JOHN PELLING - ARTIST AND ENIGMA

John

PELLING

Art

ENIGMA

The full series of 23 paintings and The full series of 21 paintings, accompanying sketches are included with two preliminary works and this profile. accompanying sketches are The dimensions the canvasses presentedofinmost the offollowing are 54 by 70 inches (137 by 178 m). pages.

The dimensions of cmost of the canvasses are 54 by 70 A selection of the works were chosen for inches (137 by 178 cm). exhibition in London at the Chelsea Arts Club from June 15 - July 4 2021.

The paintings can also be viewed online at: www.druimarts.com/john-pellng

© Neville Rigby

Few artists relish the prospect of dissecting the style, technique, motivation, influences or meaning behind t h e i r w o r k . To s e e k explanation to some seems an affront, thus so many artists shy away, preferring to remain enigmatic, leaving the observer to study and draw their own conclusions.

John Pelling seems to have few such qualms. Reflecting upon a lifetime in the studio, he talked frankly about his rare if not unique double life as an artist and an ordained clergyman, about his friendship with Francis Bacon, whose subliminal influence may be detectable in some of his works, and about the raison d’être behind his latest major series - a sequence of paintings depicting women wrestlers - that demanded exceptional energy and dedication from the artist, who celebrated his the 90th birthday in 2020, and who spent over a year working almost daily on an exceptional volume of sketches and paintings.

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In his Chelsea basement studio, brightened by a large shadowless skylight, John Pelling sits surrounded by the typical artist’s accoutrements - pots of brushes, canvasses, sketches and books.

Almost hidden in a corner hangs a framed photograph of Francis Bacon. Some of the new series of paintings are not yet dry. Most are complete, taut on substantial stretchers so large they often have to be manhandled by two people. They can barely fit on the vintage crank easel that has been the centre of his working life for decades. The latest array of nearly two dozen canvasses - all variations on a single subject - represent just a tiny fraction of his output over a lifetime, now held in private and even some royal collections, many hung in his own home, squeezed into corners, stacked on elevated racks in the studio, or else hidden away in store rooms.

Understanding what drives the artist to produce such an extensive series on a single theme is impossible without comprehending what led him to become an artist in the first place, and considering the events and circumstances that framed his life both as a painter and as a member of the clergy. Born in Hove in 1930, he felt destined to become an artist from an early age. As a teenager he attended art college in Brighton, and considered himself 'one of the lucky ones’ to be accepted at the Royal College of Art in 1951, a post-war period when priority was still given to ex-servicemen. He studied under Prof. Rodrigo Moynihan at the Royal College of Art in London, where among the other influential RCA staff he encountered included Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight, John Minton, and his tutor, Colin Hayes.

Initially he found himself in a quandary torn between wearily commuting from Brighton every day and the college’s expectation that he should live in London (and perhaps live-it-up as an artist immersing himself fully in the ‘never had it so good’ Bohemian atmosphere of the 1950s).

“I was nearly thrown out in the first year because my work was so naturalistic, then I moved up to Kensington and my style changed,” he recalls. But his time at the RCA was not dissipated in the wild student parties. Instead he felt ‘shockingly lonely’ - perhaps an inevitability for

someone torn between a calling to the priesthood and the libertine lifestyles some of his contemporaries enjoyed.

CONTEMPORARIES Some of his illustrious contemporaries went on to become widely celebrated artists including Bridget Riley, Frank Auerbach, and Peter Blake. Around that time he first encountered the arch-libertine Francis Bacon, by then already an established figure in the post-war art scene, who used to visit the RCA, and later became a significant figure in John’s life.

Ironically it was this co-incidental connection that became instrumental in helping him decide the direction his life would take. John met a priest at the London Oratory, Fr. Mark Taylor, a friend of the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who had taken a young Francis Bacon under his wing, introducing him the fundamentals of art practice and steering him away from interior design towards a career in painting. Fr. Taylor, it seems, steered John away from embarking on a full time painting career, towards a calling to the ministry. After four years at the Royal College of Art, John found himself invited by the Bishop of Chichester, the Right Reverend George Bell, to enter theological college.

Although he was determined to continue pursuing his passion for art, and was encouraged to do so, he ‘took the road less travelled by’ entering the priesthood in 1959. He started out as a curate in his home town of Hove. “Originally I had hoped to become chaplain to Royal College of Art to be among fellow artists, but they only wanted a single man, and by that time I was married.”

Instead he was pleased to be offered a living at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, staying for 13 years before becoming Vicar of St Saviours, Shepherd's Bush. In 1979 he moved to the south of France to become the Anglican Chaplain in Nice. Around that time his first marriage ended and he returned to London, where he retired from the church in 1982 to concentrate finally on working as a full time artist.

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During those Kensington years, his work reflected the times and the social environment he was living in. “There was an undercurrent of mad life going on all around me. It fuelled my painting at that time. I was doing pretty mad, violent things,” he confesses. His work at this time also contained an erotic element - still to be found in much of his work.

One of the galleries that was keen to show his work was the celebrated Drian Gallery in Bayswater, established by the late Polish artist and gallerist Halima Nalecz, who favoured new contemporary artists yet to be recognised by the inner circle of London galleries. It was here that John enjoyed what he jokingly refers to, using Andy Warhol’s famous quip, as his ‘15 minutes of fame’.

MEETING FRANCIS BACON Whilst in Kensington he had further remarkable encounters with Francis Bacon. “I met Francis, who was on his way to see George Dyer, who was in hospital. He seemed very pleased and came to look at my paintings.,” John remembers. “I don’t think he had expected this clergymen to be painting these pretty large paintings, trying to recreate the human figure, which he was doing himself in his own way. He seemed impressed.” John was surprised to receive an immediate invitation to visit Bacon’s studio: “It was so interesting to be with a man I admired so much. He showed me transparencies and I’m pretty sure one was of his bullfight series.” The bullfight was later to figure for quite different reasons in John’s own painting, recalling the rejoneadora, a woman bullfighter on horseback he witnessed at the Feria d’Arles.

After his decision to focus full time on painting, John received an offer from gallery owner Bouwe Jans, which enabled him to return to France to continue painting and prepare an exhibition for the Eton Gallery in Windsor. He motored to Monte Carlo, where he established an art group. Among the group’s devotees he encountered his soul mate, Zoë, who he went on to marry. “We had a very lovely apartment in Avenue de Grand Bretagne. The Villa Riviera was right next to the Hotel Metropole and had beautiful Belle Epoque rooms on the top floor, where I had my studio.”

A succession of fascinating denizens came to visit the studio, among them the author Graham Greene, whose portrait John painted. Another encounter with Francis Bacon rekindled their friendship. “I was taking the dog for a walk along the Boulevard de Moulin when suddenly I saw the figure of Francis Bacon walking towards me. He looked so happy to say hello and I invited him to visit. He came to dinner a lot of times. He was such a wonderful conversationalist,” John recalls.

He paints a slightly different picture to common perception of Bacon as a tormented soul, who tortured his canvas with bleak and violent images: “We talked about his views on life, and we often got onto deeper things. The great thing about it was he listened quite carefully and pondered. He was very concerned about life and death. He was always searching for the truth in this painting. He was a deeply spiritual man. He told me he didn’t quite know where his inspiration came from.”

Inevitably Bacon’s influence, even if subliminal, grew. “Away from Soho and the pressure of people worrying him very much, he enjoyed a peaceful time, although gambling was his big incentive. He loved gambling and taking risks, and as a painter you have to take tremendous risks,” John remembers. He casts a different light on the artist he knew, a different man from popular reputation of Bacon in his heyday, a dissolute roué throwing his money around, while holding court in the bar of the French House in Soho. In later life in Monaco, John remembers him “dressed in a very smart suit - only sometimes in his old leather jacket”.

The elderly Francis Bacon still revelled in the glitz of Monte Carlo, but enjoyed being a dinner guest in John and Zoe’s apartment. “On his way home; we had a coffee in the Metropole then walked to the Balmoral where he always stayed.” Their final meeting was on April 12 1992. “I later telephoned just to see how he was because he had had bronchitis.

He told me he felt better and was going to Spain. That was the last time we spoke” John remembers. Only a few weeks later Bacon, nursed by Franciscan sisters at the Ruber Clinic in Madrid, died of a heart attack, aged 82.

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Several years earlier John had decided to paint Bacon’s studio in remarkable detail, a vast double canvas which now covering almost an entire wall in his dining room. “I worked partly from photographs and visited the studio. I just felt I wanted to do it. It is really a painting about how I felt the atmosphere of the place.”

WOMAN AND BEAST The impact of Bacon’s style, and occasionally choice of subject, may be discernible, although not always overtly, in John’s own approach.

Towards the end of the 1960s Bacon produced three studies for a bullfight, which became the prominent and familiar poster image for his

above: detail from a preparatory sketch for John Pelling’s bullfighter

huge retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, marred by the death of Bacon’s lover George Dyer by a deliberate overdose in his Paris hotel bathroom.

John’s own bullfight paintings, executed much later, also strove to capture the tormented struggle - not between Bacon’s man and beast, but provocatively between a female matadora and a raging bull. He paints with a similar sweeping boldness, but thinking about his motivation at the time, John insists that he was not promoting the notion of a liberated woman challenging a male dominated and cruel sport: “With my own painting I used a female in place of the usual male bullfighter partly because I prefer to paint the female figure and partly because I utterly oppose the idea of women taking on the role.

Bullfighting in itself is a cruel sport and spectacle. It is bad enough for men to take up this life (however glamorous it may seem to the individuals) but worse for a woman whose normal role in life is to be nurturing - not killing helpless beasts. Men have been conditioned to kill for protection, for food and through greed and wars; unfortunately they too readily take on the role of killing this dignified, but condemned animal.”

The bullfight painting was an important forerunner to his decision to paint the women wrestling series - the gladiatorial spectacle, evoking a similar sexualised blood lust among a baying crowd of voyeurs. As for his technique, John strives to avoid being too representational. “It is travelling between a type of realism at the same time drawing in abstract lines and forms, to create more tension and violence - keeping a limited palette in colour in order to make the most of any place of dark drawing involved in the composition. I am conscious of composition, hoping that it all holds together in the directing the eyes towards the important parts of the painting, and also to be able to move around in certain rhythms inside the canvas. I like it to look as though parts of the paintings happened by accident, that the application of paint has a feeling of naturalness and freedom, with small areas of colour where necessary.”

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John’s work has remained varied and versatile throughout a lifetime of constant experiment and endeavour. The architectural angularity of his Provençal landscape, the rigid yet familiar verticals and horizontals of a hilltop village cascading down perilous slopes, which featured at the Eton Gallery in the early 1980s. The work, if not intentionally conveying a hint of Vorticism, perhaps offers a subconscious nod to Bomberg. Yet this is in marked contrast in style to much of his other work.

A common thread can be discerned in both style and content when comparing his much earlier figurative work. His early nude studies, which attracted the prurient interest of press photographers, gave way to a far more free, bold and gestural sweep of the canvas, which again attracted attention for different reasons.

COURTING CONTROVERSY His Dover Street show, The Splitting Image, in 1998, presented a polemical and somewhat explosive response to the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England and the split between the old guard of traditionalists and the modernisers. The painting was raw rather than raunchy but depicted naked women draped over church altars, large women with their breasts exposed fighting on the ground for a bishop’s mitre, a coffin bearing the words 'Church of England', and diminutive male priests on their knees in solemn prayer. If the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, above one painting he had inscribed: “DIES MAGNA ET AMARA - Oh great and bitter day - 1992” referring the year women were accepted to be ordained.

The media had a field day, but conscious that times had changed, he acknowledged to The Independent: “I sound a bigoted old buffer, but at the same time I do love the company of women.”

pictured right: The artist in his studio with a female bishop painting

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Undeterred just three years later he continued his exploration of the theme with ‘Double Exposure’, (pictured below), another significant series which enlarging the theme of earlier works entitled ‘Vulnerability’.

In his introduction to the exhibition, Simon Owers observed: “By using certain female shapes that could be described as erotic he successfully if disturbingly combines femininity with a militaristic undertone.”

Art critic, Anne Gardom, noted: “John Pelling has used the female form to express his ideas.

In his pictures he uses sweeping curves and rounded shapes against hard, angular backgrounds to give visual expression to the tensions and conflicts presented by current feminism in our church and society.

These figures both attract and repel at the same time, with the lovely lines of the female figure also ending in suggestions of menacing claws or blades tipped in vivid red points and spikes.”

The following year John dedicated himself to a more traditional ecclesiastical challenge - painting the fourteen Stations of the Cross for the church of St Thomas the Apostle in Hanwell, offering an impressive array of “brilliant stain glass colours”. The series can be viewed here: http://thomashanwell.org.uk/building/stations-of-the-cross/ Another church commission followed with an altar reredos depicting ‘The Annunciation’ for the Lady Chapel at St Gabriel’s Church in North Acton.

~~~

Prior to embarking on his wrestler series, John experimented with a number of abstract canvasses in his studio (above) during 2017.

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WRESTLING WITH THE CONCEPT reflecting the voyeuristic nature of the ‘sport’. The referee, the man enforcing the rules, is often obscured, whilst the grey depiction of the soulless onlookers - heads somehow redolent of Munch’s scream suggests an air of despair rather than titillation or excitement.

The wrestling series is little different to John’s familiar female forms, if more overtly figurative. With sweeping feminine curves, a jumble of entwined limbs, he presents the counter-intuitive spectacle of nurturing womanhood captured in violent action in what is usually a maledominated sport. But this new work does owe its inspiration. at least in part, to events of the past, when living in the south of France John witnessed a travelling women’s wrestling spectacle. The image of two strong Romanian women hurling each other around the ring remained etched in his memory for decades - only to resurface in his new series of sketches and paintings.

These women fighters bear little direct relation to the women he witnessed in that earlier village.

Although he uses a limited and subdued palette, these works vividly capture the energy of contemporary combatants in a sports club arena, images that are not merely figurative but layered with subtly different meanings. Perhaps more graphic than the male wrestlers painted by Francis Bacon, Pelling’s women gain an immediacy relating to many issues fuelling controversy today.

The women, sturdy challengers taking on traditionally ‘male’ roles, are impractically and provocatively dressed, in mesh stockings and suspenders. Nevertheless the depiction of violence asserts their strength and power, their capacity for aggression, and their equality as fighters in the ring - no longer an exclusively male province. The paintings also critically portray the ‘male gaze’, evoking the sense of an erotic and gladiatorial spectacle, alongside a whiff of sexualised blood lust among a baying crowd with the ghostly and deliberately vague images of the all-male audience

23 paintings captures a dynamic tension, a contest The overall series of 21 of opposing forces. The works were produced between 2018 and 2019 in a frenzy of daily creativity at the peak of the Brexit turmoil, before the Covid-19 pandemic floored us all with lockdown. The heightened political tensions and hostile atmosphere generated in the post-EU referendum era seem reflected in the embattled rough and tumble of the wrestling scenes.

Text

Although many artists have tackled the subject of wrestling, from the sculptors of ancient Greece and Rome to 19th century realists like Gustav Courbet and 20th century Cubists such as Natalia Goncharova or even Picasso in his lithographs, none has elaborated the challenge of capturing figures in action as this series does on such a scale comparable to Eadweard Muybridge’s celebrated early photographic locomotion studies.

While John Pelling’s preliminary sketches seem even more striking as individual pieces outlined in stark monochrome contrast, it is the sheer scale of his succession of canvasses that demands that they be considered and viewed as a whole - a subtle but distinct sequence of observations of postures, movement and physical contortions that convey the energy, erotic momentum, agony and ecstasy of combat in the ring.

above: one of several preparatory sketches

Neville Rigby May 2021

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John Pelling - born Hove, 1930

1946

Brighton College of Art

1983

Eton Art Gallery, Windsor

1951

Royal College of Art

1983-95

Painting from studio in Monte Carlo - subjects included Graham Greene

1959

Ordained AnglicanPriest

1995

Returned to London

1961-74

Curacy at St Mary Abbots and priest in charge Christ Church, Kensington

1998

Exhibition The Splitting Image, Air Gallery London

1962

Visiting tutor Sir John Cass School of Art

2001

Exhibition Double Exposure, Air Gallery London

1965

First one man exhibition Drian Galleries, London, which hosted a series of exhibitions up to 1970

2003

Commission Fourteen Stations of the Cross, St Thomas the Apostle Church, Hanwell

1966

Moyen Gallery, Manchester

2004

Altar reredos The Annunciation, St Gabriel, North Acton

1967

University of Sussex, Brighton

1973

Visiting chaplain Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

1974

Vicar of St Saviour’s. Shepherd’s Bush

1979

Made Chaplain of Nice

1982

Retired from the ministry to paint full time returning to the South of France

John continues to work in his studio rarely exhibiting.

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