughing at the stupidity of that question. How can you miss it? Such is the distinctive character of the mountain. It is enormous, an imposing and unforgettable feature of the landscape – rising majestically out of the plains, conjuring up associations with- of all things- “Devil’s Rock” in the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Hokusai’s prints of Mount Fuji, with their frequent wilful shifts of perspectives employed to fit the formal requirements of compositional elements within a rectangle, offer an intriguing landscape precedent (though the conical volcano was more of a witnessing presence to the unfolding drama of life played out around it). For Cézanne, Mont Saint-Victoire became an ever more dominant centre-stage character as its undulating terrain yielded an inexhaustible amount of relational detail to his gaze. Maybe Rembrandt’s self-portraits would be a better comparison? They too reveal a persistent interrogation of a familiar reality.

In the mature landscape work of Cézanne we see tautly constructed spaces, all made with a seemingly generic palette of greens, earths and blues. This is a great lesson from Cézanne: look at the obvious but place ever-greater demands upon it. I often remind myself to “keep it simple, do it well”, Cézanne was not a complicated artist. He learned from Pissarro not only to observe but to ‘step in’ to the observation, to work a painting, and we see him constantly building subtle transitions to make each segment of his painting breathe. This bearing down on every moment, every instance of paint-colour is what marks his art out from others’ – for it is the colour, and how intensely it is committed to in the stroke, that counts. Cézanne teaches us to not take anything for granted. He never drifts into generalisation. How badly we need this quality in public life now. We are wandering about indifferently in an iPod oblivion whilst the most pernicious corporate coup is taking hold of our lives; we see cliché after cliché being trumped out shamelessly by journalists in both fringe and mainstream media, and in the case of the unfolding Brexit miasma, anyone with a degree of expertise is treated as a ‘turn’, or worse, castigated as ‘unpatriotic’ for daring to ask questions of the detail.  These attitudes are trickling down into our schools, where intelligence and an eagerness to learn are mocked and bullied as ‘swotty’. New role models are making exploitative money and fame at all costs has become the true measure of success. Why do we celebrate the vulgar and the trivial, and treat integrity with suspicion?

Cézanne said: “A healthy need for the truth takes hold of you”. Truths can be difficult to stomach, demanding to be absorbed and acted on; yet ultimately they are what we build our ethical values and societal laws upon. He is a flag bearer for an uncompromisingly intelligent art: and by implication, for a life lived with integrity.

Thanks to Cézanne’s labours, pictorial space is opened up to us in ways which compel our eyes to move in constant delight throughout his paintings. During these moments of movement we are continually interrogating the realities, surprises and truths of forthright decision-making. As our eyes move we too are moved at the humanity latent in these subtle yet powerfully-orchestrated coloured forces. An eye scans back and forth across complexity such as this and takes in space both near and far. Movement is subject to time; yet a painting is apprehended at light speed, so ironically, it hits us in one go, as a stillness (Cézanne: “You either see a painting straight away or you never see it.”) A stillness, however, that seems to burn and breathe, rather that one that lies inert. Herein lies Cézanne’s great triumph – the extreme pressure that is exerted, in his best paintings, between these two states: stillness and flux.

Shortly after the new Marseille-Aix line opened in late 1877, Cézanne saw the mountain from the train, and in a letter to Emile Zola a few months later, praised it for being a “beau motif” and began the series of Mont Saint-Victoires soon after.

This work, in the collection at Princeton University, is slightly unusual in its vertical proportions, with the mountain cutting through the top third. The creamy band of earth at the bottom is cleverly ‘cut into’ by those thin trunks, making the space work rather than flattening the area down to a narrow ‘skirt’ of colour. I am particularly impressed by the way the colours meet the edge, pulsing in and out from surface to distance as the rhythms of each macro-passage take hold in our perception. The staccato orange roofline makes a lovely long distance call to the blue ‘thumbs-up’ towards the top left. In these paintings from the final years of his life, he was creating massive pressures, checking and adjusting the colour with every brushstroke, subtly changing direction, and giving a rich nuance to every hue with the use of the most delicate of half-tones. The works of his last couple of years sweat their colour, and each mark earns its place, feeling really bedded in to the painting, fully functional in the manner in which it describes – not depicts – the forms and interrelational spaces of the landscape. It is pointless to try to place a time, or even a season, with Cézanne, as the paintings have often been worked on over years until reaching their own timeless state. This particular one is like a thunderclap; it feels quiet, then bang, it hits you. Those areas of raw canvas superficially beg the question: finished? It looks pretty resolved to me. It’s a simple work really: a mountain, sky, some trees, and a bit of land in between with the odd building on it.

Cézanne, intertwining his fingers: “That’s what has to be achieved… if I pass too high or too low, everything is ruined. There mustn’t be one single stitch which is too loosely woven, not one gap through which emotion, light, truth might escape. You see I develop my whole canvas at once as a unity. Everything disparate I bring together in one outburst, one act of faith…All that we see dissipates, moves on(…) it must be conveyed. And through colours, without literary means.”

In schools and colleges, Art students are quite often encouraged to “research” a subject, theme or issue that can reveal some intriguing information. The thinking goes like this: seek out something you can feel strongly about, get some facts or images together, let all this information help shape a response, the more intense or personal, the more ‘significant’ the art that can be made. Fine, admirable even, in promoting intelligence and curiosity, yet what ends up being made is highly personal in intent but invariably generic in its content as art – a sort of ‘beige carb’ art, to put it in the current parlance. Cézanne’s lesson would be the antithesis of this: look at the ordinary, at what’s around you, and how it exists, and at your materials even; take nothing for granted and discover a response that forces you to bring more to the table  – to invent, to imagine, to scrutinise, to synthesise… to question how we truly perceive our world, how we see and how a human being can impose themselves purposefully within the space between sight and action. When Cézanne is painting you can see decisions constantly being made; a working-things-out as problems arise. This discovery in the moment affords us, as viewers, great freedom to enjoy the spontaneous and revel in the surprises that simple colour-upon-colour brings. Although I maintain that abstract painting offers the most uncompromised of approaches, ultimately, it doesn’t matter what art one is pursuing, what matters is how believable it ends up being. Cézanne’s greatest achievement was his complete and utter believability, achieved through humility, dedication and an ambition for a powerful specificity.

If more students were challenged to interrogate, to look rather than plan, to react as things unfold; if more people were tasked with examining details, looking beyond clichés or generalisations; if more kids who were clever and curious were respected for these attributes…you get the picture. Cézanne: “ I paint as I see and as I feel, and I feel very strongly.”

Keep it simple, do it well, and give us something we can believe in.

Cézanne’s palette (according to Emile Bernard):

 Yellows:

Brilliant Yellow

Naples Yellow

Chrome Yellow

Yellow Ochre

Raw Sienna

Reds:

Vermilion (the most popular red until Cadmium Red came on the scene in 1907)

Red Ochre

Burnt Sienna

Rose Madder

Carmine Lake

Burnt Lake

Greens:

Emerald Green

Viridian

Green Earth (Verona Green)

Blues:

Cobalt Blue

Ultramarine

Prussian Blue

Peach Black (grey black made from burnt peach stones)

Lead White (warm white)

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From the Paint Face: One 2018: Published by Instant Loveland →

Picasso, whilst living in the Bateau-Lavoir (has there ever been another such mythologically romantic place in all of art history?) would often visit the Cirque-Medrano – a popular circus located in the area that would also house the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette- and the characters he witnessed there informed the subject-matter for many of his post-Blue Period Rose paintings. The large Les Saltimbanques (1905), at 7ft x 8ft, has held my attention as a painting for many years, and in fact is an early major work that intrigues me more than the notorious Demoiselles D’Avignon painted two years later. Ironically, unlike the incendiary Demoiselles, in the Saltimbanques the paint itself is doing the majority of the work; the painting looks very comfortable in its own skin. There’s the interesting storyline about who is who in the work: Apollinaire being the tubby jester, Andre Salmon or Max Jacob the tall acrobat, and Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier the female figure on the periphery.

The composition can be traced via Manet, to the spareness in a great Goya, and further back to Roman and Greek figures – witness the pose of Fernande (even with a dislocated articulation of fingers). The figures themselves conjure up comparisons with Giotto in their deployment of facial shadows used for structuring the cranium. In fact, the whole work is dripping with an historical classicism that reveals Picasso’s artistic DNA. His connection with the classical underpinned all areas of his work until his death. Picasso is a covert colourist, and this work demonstrates just how in control he could be with his colour; the earths which just keep going are future indicators of those late easel work pyrotechnics, which have a similar painting out of space rather than a filling in of it. Unlike Matisse, who championed the importance of colour in building space and creating luminosity, Picasso would brag about running out of blue and using red instead – colour was just a filler, so to speak. Yet I don’t buy this bravado; Picasso is letting the colour do the work of building the space of the desolate hinterland that these characters have settled in. The brushstrokes swing about and weave oiled-out earths and chalky blues. Each of the characters has clothing the colours of which come out of this ground space, with its tempered hues reclaimed by the landscape; their presence is immutable, statue-like and heroic in disposition, as a stark counterpoint to the animated busyness of the colour space surrounding them.

During the same year that Picasso was mooching about Montmartre, Matisse was down in Collioure, towards the Spanish border, painting some of his greatest – soon to be known as – Fauvist works. His Landscape at Collioure (1905), a study for the seminal Bonheur de Vivre, is a work that I have prized all my adult life – so much so that in my twenties I made a special journey to Copenhagen to see it. Matisse used to joke that Fauvism was when it had red in it; yet this work is a symphony in predominantly secondary colours – the reds are mere accents to the magical invention of brushed colour and rhythmic linear elements (again, always reading as colour). This is a work that ‘destroyed’ painting in much more brutal ways than Miró ever wilfully managed – by not trying too hard to ‘look like art’. As if in a moment of prescience that illuminates his connection with the emphatic frontality of Russian Icon painting that he went on to explore in subsequent years, the paint in this work stings against the canvas, drum-like in its tension; that sudden chilling of mountain stream water to the throat as one drinks on a hot day – the colour here startles and shocks in its clarity. The surface has an emphatic ‘slap-panel’ quality to it, and although the space is palpable as landscape, it refuses to yield to the conventions of foreground and background – the colour has an aerated quality and the familiar perfume of pine trees pervades (if you have experienced that). It is so ‘real’ as a landscape due to the unique catalysing of its synthesis, yet it lives in the shadows of the great Bonheur, which of course has figures in it, and, as such, an immediate connection with historical subject matter. Picasso seems the better for these links whereas Matisse (ironically, the inveterate bourgeois) is at his best when the shackles of Europe are slewed off. Picasso is a draughtsman who excelled at line and tone – two elements that are symbiotically connected to form and figuration; whereas Matisse, the man of hue, has become a gatekeeper for abstract art.

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Space in Painting and Sculpture (Part 1) 2017: Published by Abcrit →

The qualities of abstract art – painting or sculpture –  are often pitted unfavourably against figurative art. Most art that I look at is indeed figurative. If I want to see great art, it will invariably mean going to see historical figurative painting. Of course I enjoy looking at abstract art and could not imagine making anything but abstract painting. Apart from the very occasional, idle foray into figuration – ‘sans le même désespoir’ – I have been at the abstract paint face, so to speak, for the best part of thirty years. I ponder the relationship between these two worlds frequently. What is it about Cézanne and Matisse, or Titian or Goya and so on that makes me continually return to their work – like going to a well for water?

There is clearly a chasm in time frames between abstract art and great historical figuration, which is able to call upon a massively larger canon of achievement, casting abstract art in the role of a veritable parvenu by comparison. I once wrote – as a throwaway really –  that abstract art must meet the challenges of figurative art on its own terms and not on those of figuration. I wasn’t exactly sure at the time what I meant by that!

I was in my studio the other day and those words re-surfaced when considering a few paintings – not in any swaggering challenge to figuration but in terms of what exactly can I achieve in my work? From time to time, like most artists, I sit on a not-quite-comfortable chair gazing dejectedly at my abject offerings to the burgeoning volume of abstract painting as they peer back at me from the walls.

Abcrit has thrown up some important areas of discourse since its re-incarnation from Abstract Critical and a chunk of it has helped crystallise feelings about what are areas of concern for me to deal with in my own work too. One issue I feel that has bobbed along like plastic flotsam spoiling the tranquil oceans of literary bias in the visual arts is that of “Space”… the final frontier… This issue has caused such a great deal of debate and even misunderstandings between people; debates which are often akin to watching separate polarities in a two magnets resisting their connection.

Space seems at its most ambitious and exciting to behold in figurative painting and sculpture; the reconciliation of three-dimensions on two or the animation of the air as limbs turn through it. What can poor old abstract art offer by comparison? One could say that space is something that has not really been top of the list of achievements in abstract art. Colour has enjoyed some moments in the sun for painting, materiality too, process has played a huge role, as has design. And in abstract sculpture? Everything and the dog next door has “occupied” space – albeit sometimes in beguiling or tasteful ways. Architectonic configurations have offered false dawns as have limb-like assemblages. There is much online tussling over historical precedents, influences, relationships and contexts in sculpture, all of it usually very welcome – especially for younger artists getting to grips with their own work (I have been told this on more than one occasion); heat creates metamorphoses and grit creates pearls.

Amidst all this debate and discussion I wanted to point to two moments that have informed my thinking about space. The first was the coffee-fuelled disdain at my own work and a sudden clarification about space in painting; and the other was a quote from Mark Skilton when discussing forging  (this I read after I had started this article and it dovetailed nicely with the sentiments I wanted to discuss, so I thought I’d flag it up). Mark mentioned how forging “was compressing the space within the steel, sealing it off from the space around it, isolating the content of the work within the material presence rather than in a spatial presence.” “Sealing it off from the space around it” – just think about that for a moment… I did and it chimed with my studio moment. In fact it helped inform my thinking on figurative space and abstract space and their respective characteristics.  Thoughts are never permanent, I know, but at this moment in time, these are hanging around ominously.

Figurative space is indeterminate because of its duality.  That duality is its virtue. Take a good painting of a landscape for example and that painting does not rely on its physical size to deliver its content as much as its illusory relationship, through rendering, suggestion or even evocation, to a known – external – reality. It could be any size and the pictorial space is not affected. Yes, we have a physically different engagement with larger or smaller works but ultimately the figuration controls the space.

My most recent paintings are around 6 x 4 ft in proportion. I have been on this size for over a year now and I started to realise, whilst considering how the colour was working, the implications for space. Space is not something I go looking for, to be honest; articulating colour means things happen that I can’t predict and spaces occur through these ‘happenings’. I can’t pre-determine a defined space in my paintings. What dawned on me was that all the space I could deliver in these paintings, would be up to twenty-four square feet – any suggestion of “more” and I would say it was “leaking” and dissipating in impact; any less and it’s compromised in its delivery.

My paintings have to deliver the amount of space that they occupy. That yellow is there, that blue is there, they may do “something” together as all my colours try to, but all this “something” will amount to and can amount to in these works, is – if I’m lucky – twenty-four square feet.

I have also written about how abstract art can provide a “haptic sense of space”, but I now realise that abstract pictorial space has a size limitation too, yet it is one which is not necessarily limited in expression. Maximise the space on offer and that will be considerable; one does not have to try to suggest more. Abstract paintings often leave the space in an indeterminate state – perhaps paint-marks existing as the non-essential, tasteful detritus of the painting activity, washes which could be liminal spaces from vistas, frenzied splashes as signifiers of earnest ambition; it can often add up to somewhere else rather than what’s really in front of our eyes. Furthermore, this indeterminateness is often celebrated as being “evocative” – some sort of numinous experience can be had by looking “in” to this mysterious hinterland of the visual. Indeterminate space in abstract art is a benign, non-threatening space; a space where our egos love to roam – probably explaining how prickly or even intimidatory things become when it’s discussed. Many artists are often turned off by this type of discussion; those of a shy temperament perhaps. I for one will say to those people: Please contribute, debate, argue or disagree where you see fit to… park your ego at the door.

Thinking about abstract sculpture: Figuration in sculpture could be said to have been replaced often in its content by ‘tastefully’ chosen bits of steel. This has been abstract sculpture’s way of competing with the complexities of figuration – configure some interesting components, maybe even refer to something figurative – a hook to lure one in on. Many sculptors do this – make sculptures that rely upon juicy forms in an artful repose which have the feel of figurative, sculptural space about them. Sometimes it can be eye-catching and I would point out that I have no problem with this as a way of working (or any other personal “style” – artists are hardly the bad guys) if that is what interests you, Nor am I opposed to any sort figurative painting made today (I would even admit readily to Basquiat being a guilty pleasure) but, I need to echo Mark’s words here again – “the space is sealed off”. It  becomes indeterminate (perhaps this is why maquettes are required for public sculpture – not just for costings or commissioning juries but for everyone to control the space rather than hand it over to the sculptor to deal with as an integral element of the decision-making – that leap of faith would never pass the committee stage would it?). I can enjoy looking at abstracted, suggestive, filmic or designed painting as much as the next person but with the hefty caveat that they are ultimately “compromised” as an art-form, therefore none of it is something that would overly concern or challenge me when I am in my own studio. Furthermore, I believe that there is in fact a difference between figurative and abstract art.  I do not agree it is only about being “good”. I respect the words of many who say this, but these words – again – are not going to help me in my studio. I take it for granted that I am trying to make things that are good, we all are – who isn’t? (There are some, so don’t answer that, it just induces sighs.) Is that ambition enough though… really?

Returning to the figurative art I prize the highest and taking Cézanne as a prime example: Although the spaces he makes are figurative, it is highly relevant that the main criticism about his work has been its lack of ‘atmosphere’ – in the traditional sense. No landscape was ever “captured” by Cézanne; instead one is constructed, synthesised, and in this synthesis, every stroke is really there as an autonomous reality. This lack of atmosphere is actually a lack of “leakage”.

A painting ends at its limits and everything is contained by those limits. Yet what of a sculpture? Where does the space end in an abstract sculpture?  “Assemblage” characterises a significant amount of abstract sculpture. It is collagic in nature: pieces are joined through welds or glues. These pieces are usually found or formed and ‘brought in’ to the work. As such there will be spaces to deal with. How much abstract sculpture shuts out the issue of space, though, preferring to explore issues of form and materiality? In this modus, abstract sculpture would seem to be operating within the shadows of figurative art, which by stark comparison has an endless ‘library’ of forms to work with.

As I said, getting tasty pieces of steel was one way of challenging this library – the truth is that it often ends up appearing as a second-hand bookstore by comparison; nice to browse in from time to time perhaps. Beautiful objects were another incentive to make abstract sculpture.  Post Caro, our highest profile sculptors produce “interesting” three-dimensional objects or figures rather than really challenging sculpture. An object has a poetry ready and waiting to come out; it yearns for its own history, like the long-serving French President Mitterrand did on the day of his inauguration. He walked amongst the Parisian tombs of the greats of the past – at once wanting the world to see that he could and would be identified as one of them. A solemnity was what he desired.  He had one eye on his death before he even took office. Great figurative art is apprehended with that same solemnity. Artists often go looking for it too. It becomes a search for a content that can be discussed independently between artist and viewer over a glass of wine at someone else’s show. Yet you can’t discuss space as easily – no matter how much alcohol is present. Space is invariably the thing that we move through to look at most sculpture rather than the stuff we engage with, when we get there.

As a painter, I do not have to face the challenges of the competing, enclosing space of the room, gallery or environment in such an intrusive way as a sculptor does. A sculptor will have to make a sculpture that negates that space unless they are ‘installing’ a work which obviously has to exist in a dialogue with it.

I have looked at quite a bit of sculpture in recent years and much of it I find hugely challenging. One thing in particular that I enjoy is the specificity that a good sculpture has.  I am also intrigued by the point at which the space stops being active. Is this in some way proportionate to the internal spaces and ultimately conditioned by the intrinsic nature of the material itself? In short you can’t make more space than you have material to make it with. If this is so, wouldn’t scale be of paramount importance? (scale is another thing that obsesses me). Scale in sculpture would come from the inter-relational dialogues of the component parts and their consequential air-spaces. A repeated size of parts has the problem of limiting the scale and making the sculpture seem small; too big a contrast and the space ruptures. It’s a fine balancing act (in painting too). Putting larger elements in and integrating them in a sculpture can provide a potentially stronger spatial facility and thus a more potently expressive work. We look in admiration at the way performers command the stage. They have a confidence in their own abilities to perform due to much rehearsal and sweat which ensures that high level of performance; it’s all about confidence rather than bravado. Bravado feels more at home on our screens these days.

The virtual space of the screen is forgiving and quite benevolent towards images of artwork which have wildly differing visual qualities – levelling them out as experiences, whilst providing little or no feel for their spatial realities. Good paintings often suffer a death through glass in this way. Spare a thought for sculpture though, as three-dimensional space is a contradiction in terms to a screen image. Sculptures degrade to approximated illusions on screens. Advanced eyes are adept at patching up these shortfalls… to an extent; looking forwards not back, seeing possibilities, rather than contexts. It takes a degree of education to fully understand context, yet we live in a pernicious age for education, we are seeing the rise of contextual ghettos: Those who can appear to “get it”, and those who are regarded as “making do”. Woody Allen once said “life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television”.  Looking forwards means grasping the implications for space as a set of problems and opportunities rather than just a way of re-confirming prior experiences – new covers for the same old chairs. It is fine to flaunt a contextual understanding but clean fingernails don’t make civilised populations. A conspiracy theorist would point to the savagery that exists in funding for the creative arts or languages as part of an engineering of society to disengage from any meaningful questioning of the status quo.

I have no answers to the dilemma of screen imagery, other than to be more and more demanding of surface and colour in my own studio, for I feel I can only discover space through these elements – the kind of space which will reveal itself to me, I have no idea of. Considering space as a palpable entity to be discovered rather than something to be pre-determined, suggested or alluded to forces me to bear down on the realities of my decision-making and I hope any space made through these elements would have an energy about it. This kind of space would probably be all the space I would need. Space in painting and sculpture is mysterious, it appears where and when we least expect it and greets us in our silences as we sip our coffees and stare into somewhere in front of us.

Franco Lecca, the director of photography on the hypnotic, Italian detective series “Inspector Montalbano” said the following: “My goal is to make beautiful light. In Sicily, the light is corpuscular. it seems non-crystalline but made up of many little particles of light, diffused in the sky, in the air itself, in the transparency. It’s like it occupies a space between the viewer and the things that are there. It’s a kind of light, how can I say… that’s excessive. It’s strong, excessive and suggests a solitude… this Sicilian light.”

Strong, excessive and suggests a solitude…

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Alan Gouk: 2017 (Published by Abcrit) →

Alan Gouk: New Abstract Colour Paintings  28 March – 12 May 2017, Hampstead School of Art

Elephints a-pilin’ teak

In the sludgy, squdgy creek,

Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!

On the road to Mandalay…

Rudyard Kipling: A Road to Mandalay (from his Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, 1892)

Alan Gouk last exhibited at Hampstead School of Art in 2014: a series of gouache and acrylic on paper paintings marked by an overt fluidity of handling. Soups of primary and secondary colours were brushed, pushed and dragged into some of Gouk’s signature configurations: vertical gestures often animated with curves and leaning diagonals, set against supportive or disruptive horizontals. Working with this sort of liquidity and with this palette forces a painter to deal with brown; primaries end up there when all mixed – sometimes fatally, other times splendidly. This is the risk run and painting in this way is akin to driving on a cliff road – add speed into the equation and it can be quite a ride.

Hampstead School of Art has since moved into a stylish new bespoke building designed by architects Allies and Morrison and celebrates its 70th year. The modest cafй space providing the gallery walls. As a patron of this establishment, Gouk has reciprocated by moving his painting on too. After the recce of those gouaches, we can see the evidence of a more flowing “in the moment” attack. There were a couple of smaller works on show, but the main protagonists were five large, quite sumptuous paintings in newly adopted acrylics instead of the usual oil paint. Gouk coyly suggested the economy of acrylic was a deciding factor. (Having just purchased a post-Brexit order of acrylics at pre-Brexit prices before they go up 15% this month and finding myself eyeing up more and more lonely post offices in secluded locations, I am not entirely persuaded by that reasoning.) Acrylic flows over larger areas and there are a lot more surface variations that can be employed when compared to oil, especially with the addition of an ever-bewildering variety of facture-determining mediums.

These paintings have a real fizz, bang, wallop quality about them that at first sight stops you in your tracks. Painters paint and trek about visiting exhibitions of others – sometimes out of interest, at other times… courtesy (come on, you’ve all done it!). Gouk is one of only a handful of contemporary painters whose work I would go out of my way to see. Thankfully on this occasion it was an easy drive. You have to see these paintings in the flesh though to really feel their colour in relation to their size and indeed to your own body’s proportions. Screens nullify both facture and scale and I would urge the editor to post an image or two with a figure in the scene and perhaps even a close up to address this, even in a cursory way.

It is worth exploring how the paintings are made, as the tools of the job are brushes and cardboard (apparently in this instance the actual boxes that the brushes came packaged in – that’s a new twist on the recycling logo!). We can trace the use of each of these two applicators: the brush daubs and sweeps colour into rough bands in a very forthright and accumulative way; spreading the colour and working it into ordered areas until an amount of colour arrived at “feels right.” The box is used to drag colour through other colour – wet into wet. Indeed the paintings retain an alla-prima freshness of execution. You can see that there have been several or numerous “sessions”, but the evidence of one colour sitting on top of another from a different session is not as strongly felt as the amount of “in one hit” painting. It looks like a lot of the painting has been put down, then a whole new painting or at least a significant part of one is laid over the top (such is the bravery of “Gouka Din”).

When a wet colour is dragged into another wet colour, the stakes are high – unforeseen outcomes are a gainsaid (of all ambitious painting for that matter). In this regard Gouk’s hands are a little tied. Use a complement and the cliff’s edge awaits, so a gamut of analogous colours are used instead. Greens drag through yellows and vice-versa, creating limes, reds through purples and purples through magentas. Blue is often bonded with white, and white is used to kick areas into a bristling effervescence. The paintings are stacked with these heady effects. Reds smolder with an insouciant menace in shadowy plums or rusts. We are staring at colour used in molten ways. The gestures are deliberately confrontational, addressing us front on, like a troop of soldiers on leave; some stand cheek by jowl, others sprawl or lean as if drunk on sun and alcohol – burned by the heat of an exotic climate and bewildered by its alien treasures.

Actor Fred Proud can be seen on You Tube giving a remarkable reading of Kipling’s Road to Mandalay. This rendition re-awakened lines which had popped into Gouk’s head as he was working on a painting way back in 1986, which in turn sparked an interest to revisit some paintings, in his view, which were unresolved. This information conjuring up a thematic aroma to the proceedings, with titles referencing the poem throughout. Make no mistake though, there is no illustrative or figurative link with poem or place evident. Yet the qualities of these works, their other worldliness and their pictorial ambition for an intense, pressing hedonistic colour space, positively revels with such an association. Nostalgia can swagger every bit as much as nihilism, so it is therefore important not to drift into the reveries of distant places like an off duty squaddie. Stand up straight laddie, there are paintings to be made! Thankfully Gouk doesn’t yield to the temptations of allusion – temptations so evidently given in to by so many high(er) profile painters.

The unforgettable example on show is “Mandalaysian Orchid” – by general consensus the belle of the ball –  “Supi-yaw-lat”. Like the others on show there is a sweaty, tropical temperature evident in the colour juxtapositions. The whole thing would burn out such is the acidity of the dark to light tonal shifts, if it wasn’t for the welcome cooling of a buttery lilac centre stage and a backhand flicked blue cuffed off to swim upwards and shunt into the welcoming corner of anthraquinone and dioxazine. A wonderfully applied pink at the top leaves a glimpse of an ice-cream roughneck ancestor to complete the dousing job. Like all the paintings on show, the regularity of vertical and horizontal holds sway, but, as in all of them, there is a simmering disquiet in the relationship of these forces, which adds a frisson to the work. To the left, we see a curmudgeonly cadmium lurch into the scene, propped up by a spindly streaky green that doesn’t quite stop the red from laying a finger on a friendly orange  – a nudging plea to be allowed into the party.

Although this is the stand out painting, I want to make a play for something that is going on in another. “Mephistopheles (Mandalay No15)” has a lot more awkwardness about it. Indeed it doesn’t quite hang together. There is an uneasy cappuccino brown which hooks into a deep phthalo green and streaky grey creating a sort of hole in the gut of the painting. Although this coffee looks out of place amidst the bacchanalian antics of the other colours, it does attempt a sobering moment. Also the whole right hand side has a fluttery invention in the way that the colour sits on or under a neighbour and cascades up to the top. I couldn’t take my eyes of the deep vat orange which straddles a dragged whitened purple and grey, especially as the edge is the original stained lilac showing its canvas weave in an airy release of space at the corner. There is something telling happening in these colours and I would like to see more of it. Would it perhaps be prudent to bring these softer earths and muted hues into the spotlight more to give the big guns more room to breathe – perhaps even by throttling back on the dragging box technique? The whole painting has an unpredictability that suggests it will repay on repeated visits with its secrets remaining intact for some time yet.

The paintings are worked on the stretcher from all sides and at some point an orientation presents itself. The ensuing gravity is then honed to an equilibrium. They sometimes have a “base level” of colour and sit up off that, getting to the top, which frequently has darker colours lurking about, either overtly or covertly enclosing and compressing the spaces. Coloured gestures and patches spread, squeeze or accelerate and often bump into one another in uneasy and at times claustrophobic ways. It is the saturation of colour that often rebuts any ungainliness, though not always; one or two passages had a dry stone wall build-ness which could have been lifted with more subtle transitions of hue, and some passages did lapse into tenebrous depths. The essentially frontal configurations shut down on any illusory devices. Illusions happen with colour, so why force them? Gouk prefers to maintain his focus on the primacy of immediate colour responses; put it on and see where it goes, what happens next will be something to deal with in due course, rather than worry about beforehand. I was trying to figure out a lineage here and although Hofmann and Heron, Motherwell even, could be cited, I am not convinced that any of them is a true ancestor. I’m sure that certain vernacular qualities raise their head from time to time which do connect Gouk with these three, but I would prefer to go back to Matisse’s “Moroccans” – a right bugger of a painting with a hard-wrought resolution that Matisse won his spurs on. It does no twisting and turning to present its mordant logic to us, rather it hits us head on – directly, unrelentingly; large – at first glance – cumbersome passages of paint gather their momentum and end up reaching an uneasy victory of pictorial unity. Each area of the painting is architecturally different to another. This is something that I see in Gouk’s painting – a declarative and specific construction of part to part relationships that neither exist as a process nor as a compositional device, though “Theebaw’s Queen” flirted with one. I think it boils down to an ‘honesty’ in the approach.

Gouk eschews any understated handling in favour of the power hit and there is no “knowing” device used to corral any reading of a fictive illusory space. This is a strength of the work; however, sometimes a little more sensitive variety of handling in the facture with some concessions to earths and more nuanced tertiaries in the palette would enhance their emotional reach even further. Then again I could equally well see him go the other way and make those high key chromatics career off each other in ever more explosively abrupt ways. The prize of such choices has to be earned by the hard yards in the studio. Which brings me to my final point: the directness and forthrightness of colour could appear to some as an obvious, even matter of fact thing to do; just get the big colours out of the tub, wing them around and hey presto another blockbuster abstract painting is born. It sounds simple doesn’t it? It’s not! Painting such as this takes a massive amount of dedication to one’s art. Not enough is made of this fact. Abstract painting with this ambition and clarity of purpose does not come easily.

“An there ain’t no ‘busses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay”… (though the 113 runs from Edgware Road and stops round the corner – go see.)

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Can we consider colours as purely subjective forces? 2017: (Published by RA Magazine) →

Can we consider colours as purely subjective forces?

From the Spring 2017 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

No...

Artist Emyr Williams argues that colours are objective forces that can create a unified whole in painting.

Jackson Pollock once said: “The problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country”. The same goes for colour in painting, which is neither sociologically determined nor culturally dependent.

Paintings constructed through colour are capable of such surprising and unforeseen visual delight, transcending the mechanics of their making. This “beyondness” is only possible when the artist is disinterested in colour to the point that it serves a greater purpose than the office of taste-making. I am not talking here about systematically made optical art. Colour can build the perception of a haptic, perceived space when the execution is spontaneous. It’s about working in the moment and reacting to the colour as the work takes shape.

Matisse’s great “Vence interiors” from the late 1940s are paintings that have achieved this particular state of gestalt. His organisation, of what are essentially primary and secondary colours, is such that the surfaces seem to glow.

Colours and their juxtapositions operate here as forces which, although seemingly in competition with one another, somehow unify into a summative whole, generating pictorial light and opening out space to us in a heady, palpable way. Using colour as a fact of pigment quality rather than cultural association, and finding expression by the control of its facture, is to bear down on the objective reality of what colour is and can be. Furthermore, to produce art with this ambition invites an interrogation of how we relate to colour in our wider lives.

For an artist wishing to use colour with such an intent, considerations of extrinsic colour association are weights, not levers. People can experience colour differently due to physical anomalies, but cultural biases can become restrictive and even produce schisms. We must search for content in our art forms that avoids courting the subjective interpretation of imposed narratives.

Cultures respond to colour in their own unique ways. Lifestyle, belief systems, valuation of materials, pigment scarcity – all these have affected peoples’ regard for, and judgement of, colour. But does this pragmatism turn us into prisoners of subjectivity, desperately looking for an affirmation of our relationship to colour?

Colour, revealed through visible light reflected upon a surface, is a minuscule percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum. This tiny fraction of reality is what we see. Why muddy the purity of this reality by seeking to trap it in the habitual?

Clichés such as ‘dark colours are serious’ and ‘primaries are frivolous’ almost compel us to be ashamed of any meaningful engagement with colour. If we wish to search for the universal, then we have to get beyond the local.

There is an old saying: a three-legged stool finds its level. The three primary colours are the building blocks of a palette. When I am painting, any applied colour will compete with an existing or subsequent hue. To put these three primaries into a work and unify them is a great challenge. I find it useful to think of any colour with the word ‘a’ in front of it. So it would be ‘a red’ instead of just ‘red’, raising a question of how should I temper or tune this red and what consequences of using it thus could I discover. I am looking for conflict repeatedly, and strategies emerge to deal with these conflicts as I paint.

Painting forces me to look at colour with a curious scrutiny, one which feels like I am looking at something external to myself. When I see colour in this way it gives me something to believe in. It doesn’t feel like it comes from me, though – I am searching constantly… objectively.

John Hoyland 2016: (Published by Abcrit) →

John Hoyland, Power Stations, Paintings 1964-1982 is at Newport Street Gallery, London SE11, 8th October 2015 – 3rd April 2016

Damien Hirst’s new gallery is open for business and, surprisingly perhaps, he has chosen to showcase a particular period of the work of John Hoyland. Power Stations 1964-1982 launches the Newport Street Art Gallery in Vauxhall, London. Although Hirst has mentioned his deliberate challenge to those who say you can’t make and curate at the same time, I would have thought his way of making was very much in tune with the approaches of a curator. Get something interesting into a box, just on this occasion make it a bloody big box. Good for him to do this, though. I’m sure there is a sense of intrigue as to what will come next, but for now we can enjoy the wonderful spaces that this former scene-painting studio houses and get a meaty glimpse of the work of a significant British abstract painter to boot.

John Hoyland was very much the transatlantic painter during this period. The works on show are a European /American fusion; a sort of easel meets west. Big, strident fields of highly chromatic, intensely saturated colours, stained into the canvas, greet us as we enter the ground floor gallery spaces. Initially it’s a ‘wow’ moment; so much abstract painting is rustic and dinky these days that the chance to see works like this is a bit of an oasis in the desert. I am more than ever convinced that when it comes to abstract painting, the bigger the better. Moving through the chromatic fields and giant geometries we walk up stylish stairs to the upper floor to see a series of paintings with more awkward junctures of shapes – diamonds which balance on the edges of paintings and squares that jar against forms or clouds of impastoed colour. There’s little or no let up in the colour intensity. It’s all heady stuff and the gallery space is fantastic.

If red and green fight each other on the ground floor, up here they are now joined by the rest of the crew: blue, yellow, orange and violet. There’s a greater sense of traditional picture making on this floor, albeit a heavy muscular form of painting as in de Staël. Slabs of colour are uncompromisingly flat and frontal. These regular areas of colour often float in watery stains, with drips, spatters and the whole unpredictable residue of heave-ho abstraction laid bare as a supporting cast of features to underpin the solid certainties of the large, flat ‘star’ colours. As singular uniformed entities these types of configuration would look clunky or even mundane, yet the handling of the paint and its variety pictorialises these elements and allows them to sit cheek by jowl in the painting, though it’s more a case of shapes begrudging one another their spaces rather than relating sensitively in a spatial way. Hoyland is a pictorial artist and “in” the painting is a key phrase too. Although he admired the American abstract painters, he eschewed their more singular approaches, feeling it limiting structurally. Unlike Hoyland their use of repetition, stacking and neutral formats got the eye “across” the painting rather than through it. The lateral forces that the American approach produced suited the regular shapes or the all-over-ness better than the pick and choose approach that Hoyland has used. I think this is because of his use of these ‘known’ shapes; we end up with an abstract vernacular type of painting. I agree with his urge to get past the Americans but you can’t expect to fully go beyond them if you keep using their forms, generalized techniques and even configurations. It would be much later that he brought in linearity and overtly hand-drawn elements. His solutions here are to look to Hofmann, yet without the latent cubism that dogged even Hofmann’s most mature works. So frequently we have the cocktail of a high key “teutonic” palette stirred up by the roughly textured surfaces that palette-knives make. Shapes clash and clang about and the transitions jolt as colours butt up against one another. An almost violent use of the diagonal literally splits paintings corner to corner. Hoyland bullies his colours into shapes and bullies his shapes into the limits of the painting: ‘you will fit in there pal, come what may!’

After this wrestling match of colour and shape we have a room dedicated to a series of, at first glance, slightly wayward works with a pastel, plaster, bleached chocolate and vomit palette. If the previous room was a wild party, then this room is definitely the morning after; spatters of acrylic pepper these works as if fired from a paint bazooka. This wilful foray into tints and textures is a clear counterpoint to the full throttle primary/secondary approach that abounds elsewhere. These cooler more subtle shifts of colour relate to each other in more integrated ways and the visual ‘press’ of the colour works in a frontal way. Although they are devoid of any of the angular tensions of the higher keyed works, I was very aware of the lump of paint, the splat of mark or the hewn shape to a greater extent than the full force of the colour. The invention at the surface, though, seemed greater, as if the paint was being made to work harder to compensate for the overt loss of saturation.

It can be a thankless, cheap-shot task to pick holes in someone’s work and it should be worth mentioning – especially to the more literary minded – abstract painting is a very, very hard discipline. Hoyland’s paintings deserve to be seen in these large spaces. He really gave it a lash as they say and the energy of the works is infectious. His best works stand up well to those that he admired across the Atlantic; they lack a certain finesse of colour that you would get in a Noland or an Olitski and sometimes he’s guilty of negating his colour with a wrong ‘un, yet all in all his batting average is pretty good and it would be intriguing to see how they fare next to a Hofmann. Hirst too should be applauded for putting his back and his wallet into such an enterprise. Reading their interview is an enlightening experience; Hoyland comes over as a slightly bemused, avuncular elder painter, yet touched by Hirst’s enthusiasm. Hirst has a quality in his work, though, that Hoyland doesn’t – it’s that bloody-minded singularity. It may well be that lack of stardust that stopped him from reaching the dizzy heights of the Art world. His form of visual poetry perhaps comes out of the sensibility of an Englishman abroad. When it’s hot and sweaty, a T-shirt and flip-flops is better than a collar and rolled-up sleeves.

The stand-out paintings for me were the two works that most successfully incorporated the scale of the mural with the specifics of the easel. 23.7.67 is a large black charcoal ground with three elements on it: a floating top grey bar hovers above a soft glowing scarlet square which sits on the left end of a beautiful simmering violet. The other was on the upper level, Cobalt Glide 10.11.80, with a rather lovely use of warm and cool blues and a melting orange. There were many other sumptuous colours… go and see!

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Seeing Painting in the Flesh: 2015 (Published by RA Magazine) →

Does our perception of a painting rely on the electricity of human encounter?

• From the Summer 2015 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

• Yes...
  
  Paintings can only reveal themselves if we commune with them in person, argues artist Emyr Williams.

Joan Miró once said of Courbet’s painting, A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), “You can feel its power with your back turned to it.” As a schoolboy this remark had intrigued me, my sole reference for the Courbet being a small reproduction in a book. It was only when I saw the painting as an art student that I realised what had so overwhelmed Miró: the mourners are life-size. The sheer scale and ambition of this work is staggering. Conversely, the jewel-like qualities of a small Manet flower painting are dazzling in their modesty. A few years ago I had a visceral need to see and feel the scale of the huge Delacroix works in the Louvre. No other experience of them would do; I simply had to go to Paris.

If you have ever watched a person looking at a painting, it is noticeable how mobile they are, often shifting their weight, or tilting their heads, as if attempting to locate something. Active looking is very physical, yet more paintings are probably seen nowadays digitally than “in the flesh”. For many, the convenience of a screen image suffices. Apologists will argue, convincingly, that our interaction with the virtual is an inevitable point on the trajectory of our developing human intelligence and culture.

Indeed, virtual realities are vitally useful in numerous disciplines – surgery springs to mind immediately. But is there a dehumanising flipside to this technological revolution? Are we disconnecting ourselves from the handmade? Are thousands of years of evolution culminating in our opposing thumbs’ ability to screen swipe?

I believe a painting cannot fulfil itself as “Art” unless one really sees it in person. Reproductions can be an enticing reference or an aide-memoir, yet the electricity of the encounter is missing. A real painting possesses an inherent plasticity formed through human endeavour; it provides us with a haptic sensation of constructed space. Furthermore, we often return to seemingly familiar works only to discover new and unforeseen qualities in them. This regeneration can only happen when our eyes apprehend the surface. The surface: that magical membrane, the point at which the paint stops and the air begins.

In this digital age, painters can ask themselves a simple, significant question: what can I achieve in this medium that I cannot do more effectively in another? As an abstract painter I now feel an urgency to make highly spatial paintings through a very specific control of colour and surface. Colour for me is completely dependent upon surface to make it both physically and emotionally expressive. I am always astonished at how a seemingly innocuous material such as paint achieves such amazing outcomes when handled sensitively. The “coloured glues” of paint, when viewed in reality rather than reproduction, can conjure up wonderful luminous spaces that condense and amplify the sensations we have of seeing and perceiving the world.

A painting for me should aspire to these heightened states of visual stimulation, rather than display itself as a form of entertainment or rely on extrinsic narratives, which other media can employ more readily. Painting needs to seek out more profound visual territory to explore. In any quest to advance painting, artists can learn illuminating lessons from the past. Matisse’s phosphorescent Venice interiors; Cézanne’s revolutionary landscapes; Constable’s daring spatial structures; Titian’s unerringly inventive compositions: all these feel more relevant than ever when seen in the flesh.

Great paintings like these provide a communion that is timeless. The transmitted backlight of a screen or the glossily inked page of a magazine homogenises our spatial perceptions and transforms “looking” into “reading.”  To engage fully with a painting, we need to see its space… in its space. If we forsake opportunities to absorb ourselves in art in this way, we will surely erode one of the more remarkable abilities of our species.

Homage Limitations: 2015 (published by Abcrit) →

Many years ago I was in a dinner party in California given by my cousin. She is an actor and producer and the company she invited was charming and witty and the conversation easy and friendly. I enjoyed it, and it exuded a slightly glamorous atmosphere too, being in a villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One comment though has stuck with me to this day: I was asked “Where are you from?” I answered without thinking, “Wales.” One highly impressed person leaned over to me and in almost hushed tones said: “Wow, that is the spiritual centre of the universe.” Now, I am a proud Welshman and I am always pleased if another nationality knows that Wales exists, let alone passes any kind of familiar comment about it, yet this comment was something I did not see coming at all. I smiled and nodded and thought about this statement… we clearly had very different experiences and ideas of Wales. I assumed he pictured a group of Druids, solemnly striding around a circle of stones, in touch with the forces of nature and the general turning of the universe; whereas I suddenly thought of my home town on a Friday night, when a fellow I was in school with burst into one of the pubs and offloaded two blasts of his shotgun into the ceiling. I won’t name names for legal reasons, though I doubt if he is reading this (and that is a sentence with one word too many). You could say his action was the result of a completely different kind of spirituality.

Artists tend to love Art. We go to galleries, exhibitions and openings. When we are not making Art, we are looking at it or talking about it. We look for it online, we participate in forums, symposia and generally surround and busy ourselves with as much of it as we can. It is our visual food. Yet can our love of Art sometimes be our undoing? Clement Greenberg once said: “The superior artist knows how to be influenced.” The question raised is: influenced by whom and – more importantly – in what way?

There are numerous collections of the “World’s Great Artists” in print and although there are sometimes highly debatable inclusions or questionable omissions in these compendia, we tend to have the usual suspects in there: Titian, Tintoretto, Goya, Rembrandt, Velasquez and so on. (What is also notable is contemporary artists would tend to have very different reasons for a particular artist’s inclusion, as compared to the actual writer’s motivation themselves.) The consensus can be at odds with the reasoning.

I recently reviewed the enjoyable Turner and Frankenthaler exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate for abstractcritical. In that show, there was a stand-out Frankenthaler called “For EM” (an adumbration of a still-life by Eduard Manet of a fish). Frankenthaler often did this – visually quoting the work of a great artist from the past, almost certainly one of the standard inclusions in the hall-of-fame tomes I just mentioned. On another occasion, she titled a painting “A Hint from Bassano”, Bassano’s “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes” being the painting she took the hint from. “Mountains and Sea”, her most seminal work, deserves to be interrogated for its link to Mantegna’s “Agony in the Garden.”

Mantegna constructed a tightly woven undulating space with the rich rock strata pulsing through the picture, leading our eyes into the distant hills. The counterpoint is a right-to-left diagonal that crescendos steadily up to a group of angels wedged ever-so-slightly uncomfortably in the top left corner of the picture. The colouring, as in so many Renaissance paintings, sees rich primaries set off against the warmth of earths. A blazing band of a pink city adds the twist, cooling these earth tones and adding a luminous element that gets us from the red to the blue seen in the robes of the figures that people the space. The interesting thing about this work is just how synthetic it is – a highly implausible landscape and a dramatic distortion of scale. It still has the element of surprise about it.

In contrast to the tautness of the Mantegna, Frankenthaler (in “Mountains and Sea”) washes and swooshes her pigments in a languid-looking way, leaving roughly half the painting with untouched or barely touched colour. Against this ground we see those familiar wristy looping marks, with pink, blue and pale green dominant; the earth remains, but is now relegated to a single ochre wedge just off-centre, with the canvas hue acting as the key colour. We can clearly see the configuration of ‘mountains’, a general busyness centre stage and an oblique diagonal movement, all à la Mantegna. Frankenthaler, though, opts to send a blue (sea reference) out to the right hand side. This is a clever device as it anchors the whole painting and brings the space up to the picture plane. This painting has passed into Art folklore. It was colourfield painting’s “Moses” moment. The Promised Land was in sight, and it was Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland who entered. From this point on, being a colourist meant neutralising the layout, eschewing the gestures of Frankenthaler, which by comparison are much more related to the abstract expressionists. The ambition now became to give colour a freer rein through cool detachment. New acrylics were developed and the rest is, as they say, history. Suddenly Pollock’s fluency and mural sizes could be achieved and colour opened up. Stains were in.

Noland went on to produce a truly remarkable body of work, characterised by series after series of neutrally formatted paintings. He was always a painter who employed shape, and his use of cropping was intrinsic to his shaping. Circles became stripes with bands of colour finding their limits and edges. These developed into “The Surfboards”, irregular shaped canvases which, simply speaking, had more edges, more possibilities for these limits and more eccentric configurations. Then at the start of the nineties he produced a series called “The Flares”. Seldom seen works, they have all the hallmarks of great Nolands – clarity of colour, generous proportions, an inherent classicism and a satisfying materiality.

Materiality is a crucial issue. In the sixties Sam Golden, working for Boccour, had helped create ‘Magna’, the mineral spirit acrylic. So again, during the eighties, did Golden – with Sam now out of retirement – manufacture a breakthrough product – a whole new range of gels. Physicality was back and with a vengeance. Gone were the now tired looking canvas stain factures and in their place came new surfaces, from delicate glazed skins to ravine-like troughs formed by heavy gelled ridges. Oil paint could not compete with this. The Flares were cool, considered and ultimately Apollonian. They took shaping to new extremes, each part being a different section of colour, joined to its neighbour with linear strips of Plexiglas, which speak to the floods of colour as accent, ever changing their feel as they often switch edging from one panel to another during their arc.

Noland described these shaped works thus: “They are made with hollow core doors as supports, which gives them human scale. They become slabs, chunks, pieces of colour that I put together for pictorial works.” “The Flares” have a wide array of surfaces, from gloss to matte and varying degrees therein. Colour is asked questions: How much? What kind? What shape? What relationship, one to another? Formats are found rather than imposed. Everything seems up for grabs, yet all is reined in by the colour control and surface specificity. They make Ellsworth Kelly’s work look by comparison somewhat overblown and preconceived, in a limiting way. “The Flares” are in my opinion some of Noland’s greatest achievements. I vividly remember a stunning show of them that I saw in California in the early nineties (dinner party time).

One of these works is called “Homage to Matisse”, a three-panelled work with an understated simplicity. At once we can see the Matisse that is being paid homage to: the fantastic “Piano Lesson”, 1916. Matisse was flirting with cubism during this period and flattened up his works with iconographic severity. This was a work which greatly affected Pollock, with its confrontational flatness. Looking at the Noland, we can see how the green-grey-black relationship has been lifted out of the Matisse; the rose is now transposed to an edge, which acts to light and lift the side of the heavier grey; a blue edges the black and cools it accordingly; the green melts in and out of a fat ochre; these colours react with the blue and again through their infusion at the centre of the painting recall the warmth of Matisse’s grey. Each work shares a powerful diagonal structure. Noland literally cuts his through the painting and it plays against the bellied arc to its left, subtly creating a new “ghost” section. “Homage to Matisse” is cooler and more pinky in temperature than the original Piano Lesson – a subtle change of key, by one of the most significant colour composers in recent memory.

Noland has openly discussed the importance of taste, “but the right kind of taste”, and a work such as this comes directly out of a refined, well-educated taste. We can take for granted that his mastery of materials and his colour sense is of the highest order, but compared with others of this period it somehow strikes a more troubled chord. Making these kind of overtly quotational works narrows our experience of colour and seeks to literally choreograph our reaction to it. We can acknowledge context and enjoy the colour, but it doesn’t lead anywhere as exciting as it could, especially given the relative unpredictability of format in these works. Others of this series have magical colour chords with a rewarding volumetric tactility; they have an unfettered freshness about them by comparison.

Around the same time as Noland was exploring curved multi-panel paintings, his friendly rival Jules Olitski was making some remarkable heavy gelled and sprayed works which became known as the “Mitt” paintings. These were baroque in nature, souped-up lizard-skinned swirls of paint. The zigzagged scribble swishes of gel fizzled in and out of corners or up through the heart of paintings. A black coloured top-layer spray checks everything back into a fictive uncertain illusory space which, allied with new nacreous and interference pigments, has the added quality of opulence. Colour is subsumed into powerful gesture. Olitski was a master tonal painter who had a rich sense of colour rather than an out and out colourist, such as Noland. If Noland was Apollonian, then Olitski was Dionysian by comparison. These works were only possible as a result of Golden’s new acrylic paints. (We can find technological precedents such as the paint tube’s usefulness to the Impressionists and Golden as a company deserves an essay for their influence in much advanced abstract painting made since the 1960s).

It seemed surface could do no more. As a point of interest, it was these ultra non-flat works that so convinced Greenberg of Olitski’s stature as the “greatest painter alive.” “Greenbergian flatness” is a red herring; he just reacted to the times and what was in front of his eyes.

Where does one go after these? Back to colour, as it proved. With hindsight, it seemed quite a logical step to see large orbs and dollops of hand-splattered colour left in larger unsprayed and unchecked areas arrive as works after these “Mitt” paintings. It was as if he had come full circle to return to the early flat irregular discs in colour fields, which were first made in the sixties. The disc-like configurations are now revealed through his hallmark – intense materiality.

Olitski was a keen student of Old Master works. Rembrandt and Tintoretto are often referred to, a series of monoprints worked out of Tintoretto’s El Paradiso and called “The Paradise” being an overt case in point. There is frequently a numinous reference to his work too. The painting I wish to look at is an off-beat reference to Tintoretto’s extraordinary “Susannah and the Elders.” Olitski titled his: “With Love and Disregard: Susy and the Elders.”

This painting has a centrifugal weighting unlike the Tintoretto, who splits his picture space into zones. In the Olitski, there is a switch from yellow to a startling white in the top right, akin to the surprise of seeing the flesh of Susannah, which is cooled with a white, draped cloth. Both paintings compel you to look inwards, deep into the picture. Tintoretto, through the diagonals of water’s edge and top of hedge, and the perspective of the mirror that Susannah gazes into, reinforces this pull. It leads us to the second lasciviously-lurking figure. The closer figure’s circular bald pate creeps around the bottom left hand of the hedge, orb-like. It forms a rounded apex to a cone-like projection that culminates in the curve of Susannah’s body. In this work there are numerous details of delight: the “thieving” magpie, the roses on the hedge, the sparkling leaves cascading down the side of the hedge’s trunk. Figuration has so many possibilities for this kind of rich detail – all worked in here through a logical reasoning. They may be symbolic or allegorical, yet whatever their function the visual construction of the work takes precedence. They must work on the picture’s terms, first and foremost.

So what do we make of Olitski’s slyly laconic reference? Are we to see this as art to compete with an Old Master work? Is this modernist bravado? Has he reached a point when he feels he has the all-round game approach to visually accommodate such a reference? In short, has he got inside the Tintoretto and disembodied it, understood its order and logic? This was something he humbly discussed failing to do with Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider.” Olitski: “I was going to get inside that painting. I was going to take it apart, open it up like you might an unusual sounding clock to see what made it tick the way it did.” If this was the intent again, it’s a heck of an attempt, that’s for sure. These works pack a punch when you see them in the flesh. Yet the speed within the work and that centralised pull undermine the ambition. Tintoretto was also a tonal painter, yet he gets a lot out of a little. The pared down colour, the chess like placement of incident, the steadiness of it all, pins us back and we are ultimately “out boxed”. You can’t pin this painting down. The Olitski by comparison is more of a beautiful hit, a sugar rush. Those galaxies of colour which so often swim around in their liquidity, merging and cracking, like tectonic plates on a sea of lava, have such a literal physicality that any more functionality is almost beyond them. Technically, blowers were used to physically agitate the paint and produce unexpected fissures and fractal-like forms. It’s ambitious stuff, and there’s a lot to marvel at, but that title does invite another choreographed comparison.

I want to believe that abstract painting can be as great as figuration, but this is a battle that must be fought on abstract art’s terms and not figuration’s. Paying homage feels like a white flag has already been raised, with content being delivered through context rather than visual functionality. Could we surmise then that making these homages is part of paying ones dues in some way to the great art of the past, to be seen to be part of its continuum; to ultimately be accepted on the same kind of revered terms; or will this work eventually become just another page in a book gathering dust on a shelf?

Can figuration really teach abstract art? Artists have always worked from those that inspired them in previous generations. For example, Picasso was famed for his re-workings of Velasquez, Cranach, Manet and others, yet he stayed in the realm of figuration. Once you cross the Rubicon, you must not turn back. We need to find better ways to challenge figurative painting. Compared to figuration, abstract painting is a relative pup, a toddler finding its feet, and as such is want to fall on its face from time to time. I am optimistic for its future though. Yet for it to truly move forward, I can’t help feeling that we have to stop trying to hang on to figuration, even in oblique ways. The relationship between what we see and what we make is a complex and fascinating one. I have avoided discussing sculpture in this article in spite of initially intending to, mainly because I realised it would need a complete article on its own, though my sentiments would remain unchanged. As abstract artists we need to tear out our own piece of the universe to wrap ourselves in. We need to get out of the gravitational orbit of figuration. As an art form, it has produced a cornerstone for all civilizations. Is it now too containing, though? Does it box us in? Maybe a couple of shots through the ceiling will allow us to see space anew. The possibilities are out there, but I don’t think walking around those ancient stones is enough anymore…

[FOR THE ONLINE ARTICLE PLEASE CLICK HERE.]

Matisse's Cut Outs at Tate Modern: 2014 (published by Abstract Critical) →

I found the show to be very revealing and was also delighted to see other works such as paintings and sculptures in there. It was a treat to see the Red Interior from Dusseldorf with its amazing spatial qualities: the interior floor, wall and exterior patio all perfectly described and spatially palpable, yet all rendered with exactly the same red and zig-zag black.

I don't see the cut outs as a culmination of his life's work or in fact as a single unit of achievement . There are may different purposes for them - from the page turning tactility of Jazz , appliqué fabric designs , posters and book covers, the stained glass windows to the heroism in the dazzling grand murals with their white to blue anchoring of colours and larger than life scale. Each reason for a cut out has a different feel to it and a thorough understanding of its purpose. They are not simply a one size fits all approach. "Mimosa" is possibly the closest one gets to an easel painting with its densely interlocked, layering of colour to colour. (By all accounts a draining one to make too). The blue nudes are hewn. In many of the works , the use of white is akin to light seen rolling over forms or bursting out at you from behind figures which dissolve at their contours or - at times - sneaking in and out of the terrain of the landscape. Curves and sinewy amorphous shapes can be read as analogous to specifics such as watery reflections and refractions but are so much more than that. They function as space makers and feel close in character to the lines in his drawings - which have an equally rangy and springy plasticity. The phrasing always goes on further than you think - without ever losing impetus. The word 'decorative' somehow saps the vitality out of his achievements.

I am not convinced of the story of him not having the strength to paint any more either . Many of these works take massive concentration and a heavy pair of scissors weighs more than a paintbrush to be banal about the physical demands. It is worth pondering what he means by painting? For one thing many of his most ambitious works through the forties were modest in size. In fact he mentions wanting to really get to grips with painting and many of the subsequent works were made with canvases propped up on a small bed side table. No, when he says painting, I think he is alluding to mural painting, (or rather painting frescoes as he himself said he would like to spend an afterlife doing, if there was such a thing). I would venture that much of the ambition in the cut outs is to find an answer to Pollock and other large American mural scaled works of the late 40s and early 50s. He was acutely aware of them, through his son Pierre and also discussed them with Picasso (who was Eurocentric and ambivalent to them). The leaf shapes with their curving repeating rhythms create astonishing orchestrations of colour in, and colour made, space. They have a breathtaking clarity and directness - Matisse is a guff free zone! These large works were his riposte to North American modernism. Its as if he dabbed on a little cologne, adjusted his silk tie, picked up a bat and smacked the ball back as hard as he could... clear to the pacific ocean!

Emyr Williams - April 21 2014

Sean Scully / Mary Webb reviews: 2014 (published by Abstract Critical) →

Sean Scully is showing new work at Timothy Taylor Gallery. The title of the exhibition “Kind of Red” is a direct reference to Miles Davis’ seminal album Kind of Blue, which Scully absorbed whilst making these paintings. Modal jazz, minimal chordal movement intended to create a freer space and calmness in the music. Painters have always been affected by music. Matisse’s choice of Jazz as a title being the current high profile case in point. 

Scully has tried something a little different to his usual approach - namely letting his slabs of brushed colour “float” over centres - the background support is aluminum - unyielding and clangingly harsh - a literalism maybe with its own references to - imagined - sounds. 

 The paint is applied in familiar ways - heavy oil-loaded brushmarks. Scully can be subtle in his use of colour but has always worked tonally in the main: repetitions, stripes, bars, blocks - almost always on the vertical horizontal axes. At first glance the paintings have that big space chic - the sombre colour, the “this is art” seriousness vibe. The ensemble of 5 large paintings holds you at a distance. I paced out an optimum viewing point, which was 5m away. They need a big space - get closer and things start to fall apart. For one thing, the oil paint and aluminum picks up too much reflection and you can’t see the works in their entirety. I assume this was never the point though as there is little to reward any closer inspection. 

 Scully: “I wanted to set up something that was very rhythmical so that the images were on the support but not secured to it, so that they could float around and set up these rhythms between them, up and down and from side to side, playing with the edges. Those drips gave them a kind of lift off.” That first phrase seemed to me to shut down possibilities. I have always felt that for painting to become great there needs to be an inherent vulnerability to it. For example , when Pollock says “Is this a painting? “ not is this a good painting? It could be argued therefore that setting off with a definite intent is at odds to what painting is really about - You need not second guess it. 

 Artists often have a feeling or idea in their heads that they wish to realise. Think of this as a boxing match and the thing in the head is the - perceived - champion. As we proceed and start to make our work - we produce the challenger. It is our jobs to knock the champion out (if one exists at all). To have faith that the qualities this challenger brings are in fact the right way forward and to let go of any preconceptions. To respond to what is actually happing in front of us. The work must take us to places we could not foresee. There can be a role for set intentions but it must be transcended by discovery. Attempting to set up something rhythmical could thus be considered much the same as illustrating it. 

 I enjoyed and was intrigued to read the Sabine Tress / John Bunker conversation on this site and her mentioning Claude Viallat - an artist whose work I know quite well and one who visited my space when I participated in the Triangle Artists’ Workshop when it located to Marseille for the year in the mid nineties. Viallat invited a group of us out to his studio and it was fascinating to see his working space - a sort of beatnik studio full of draped, un-stretched canvases. The reason I mention him here is that he shares something with Scully. Viallat has been producing paintings since the sixties with the same shape in them. He uses this visual leitmotif and repeats it with colour applied, on, in and around, the shape. It is a deliberate neutral element that gives him the reasons he needs to use colour in expressive ways. He has a good eye for colour, though at times it’s strangely like watching a John Wayne film... Stick a different hat on John Wayne and he becomes: a soldier, a fireman, a gladiator and of course, a cowboy, yet it’s always John Wayne.  We are aware of him before we know him as the character of the cowboy or the soldier etc.  In the same way we see Viallat’s glyph and wonder what it’s going to do next.  Scully’s bars of colour function in much the same way - so they can be set up to be rhythmical or maybe they’ll become exotic and hotter or icy and bleak. In this way the work always references something external. Scully talks about the soft uncertain spaces between these bars, which are used to animate the shapes from the outside, and the brushstrokes aerate them from within. They do what he says they do. I would like to see him make ones which have much more surprise and not be so self aware, to lose the brand Scully and venture more into the unknown...a greater truth is humming in the distance. 

 Not far from this blue chip world.  Mary Webb is showing new smallish 45cm square paintings and 3 screen prints. All the work is a response to her experiences in Utah. There is a wry irony present when one considers Utah’s vast, seismic wonders and panoramas of glowing hot colour, transposed to the small subterranean space of the crypt at St Marylebone’s church near Baker Street. Much in the same way as Scully does, Webb sets up an intent; in this case, a grid is used to imply a staircase - the rock formations of The Grand Staircase Escalante to be specific - an astonishing natural feature in the American mid west. Within her painting’s grid structure she creates zones punctuated by thinner strips with 90 degree angles. Her palette is one of hot colours - oranges, reds and creams cooled by greys and black. The paintings are sensitive musings on colour, placement and relationship. Taking the essential and re-imagining it through this abstracted almost codified approach. Each section is cleanly masked off in the familiar way.  

 I was struck by the screen prints - their immaculate crisp edges and surfaces were better suited I felt, to their even handed colour. One print was a direct version of a painting and it sharpened this point. Paint can do more than fill in and the surface can be so important. Here we have unfamiliar geographical territories responded to in familiar artistic ones. A well worn trail of an approach. 

 Although the classic cross-hairs weighting of modernism is the structuring device that these artists share, Webb is much more about colour rather than tone. Her works are at their best when black is inside the painting rather than at the edge. It is a difficult ask to make a black work on the edge of a painting without it pressing in and creating holes inside the painting - the screenprint succeeded more in this. 

 The gridded zig-zag of colour is something that Kenneth Noland used so effectively in the sixties and indeed many times his work seemed to point to landscape. He once said that he felt landscape painting was closely related to abstract painting. Noland went on to produce a dazzling array of nuanced surfaces which amplified or tempered his colour. (Matisse used to talk about the “play of the brush”), and Noland like Webb (though less so) has references to external colour values and spaces, which are revealed by a neutral layout, thus attempting a transposed and distilled summation or approximation of these values and spaces.  

 All of these artists are working out of taste.  Neutralizing layouts to explore the emotional, maybe lyrical impact of colour. Whilst each show affords enjoyment, the question is can colour do more than suggest external factors - be they rhythm, sound, landscape, localised light? Can it stake its own new territory - one as vast as a canyon, yet not one checked back by having to wear any particular hat?

Making Painting, Turner and Frankenthaler: 2014 (published by Abstract Critical) →

MAKING PAINTING: TURNER AND FRANKENTHALER

Emyr Williams

This review first appeared on www.abstractcritical.com 2014

‘Making Painting’ has just opened at Turner Contemporary in Margate. This is an eye-catching exhibition pairing the initially curious twosome of JMW Turner and Helen Frankenthaler – separated by over a hundred years but united in their... in their... handling of paint? Response to landscape? Exploration of light? The romantic sublime? According to curator and Turner scholar James Hamilton: it started out as ‘Ten artists and Turner’ and as time passed names began being shed until a final playoff which saw Frankenthaler win through. A sort of painterly X Factor then. Upon consideration though one can see the logic and it was more about a “gut feeling” of two artists that could work rather than an explicit relationship of say, style, theme or geography. Curation by gut feeling – now that is a novelty!

In Britain, we are blissfully aware of Turner as a landscape artist par-excellence. Forever tied to the name of Constable, their place in the nation’s hearts is secure. The Clore Gallery is a temple to his vast and prodigious output. Frankenthaler on the other hand is quite sparsely represented on these shores, championed mainly by lower-profile abstract painters (unfortunately synonymous terms). Her work has a historical aura about it which reaches almost mythological proportions, with the usual line about being a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible” floating in the ether whenever her groovy signature is in sight. I have always found it endearing that she signed her works so often when most of her contemporaries favoured the back of the canvas – a link with older traditions perhaps? Frankenthaler was a passionate student of painting, a competitive artist and one who saw herself as part of its continuum.

The two artists are represented by paintings and watercolours. In fact, water is one clear link between them: the way it carries colour, extending its reach into the corners, lapping against the edges, the bleeding and flowing of pigmented washes, suggestive of form or simply evocative of place as felt experience. It seems entirely appropriate therefore, that the show be held looking out on the spectacular backdrop of the North Sea on its way to meet with the English Channel. The gallery has light flooding in to its spaces and that mesmeric tidal flow framed by massive windows – nature’s own watercolour. What an engaging exhibition to conceive of and what a great place to put it on. It needs to be stated that entry is free.

Each artist is given different rooms with only a joining corridor space providing an eye level meeting of their works. This space creates quite a jump to the eye – partly due to the size differences of the works in there. Frankenthaler needed to work big to get the maximum out of her techniques, and although a painterly relationship with Turner is there, it would have been a step too far to hang their works side by side. The closest we get is a view through to an easel sized Frankenthaler framed by two Turners, one each side of the entrance / exit wall.

The hanging is relatively sensitive and well thought out. Turner is.. Turner, dazzling in watercolour, assured and masterly in panorama and still surprising when he lets rip with those instantly recognisable impastoed passages which dissolve form and create luminous whorls. The usual soft, whitened chrome yellow is everywhere as are the trademark blue-brown ensembles. The easy gestures of his watercolours sometimes become wrestling matches in the paintings in oil. It’s quite a different ball-game to get luminosity with oil paint and that familiar brushed arc has to be reigned in to stop it killing the space or becoming over wrought and contrived. One of the most beautiful works is when the handling is at its most sober then – the unfinished ‘”The Evening Star” with a gentle broken, curvy flick of light lifting off the horizon; light breaking through the leaden distant

cloud. Where sea meets sky, the liminal calm and crystalline wetness of – fittingly – the Margate beach. A quiet masterpiece. I mused what he would have made of Frankenthaler’s work and even more so how would he have painted today? Would he still be painting landscapes? I wonder if it was landscape as a theme which eventually allowed him to paint as he wanted to paint, rather than always wanting to paint landscapes per se. The title of the show seems to reinforce this point. This is an exhibition that deals with how paintings get made rather than any specifics of subject matter. Many of Frankenthaler’s quotes about her work could equally have been uttered by Turner -”There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

Frankenthaler’s best works in this show are when there is some kind of pictorial drama in them. “For EM” being a standout work. An adumbration of a Manet painting of a fish (hence the title). As in the work “Hotel Cro-Magnon”, in the rooms dedicated to her work from the 50s. The dramatic use of black at the top as a device energises the rest of the picture. In the way also that Matisse did just before these works, with “The Snail” in 1953. It is easy to read her paintings solely as abstractions from something – especially places, but this is too simplistic an approach and tends to close, rather than, open doors; it also blocks any deeper interrogation of the work. Working on canvases on the floor to stain colour and then hoisting them up to view will naturally create a swing between depth perceptions – the approach also often produces recessive landscape-esque vistas. Many of the bigger works set up these sorts of deep spaces, created through tonal washes as much as changes of hue. The space is brought back up to a foreground of sorts, with dollops of paint and smaller incidents. Whilst I can see the results lending themselves to allusion and even forgive her embracing of ambiguity, I have a nagging doubt that one cannot control intentions as much as onlookers think – especially ambiguous ones. The spaces that are created here, are simply what happens when you mop in acrylic: it floods, puddles and fades in places. She clearly went with this and sought expression in response to these consequences. After this, any manner of subject-matter can be bolted on.

There are two questions here I feel. One: could she have fought more against the nature of her materials, resisted the easy stain effects – as good as a lot of the ‘drawing’ in them is – could an even greater synthesis have been found? Two: is there any lesson for painters today? I am inclined to answer yes to both. I would say that Frankenthaler can be an uneven painter; this is a result of her sheer honesty and openness to her materials. At times, she did clearly go looking for the awkward, the uncomfortable, but -being harsh- also couldn’t always stop the more facile effects from creeping in. “Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.” This is the trade off. You have to sift through much grit to get the gold. The works have some delightful qualities though: the sheer pleasure in seeing large areas of washed in colour is such a refreshing sight and one in sharp counterpoint to much of today’s mini, faux-rustic abstract paintings. I fondly remember back in the day how many students used to work à la Frankenthaler, never really following it up after graduating though. Often as not the post degree studio spaces dictating otherwise.

Frankenthaler’s paintings have that familiar languid-like quality that is so seductive, yet at times their force can dissipate and the colour can look a bit washed out. As a consequence, some of the lighter hued works didn’t age as well. Maybe it was the simple fade of early manufactured acrylic giving them a sort of veil of time quality or was it their lack of more dramatic contrasts? The colour is more often than not beautifully pitched in her paintings. Cool and warm secondary colours swim about softened primaries. Yet it is when earth pigments are introduced that things really start to happen. Umbers, rusts, greys and blacks all add gravity to the works. I enjoy seeing her paintings with full out primaries but they don’t seem as comfortably felt as when earths are used. It seems

that the use of organic hues was more naturally suited to the emotional ambition and climate of her best paintings.

“Burnt Norton” has an overtly landscape configuration but again I am not convinced by this as a straightforward reading. It seems more akin to the work of Kenneth Noland from around the early 70s with floods of colour and incidents at top and bottom of the picture – in Noland’s case these would be thin stripes spanning the width. Frankenthaler takes on board the serial qualities of Noland without ever buying into the process. She wanted more surprises I guess. Her paintings have a similar classicism to Noland with an understated symmetry. I would not consider her as a fully paid up colour field painter. Her centre of gravity seemed to remain as more a ‘chromatic abstract expressionist’ (second generation). Of course, she became famous for those fields of washed colour but invariably they are charged by the gestural, which serves the colour, supports it and often animates the interaction between different layers of colours. Her strength was in her quite overt drawing as much as it was in her colour.

“For EM” was a work from 1981 when she was a massively experienced painter but it is the room of paintings from the ‘50s that held so much surprise. The linear brush marks, the hesitancy of decisions, probing and problematical in equal measure, are all so revealing. This quote seemed to sum them up: “You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.”

Turner by comparison has so much technique that one can almost feel his angst in trying to work against his own facility of touch, to avoid cliché and to get to... himself, to stretch himself and find what he could do with paint that no other could. Also a fiercely competitive artist, he needed to go up against the Old Masters to get that spark going. The painting “Thompson’s Aeolian Harp”, 1809, is an earlier more restrained work with an almost malevolent use of green; it is acidic and simmers brilliantly. There is a surprising double repoussoir with the second tree at the right edge – I am not aware of even Poussin ever doing something like that. Competition and travel: he painted so many works in so many places that it looked like he could paint them in his sleep. Weather became his wake-up call. Storms, gales and winds or blazing suns produced more agitated responses, his brush marks get looser and the colours get more undefined. The more familiar gestural ones eschew green – that most inert of colours – and whip up their vortices with creams, browns and blues. In all the works though he never lets go of unity. The calmer skies in a Turner can at first glance seem spare – emptied of clouds in the way that Constable’s rarely do – yet they never lose any pace in their colour. There are no holes or unwieldy passages of paint. The pastel hues being so deft and airy – again this comes straight out of watercolour, allied with a consummate technique.

In the watercolours, however, it is the paper ground that achieves this light. Here again we can turn to Frankenthaler, for she stains colour in and it is the way the ground colour glows through that gives her work its luminosity. It was thus peculiar to see a work like “Barometer” from 1992 – the one in the corridor framed by the Turners, which felt almost like an oil painting in approach and one with which I struggled the most. This painting seemed to be too directly a seascape, rather than suggestive of something palpable as informed by nature...maybe it was too Turner ‘lite’? Clearly this was why it was hung where it was. Was that decision maybe a bit whimsical though – trying too hard to choreograph the viewers’ response? Also the colours were all heading the same way, whereas in the better works they are often playing in different key signatures yet still end up in harmony.

We are blessed with amazing Turners in Britain, but Frankenthaler is long overdue a major show in this country. Her work may not be so much a bridge to what is possible these days, perhaps more a well trodden path, yet it is still one which could lead to undiscovered lands.

David Webb: 2013 (published by Abstract Critical) →

If you ever watch a golfer playing a bunker shot, you will see him start by doing a sort of shuffle in the sand to anchor his stance - the club head must not touch the sand lest it moves the ball, so the stance is even more important. This shuffling-in gets the player into the feel of the shot too. He then takes a few practice swings, all the while getting into that shot. Likewise, you can tell a good hairdresser (a proper cutter) by the sound of the moving clicks of the scissors when not cutting, the hands mimic the actions and feel their way around the hair before committing to the correct cut. This tuning in to the activity happens in all sorts of disciplines.

I remember seeing a film of Matisse painting; watching the brush likewise twitch, weighing up the mark, hovering then committing to the stroke...like the hairdresser, like the golfer. Painting is such a physical medium; the paint needs controlling, surfaces have to be created, colour orchestrated, space opened, light generated.

In knowing David Webb's paintings and having seen his current one person show at dalla Rosa Gallery, Clerkenwell, London, I can see many of these painterly qualities and such a tuning approach. This gradual honing in to an essential colour, the unearthing of a surface, the finding of a shape. Any element in any of his paintings is weighed up, considered and arrived at rather than simply painted in. Webb is a visually intelligent artist and enjoys using paint in a variety of ways: from watercolour stains of delightful delicacy to sandy textured, muted colour that feel like a sun drenched exotic wall or to a leaden, matt, almost gunmetal grey - flat as a pancake but animated by a pleasing curviness of shape.

This is a modest show of new works, mainly acrylic on canvas with a paper piece (one of the stronger works) behind glass. Most of the works under an arm's span; the majority inside the shoulder's reach. There is one large work of which I will return to. Of late, linear elements have found their way into his paintings adding a welcome scale shift and also a surprise texture when you notice they are often drawn in charcoal. These lines echo or declare edge, their extremities sometimes turning at their end in gentle arcs to prevent a rigidity setting in. One would be mistaken also for thinking the internal colour edges are taped, as upon closer inspection it seems that they are hand-wrought. Even a relatively small section of saturated colour seems hard won, almost laboriously applied in stages with smaller floods of colour, which eventually reach the limits of the shape. Pliability is much in evidence. This is clearly a person who loves to paint.

A good friend of mine from America once said to me "never fall in love with your car or your house!" To that I would add "or your painting.” Sometimes I sensed Webb flirting a bit with some of the works, when a colder eye may have demanded a tiny bit more from the colour's intensity and a little less from the application. Grey is used often to key in the primaries - all nicely pitched. Webb uses darks and lights extremely well too, with black or deep greys against creams, beiges and washed out colour - often a particularly memorable yellow appears. All of these qualities are evident in a work like "Parcheesi (twist grey)" with the split stacking being interrupted by the angular intrusion of washy blue grey. This is a contemplative work with quite puzzling spatial shifts.

The largest work,"tourist smoking room” I felt was more of a statement of intent than a resolved whole, in the way that many of the other works were. Working on this larger size is something that needs a slightly different strategy in dealing with the 'blank' areas which were a little stark - maybe more evidence of that "shuffle" and a change of, or more than one, neutral colour to talk to the elements’ colours more? The turquoise smudge at the

base being an attempt to soften the abruptness and a tiny flick of paint occupying the void between the tall dark handsome, yet peculiar form on the right and the parrot-like image to the centre. These devices work on smaller sizes and the paintings are peppered with subtle adjustments to corner, edge and area, but sometimes subtlety is not always the best policy.

I enjoyed this show for all the qualities that I have mentioned: the sensitivity, the colour juxtapositions, the delicate surfaces, but - dare I say - I believe Webb would reap even greater rewards if the subject matter was removed and he went off piste more. All these qualities of paint handling would also be put to the test and greater demands placed upon them and a deeper synthesis could be achieved. Unnerving, undiscovered spaces may well reveal themselves.

For myself, I prefer to see the subject up front - if there is one, rather than discover it; subject matter can lock in the experience of the colour - like travelling on train tracks instead of hiking on an open road. "JP in Mexico" is a case in point, with its refreshing, bang, there's the landscape feel, whereas some of the other works often had a tantalising opening up into the abstract held in check by a sense of the local. (This being the modus operandi though granted.) Webb is widely travelled and uses these recces into other country's geographies, climates and cultures to inspire his work. Plenty in the tank then to go for it from scratch maybe? As Tennyson said, "I am part of all that I have met, yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever when I move.”

In fairness though, this is not a claimed as a show of abstract painting per se, rather one of covert figuration with pared down forms, sections and passages, which are informed by landscapes, both viewed and remembered. Many of these places have an intensely personal resonance, adding a poetry to the raison d'être of the exhibition. I would hasten to add though, whereas this may be significant to a viewer, it is not to a viewing. Subject matter can be a bit like the trap to a greyhound, framing its view of the situation; yet once the race starts, the dog has left it behind...

DAVID WEBB: FRAGMENTARIUM

11 October – 9 November 2013, dalla Rosa Gallery, 121 Clerkenwell Rd, London EC1R 5BY

Peter Lanyon: 2013 (published by Abstract Critical) →

"I'm beginning to like mural painting more and more. It suits landscape painting and modern architecture - the modern glass buildings…Part of the challenge of the mural is to understand something bigger than yourself". So spoke Peter Lanyon in 1963. 

 The works on show at Gimpel Fils focus on this little known aspect of his work. The exhibition includes the final large-scale gouache sketches for the Liverpool and Birmingham murals, as well as other studies and work derived from Lanyon’s exploration of the medium. These large works  have a relatively understated sense of colour overtly informed by landscape signage (punctuated by the odd primary) and all sharing black as a common unifier. 

 These are not abstract paintings, rather, abstracted paintings. I prefer the noun to the verb for what it's worth. They are made and presented to us in terms of place. Lanyon  died tragically from a gliding accident and as we know the aerial views that flying gave him played such a catalyst in his compositions and approaches. He would talk to his students of being more inventive in selecting viewpoints too,  getting them to see the landscape in new ways and engage with its rhythms and seasons. A born and bred Cornishman, ambivalent towards St.Ives or indeed New York as a designator of an approach. Cornwall was in his blood and its vistas embedded in his psyche. Not just the pictorial but the history and mythology of the place. It's industries and the subsequent dwindling of them, the political and social consequences of change, natural environments and one's sense of place in the world. All these eclectic factors fed into the ambitions  he held for his work. 

 After seeing and possibly gaining a confirmation from the 1956 Tate Exhibition(which included abstract expressionist paintings), Lanyon  gradually employed a more gestural open-ended brushstroke based painting, sweating out his early constructivist works. However a move into fully abstract works was -  maybe suspiciously  - avoided. Instead he sought invention in his responses to the spaces he knew so well. 

 The works on show are large and include several totem-like paintings with thinner washed on drawing in a sometimes almost phosphorescent light or contrasting black line. Shapes, figures, buildings, landscape all threaten to overpower but eventually get subsumed into the paint and design. The largest work which is some 5.5 metres by almost 3 metres high seems to owe much to Matisse's monumental Bathers by a River in its use of black and semi-architectonic space. Many of these works have a sketchy working out-ness about them (hence the show's title). For all their unpredictable gymnastic viewpoints though, they actually feel quite conventionally weighted. Looking at the world  upside down doesn't seem to guarantee the same spatial surprise in a painting. The other massive work "The Conflict of Man with Tides and Sands" , again 5m wide,  is a case in point : huge gestural marks that crash about breaker-like,  are impressive as physical actions,  and their colouring in silvery turquoises, greyed blues,  earths and creams rams the point home;  this is the sea, the ozone and the beach, the earth in all its power; it's a landscape: but one that is thus bottled in feel rather than fully synthesised. Not at all as invigorating as the real thing… How could it be? It would be fascinating to compare this with a Constable sketch of the beach -I think you get my (longshore) drift. Nature can't, nor needn't be, theatrically contrived, nor isolated as pockets of experience. It will come through and inform without any need for second guessing or indeed any presupposed strategy. These paintings are earnest though and have ambitions in them that are to be admired - for their innocence maybe? 

 Black is used in so many works as I mentioned earlier as  a unifier, yet it sometimes looked unwieldily,  mushed in on top in feverish ways with loops and animated sweeps. This had a tendency to produce contained spaces with awkward gaps. The work Birdie could easily be cut in half to produce two works. At other times, the blacks nodded towards Miro with his equally brutal line. Yet whereas Miro would use deep blues to suggest imaginary cosmic worlds, Lanyon checks any such flights of fancy and uses the raw paper to temper and return us to the known rather than float off into the unknown. 

 One of my favourite works was a small gouache called Shore Thing with a lovely red, black and delicate blue wash. It looked unforced, immediate and spatially inventive - inky-like brushstrokes which held they pace and made their space: the land, the sea, the air -  it was all there. 

 For all Lanyon's almost worrying concerns for his land, his culture and it's fragility , these works are hugely optimistic. The grandeur of Cornwall clearly intoxicated him and through this sense of place and bird's eye views of it he  - ironically - found his terra-firma. The Welsh are cousins of the Cornish and we have a word to describe this sense of belonging to a particular place -  "Hiraeth"; it's not  readily translatable …the same I think applies to the Cornish landscape.

 Peter Lanyon: The Mural Studies. Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies Street, London W1. 28 November-18 January 2014