Christopher Bramham
Christopher Bramham
Christopher Bramham new work
jonathan clark fine art 18 park walk SW10 0AQ london +44 (0)20 7351 3555
Chris Bramham by Lucian Freud 1989
info @ jcfa.co.uk www.jcfa.co.uk
Introduction The gravelly, green, wood- and stone-loving works of Christopher Bramham do not, on the face of it, share much with the light touch and creamy ambience of Henri Matisse’s Nice-period paintings. But Chris Bramham loves Matisse, and in particular Matisse’s early Nice period. Register this – begin to sense why – and you have a beautiful key into his work. In an important sense, of course, Bramham’s painting needs no key. It is beautiful, urgent, intimate work, and it convinces instantly, without the need for critical intercession. You feel in front of his art both the nervous excitability and the spiritual relief that always arise from unaffected truth-telling. But besides being direct and plain-spoken, Bramham’s work is also, at odd times, anxiously alert, even a little sly. (It is art, after all.) So it is both a pleasure and a secret doorway to deeper connections when you notice the open book, facing away, on the chair in Bramham’s marvellous Still Life with Books (pages 27-29). The book that is open on top of the pile is the catalogue for ‘Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice 1916-1930’, a late 1980s show organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. “Oh, I adore it beyond belief,” Bramham told me, laughing, but quite serious, over the phone. “It’s a sort of bible to me. He helps me so much!” Leafing through my own cherished copy, I glean that Bramham’s, in the painting, is open to pages 130-131. The spread holds two plates, paintings from around 1919 that present classic Matissean motifs (windows, curtains, shutters, flowers, an oval mirror, a distant palm) in familiar Nice-period harmonies (creamy yellows, blues, mauves, and pinks, with eloquent little punches of black). In 1919, it’s worth pointing out, all this must still have felt fresh and full of potential to Matisse. Two years earlier, just shy of 50, the native northerner with the serious spectacles and the permanent furrow bisecting his brow had moved south to a series of hotel rooms in Nice.
opposite
Detail of Still Life with Books 2014-15 (page 29)
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What did the move mean to him?
walls: tables, chairs, paintings in progress. Others were more proximate still, at Bramham’s feet or under his nose: paint tins, pot plants, brushes, a plate of eggs,
A great gulping intake of air. A new project. A spiritual unclenching.
floorboards, a ceramic bowl, a favourite round table (that last quietly evoking the
And so it may have been for Chris Bramham, after his 1999 move, with his wife
table Matisse painted several times in 1916).
Ruth and their children, to a big old house in north-east Cornwall, near the border with Devon. The house, built in the 1870s, was unlikely. It reminded Bramham of a
Bramham’s bowl – bone-white, dirty, delicately ribbed on the outside – is a fixture in
vicarage. Slate floors, servant bells, big bay windows. Outside, and visible through
many of his best works. His wife Ruth used to make bread in it. Before that, it was
those windows, a big Scots pine.
part of an old Victorian washstand. Eventually, it migrated to the studio. “Everything ends up in my studio,” Bramham told me, “Ruth knows it.”
Was all this relaxing, uplifting, intoxicating? Possibly not. Bramham succumbed, he told me, to a kind of panic after his family moved in. You would never guess it by
“Everything” includes mussel and oyster shells, which Bramham often uses to mix
looking at the paintings. But then, you would never guess that Matisse succumbed
paint. Also: lemons, jugs, green apples, peaches, a pear, knuckles of garlic, duck eggs, a
in Nice to the same nosebleeds, insomnia, panic attacks, and relentless anxiety as
lilac branch, a sleeping dog, and, in one marvellously assured pastel, Ruth herself (p. 56).
he had in Paris. Great painting is always jumping over unseen hurdles. It is always unlikely.
All these things, once enlisted, must endure. Unlike the light, aerated surfaces of Matisse, Bramham’s paint is thick, resinous, sensuously clotted. His heavily worked,
A card Bramham received in the post eventually calmed his nerves. It showed
semi-sculptural, but always taut and subtle surfaces capture the tactility of things,
Constable’s elm – or actually, the etching made from it by Bramham’s old friend
embodying them anew, demanding of them – and their creator – a second life.
– a huge influence on his life and work – Lucian Freud. “You’re not loving it,” he immediately realized, in relation to his own work. “You’ve got to love it!”
Some are vegetable; they sprout over time, like the red onions that sit on a saucer beside five lemons and a couple of sea shells (see p. 24). (Matisse painted his own
So love it. But what do you paint at such times? Confronting this same basic
sprouting red onions in 1906). Others are wood; others still stone. All endure
question, Matisse in palmy Nice and Bramham in marshy Cornwall alighted on more
Bramham’s painterly amplifications in their own way, just as they have endured
or less the same answer. Both chose to paint what was arrayed before them –
the various earlier phases of their existence. The husks of a handful of hazelnuts
arrayed both by chance (This is where I happen to be) and by design (where I happen
languished so long under the painter’s patient gaze that they ended up shrivelled.
to be is my studio). They painted things in the world that were the world, in all its separateness and quiddity (furniture, rocks, lemons, a melon) but which could also
What Bramham learned from Freud, he told me, was that “nothing is so insignificant
be enlisted, without fuss, as materials for painting. Things close at hand.
that you can’t trouble over it.” The two artists were especially close in the 1980s and ’90s. Freud painted first Bramham (frontispiece), and then two of his children,
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For Bramham, as for Matisse, some of those things were further away: views
Polly and Barney. A year ago, Bramham showed me a brief letter Freud sent him, an
through windows, trees, the nearby landscape. Some were delimited by interior
invitation to tea. Unexpectedly, it quoted Nietzsche: “If there is to be art, if there
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is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one must first have enhanced the exitability
painted during dark days after a diagnosis of lymphoma, followed, months later, by a
[sic] of the whole machine.” Excited himself, Freud signed off: “Put that in your pipe
debilitating bone marrow transplant. It’s really an astonishing painting – charged with
and smoke it.”
a quality of objectivity that almost intimidates. The big charcoal (p. 11) and small painted study (p. 19) of the same subject are no less engaging.
Bramham is still, you feel, pensively puffing away. His work is rich in feeling, direct, tender to the touch, and yes, excited. The recent paintings, many produced during
Indeed, Bramham’s drawings and his pastels are as substantial and assured as the
a long and arduous convalescence, are especially so. Small, hard-won, and intensely
oils. In the drawings, modelling, texture, shine, and opacity are all achieved through
heartfelt, they have the same quality of unaffected, open-eyed sincerity you see in
varieties of hatching and withholding that are never formulaic. The nuances of
those early 19th century plein-air paintings by deracinated northerners assembled
colour introduced in the pastels – the coloured light, for instance, reflecting off the
in Rome. Never intended for show, these present randomly cropped rooftops,
wooden table onto the white bowl’s exterior in Melon and White Stones (p. 10) –
mundane views, gardens, and old stones which may or may not be ancient ruins.
attest to an artist better than adept in this medium.
Perhaps because they are so personal, they also feel remarkably modern. Bramham’s ambition, however, is tested most fully by the medium of paint. It is in Wet, verdant, and unapologetically English, Bramham’s outdoor pictures also recall
oils that you feel him wrestling with the sensuous substance of things – spongy and
Constable, and, in certain cases, the quality of faithful scrutiny you find in the more
yielding or hard and resistant, bright or dun. Unlike Freud, a connoisseur of flesh
naturalistic works of Albrecht Dürer – not least the Great Piece of Turf (a favourite
tones and floorboards who was otherwise not much interested in colour, Bramham
of Bramham’s from youth). Sometimes, subject matter and painterly idiom reinforce
is an instinctive colourist.
one another in surprising ways, lending the resulting image a satisfying philosophical cohesion. Old Cooker (p. 16), for instance, shows the stove the Bramhams saved up
His feeling for bright bursts of local colour aligns him more with Manet than with the
for to buy and which they consequently loved for many years. Bramham shows it
sweaty corporeal realism of Courbet or Freud. He delights in the saturated yellows
standing discarded at the centre of a pile of rubble and refuse outside. The painting
of lemons, the gamut of greens that streak across the surface of a watermelon,
is so humble it could be refuse itself. But it sings. Small celandines, red campions,
and in the varieties of red, orange and yellow that make up the skin of two slightly
and oxeyes chime in with unexpected descants in paintings nearby (see pp. 18, 34
stunted-looking peaches. He attends to shiny highlights and stark shadows alike. He
and 46). They recall the wildness, the freshness in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring’,
is not interested in prettifying anything. If he sees it, he puts it in, bright and clarion
“when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.”
or abject and dull. He wants to deny nothing.
The pine tree, meanwhile, towers over all (see pp. 17, 31, 35, 52 and 53), its
Sebastian Smee
pink-tinged crusty bark and sun-struck branches holding the warmth of the sun,
Boston, January 2016
and brushing (Hopkins again) “the descending blue”. The white stones (see pp. 13-15), cordoned off by a chestnut fence erected by Bramham (it reminded him of the rustic fence in Dürer’s engraving, The Virgin Mary Crowned by Two Angels) were
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above
Melon & White Stones 2014 pastel on paper 13¾ × 10½ in / 35 × 27 cm opposite
White Stones 2012 charcoal on paper 40 × 28 in / 101.5 × 71 cm
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11
above
Landscape with Rubble 2014 -15 charcoal & chalk on paper 32 × 22½ in / 81 × 57 cm opposite & foldout
White Stones 2010 -14 oil on canvas 78 × 48 in / 198 × 122 cm
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Detail
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above
Old Cooker 2014 oil on canvas 6 × 8½ in / 15 × 21.5 cm left
Small Garden II 2013 oil on canvas 8 × 6¼ in / 20.5 ×16 cm right
Pine Tree III 2008 oil on canvas 21¾ × 16 in / 55 × 40.5 cm
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Small Celandines 2007-12
Small White Stone 2013
oil on canvas 5½ × 6½ in / 14 × 16.5 cm
oil on canvas 6½ × 7 in / 16.5 × 18 cm
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20
Landscape with Rubble 2014 -15
Rubble 2015-16
charcoal & chalk on paper 26 × 20 in / 66 × 51 cm
pastel on paper 23½ × 18½ in / 59.5 × 47 cm
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Interior with Melon 2013 oil on canvas 20 × 17½ in / 51 × 44.5 cm
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above
Five Lemons 2015 oil on canvas 12 ×14 in / 30.5 × 35.5 cm opposite
Red Onions 2015-16 oil on canvas 24 ×18 in / 61 × 46 cm
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25
above
Still Life Drawing 2014 charcoal on paper 23 ×17½ in / 58.5 × 44.5 cm opposite & foldout
Still Life with Books 2014-15 oil on canvas 60 × 39 in / 152.5 × 99 cm
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Detail
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above
Trees 2015 charcoal on paper 14½ × 24½ in / 37 × 62 cm opposite
Pine Tree II 2008 oil on canvas 21¾ ×16 in / 55 × 40.5 cm
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31
Painting Stuff 2014-16 oil on canvas 33 × 25 in / 84 × 63.5 cm
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33
above
Red Campions 2007-12 oil on canvas 11½ × 9 in / 29 × 23 cm opposite
Pine by a Garden – Summer Evening 2013-14 oil on canvas 38½ × 28 in / 98 × 71 cm
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35
above
Garlic 2011 pastel on paper 8½ × 12¾ in / 21.5 × 32.5 cm left
Duck Eggs 2014 pastel on paper 14 ½×10 in / 37 × 25.5 cm right
Studio with Red Chair 2013 oil on canvas 10 × 8½ in / 25.5 × 21.5 cm
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37
above
Study of Tree (Landscape with Open Gate) 2011-12 charcoal & chalk on paper 26½ × 23 in / 67 × 58.5 cm opposite & foldout
Landscape with Open Gate 2006 -12 oil on canvas 32 × 42 in / 81 × 10 6.5 cm
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Detail
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above
Small Studio (Bar Stool) 2013-14 oil on canvas 8 × 12 in / 20.5 × 30.5 cm opposite
Small Studio with Lemons 2013 oil on canvas 14 × 15½ in / 35.5 × 39.5 cm
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Studio with Melon 2013
Small Interior with Lilac Branch & Sleeping Dog 2014
oil on canvas 12 ×10 in / 30.5 × 25.5 cm
oil on canvas 9½ × 6 in / 24 × 15 cm
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above
Oxeyes 2005 oil on canvas 8 × 6 in / 20.5 ×15 cm opposite
Small Farm, Elder Tree 2014 oil on canvas 18 × 11 in / 45.5 × 28 cm
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47
above
Two Lemons 2013-14 oil on canvas 10 ×12½ in / 25.5 × 32 cm opposite & foldout
Lemons I 2012 oil on canvas 20 ×18¼ in / 51 × 46.5 cm
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51
Detail
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52
Pine Tree IV 2008
Pine Tree I 2008
oil on canvas 23 × 16 in / 58.5 × 40.5 cm
oil on canvas 22 ×16 in / 56 × 40.5 cm
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above
Small Apples 2013 oil on canvas 5¾ × 7¼ in / 14.5 ×18.5 cm left
Green Apples 2013 oil on canvas 10 × 8 in / 25.5 × 20.5 cm right
Small Interior with Coatstand 2011-12 oil on canvas 18 × 20 in / 46 × 51 cm
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55
above
Ruth 2013 pastel on paper 9½ ×11¼ in / 24 × 28.5 cm opposite
Still Life (Melon & Apples) 2013 oil on canvas 16 × 12¼ in / 40.5 × 31 cm
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Two Peaches 2012
Yellow Pear 2014 -15
oil on canvas 6 ×10 in / 15 × 25.5 cm
oil on canvas 6 × 8½ in / 15 × 22 cm
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Christopher Bramham 1952 Born in Bradford, Yorkshire Bradford Art College 1970 1971–73 Kingston-upon-Thames Art School 1975–86 Part-time teaching at art schools in London First exhibition in London at The Fine Art Society 1988 1992–02 Five solo exhibitions at Marlborough Fine Art, London Exhibited in The School of London and their Friends, 2001 Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut Solo exhibition at Browse & Darby, London 2004 Exhibited in Drawing Inspiration: Contemporary British 2006 Drawing, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria Paintings, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London 2010 2012 New Works, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London
Photography by David Edmonds, Douglas Atfield, & Justin Piperger Frontispiece: Lucian Freud (1922-2011) Chris Bramham, 1989, oil on canvas Private Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images Facing Introduction: Christopher Bramham, Still Life with Books, 2014-15 (detail), oil on canvas, 60 × 39 in / 152.5 × 99 cm (p. 27) Designed by Graham Rees Printed by Deckers Snoeck Text © Sebastian Smee Catalogue © Jonathan Clark Fine Art Framing by Stewart Heslop Published by Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.
jonathan clark fine art 18 park walk SW10 0AQ london +44 (0)20 7351 3555
info @ jcfa.co.uk www.jcfa.co.uk
Jonathan Clark Fine Art