JAMES DODDS
JAMES DODDS
JAMES DODDS text by
A. L. Kennedy
2017
www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG  Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545
Photograph courtesy of Mary Dodds
A S e a’s Eye V iew A. L. Kennedy
James Dodds is an artist much concerned with the tensions and alliances between the trinity of head, heart and hand. It seems, then, only appropriate that I met him for the first time on three separate occasions.
1. The Bow of a Lerwick Foureen with an Upright Stem
oil on linen 90 x 90 cms 353⁄8 x 353⁄8 ins
Occasion I I wander into a summer exhibition of local art in Wivenhoe’s Nottage Institute. I am already aware that Wivenhoe, Francis Bacon’s Essex hideaway, has a record of welcoming serious visual artists. Richard (Dicky) Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller had lived out tumultuous decades in their house on the Wivenhoe quays, Ernie Turner had left his job as a Wivenhoe shipwright to become a highly-regarded naive painter and the Chelsea Arts Club – in all its creative, bohemian and alcoholic glory – had often come to play. The Wivenhoe Arts Club had become a focus for art in the South East of England. And Dicky, Denis and Robert Colquhoun had once watched Robert MacBryde bobbing on the lake at Wivenhoe Park, held afloat by his kilt, during a boating escapade.
In short, I am prepared for work of quality, but perhaps with a certain morning-after sheen and a sense of a community having aged and faded. I am, of course, entirely wrong. The work displayed on all sides is more than impressive. It comes from a range of artists and is displayed with a practical and straightforward friendliness so that it can speak for itself. Downstairs, the bodies of boats are taking shape on trestles, upstairs an institute dedicated to teaching the skills of seamanship is allowing neighbours and visitors to appreciate artisans of another type and holding them to be craftsmen and craftswomen, communicants within the mysteries of trades. Art is not presented as an indulgence, a luxury, or something without inherent qualities that can establish quality, or its absence. This transports a temporary gallery space in Essex to somewhere beyond the UK, or perhaps to some other time, when compromising on skills wasn’t the norm, and when a lack of confidence and simple greed hadn’t placed artistic emphasis on price tags and concepts rather than genuine abilities and values.
2. Varuna
oil on linen 122 x 107 cms 48 x 42 ins
3. T Nielsen Shipyard, Gloucester Docks
linocut in an edition of 150 50 x 69 cms 19 5⁄8 x 27 1⁄8 ins
Among the work are exquisitely detailed prints, their elements balanced in a hypnotic kind of tension. They have a simplicity and yet convey layers of meaning and suggest complex interrelations between the lives of animals, of figures and of objects. There is a dynamic balance between sky and land, land and sky, and between all nature’s manifestations of water and the elements which limit its courses. Head, heart and hand here is James Dodds made plain in woodcuts and linocuts that speak of raging attention to detail, joy in obsession and the pursuit of perfection within craft. And he’s here, too in massive panels that hang like Melville’s foreshadowing ghosts of the Great Whale. They are carved with the imprints of wooden boats, prows looming at the viewer, advancing at an angle; the tense curves of faired planks, sprung together and waiting to meet water. It is clear this artist understands the bones of boats in a manner that allows accuracy to transcend itself and produce a sense of life. There is something mystical about Dodds’ boats. They stay with me.
4. Essex Smack Looking Aft, New Engine Beds
oil on linen 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
5. J J Prior, Sand Barges, Fingringhoe
linocut in an edition of 150 50 x 69 cms 19 5⁄8 x 27 1⁄8 ins
Occasion II I am attending the reopening ceremony of The Wivenhoe Bookshop. The premises have been reorganised and refreshed and behind the till on a freshly-painted wall two linocuts are displayed. They have clean lines, immaculate detail, fair curves. Without being close enough to read any signature, I know I’ve seen that hand before. In one frame a mass of longlines are coiled at rest in a manner that’s far more energetic than would be normal for inanimate objects. In the other a wild man of the sea lies curled in what might be a prison, a creel, or a womb. Winding around him is a sinuous whirlpool of fish and seals and seaweeds – he could be hiding, sleeping, dreaming, he could be sinking, rising, flying in a waterspout. The work comes unmistakably from a mind which has to make complexity simple and simplicity dense with layered meaning. Before I’m told I know this is work from James Dodds. I am also told the artist may turn up to see the bookshop celebrate its new/old self. Wivenhoe is a community which enjoys celebrating its culture whenever it can and dozens are gathered to be pleased about the health of their bookshop. (Their interest also contrives to support a large second hand bookshop not far away.) Sure enough, a quietly compact, bearded man appears in the crowd.
He diffidently mentions that he has a studio not far from where I live. He has a collection of printing presses he uses. He makes linocuts. He suggests I might find this interesting. He is working on a linocut now, reproducing the details of the quarry across our river: the hopper and the ironwork, buildings and sand heaps. He tells me he does seem to be going into an awful lot detail on it and possibly should stop. But he isn’t going to stop. He’ll keep on. There is a sense, while he talks, that he hasn’t, in fact, stopped. His imagination is still sighting, deciding, planning the tasks owed to tomorrow: the fairing of lines, the journey towards perfection. And this is James Dodds. Of course it is – the slight avoidance of self in the pursuit of something else, the questioning balanced against an underlying certainty, the lightness and the dignity in the practice of skills – they all make sense as parts of Dodds. This is the man who guides the hand. This is the artist who set the tumble of longlines in its tub, who set the wild man inside the maelstrom, who set the boats out alive and urgent to stare out from walls.
6. Southwold Lifeboat
oil on cedar panel 110 x 123 cms 431⁄4 x 483⁄8 ins
Occasion III I accept Dodds’ invitation to visit his premises and printing presses. Dodds was brought up around the complicated waterways of South East England. He’s the son of a well-regarded artist and teacher father, who didn’t want the compromise of part-time art – only the much more risky full commitment. But Dodds, the boy who always drew things, was a sailor and racer of boats and then an apprentice builder of boats before he set off into an artist’s training, finally at the Royal College of Art. It’s therefore unsurprising that his print shop is not a bohemian muddle. It’s tight and trig as a cabin should be. Everything is in its place and there are places for everything, everywhere, floor to ceiling. (He mentions the possible storage of nails and screws in jars with their lids nailed to the ceiling with a type of wistfulness. It’s perhaps only the absence of great need for nails and screws that prevents him appropriating the shamefully unoccupied space overhead for storage.) Shelves look after books from his Jardine press – named for one of the three printing presses crammed into the floor space. They are, like boats, beautiful, useful and potentially dangerous things – all stillness and then all movement. Even the areas of mild disorder have a reason – a used sheet of heavy-laid paper protecting the pristine stock, for example.
His depiction of the quarry still lies waiting for Dodds to commence work, yet again. Linocuts can take months to finish, although this is already a thing of remarkable beauty. Easily at hand are finished views of watery landscapes, riverbanks, quaysides, dry docks, boats and muscular flows of water, their directionality showing white‌ Each composition is engineered to hold and steer the eye, draw along in like a powerful current and take it to the heart of things. The land appears bowed, distorted as if it were trapped in a water drop, or a drop of compressed time. The rivers, the seas are dominant here and the land a small and vulnerable thing. The figures that crew it are clearly subject not only to literal storms and floods, but economic and political forces that could sink them.
7. Keel Boats and Cobles, Staithes
linocut in an edition of 150 46 x 73 cms 181⁄8 x 283⁄4 ins
8. New Timbers in an Old One Design
oil on linen 100 x 130 cms 39 3⁄8 x 511⁄8 ins
Beyond his own workshop, Dodds walks me a few doors down to Rob Maloney’s. Maloney is Wivenhoe’s remaining boat builder and restorer. Dodds and Maloney treat each other with mutual respect, discuss the merits (and rarity) of Elm, the possibilities of ash, the heaviness of oak. At the heart of Maloney’s boat shed a small wooden craft is being restored. Its skeleton is showing, along with its copper nails. It offers a living demonstration of the truth that Dodds’ work makes plain – that a properly constructed wooden boat can never take a form that is ugly. The craft under reconstruction has a kind of immanence that Dodds infallibly catches in his piece. It speaks of its past and its future along the branches and echoes of the boat frame. Dodds’ portrayals of boats allow the viewer to appreciate both the time distortion and the detail of a boat’s complexities as the symbolic and the real are fused together.
Next we head round the corner to Dodds’ quayside studio – a space capable of holding life-size paintings of whole boats. Dodds painstakingly depicts local boat types like the Brightlingsea winklebrig, or the Wivenhoe One Dinghy. In an extended project, he has also toured to study and then depict vernacular wooden boats from around the UK: Cromer crabbers, Northumberland cobles, Orkney Yoles; all manner of craft shaped by demands of tasks and conditions and by the memory and understanding of crafts. There are paintings of massive, modern ships under construction, too. And savagely ruined wrecks join more abstract responses to the changes and conflicts in the shipbuilding industry. The studio doors open on to a view of the river and the sound of gulls and, while the boat building industry that was once here has disappeared, Dodds sees to it that work and memory goes on.
9. Oban Skiff 1
oil on linen 90 x 130 cms 353⁄8 x 511⁄8 ins
10. Oban Skiff 2
oil on linen 90 x 150 cms 353â „8 x 59 ins
11. New Essex Smack looking Forward (Two more Planks to go)
oil on linen 90 x 130 cms 353⁄8 x 511⁄8 ins
The James Dodds you will meet in his work is at home on canvas, or the delicate lines of lino cuts and woodcuts. He may paint on rough timber, or use an entire boat as a type of woodcut. His range changes and expands from portraits with a flavour of Stanley Spencer’s compassion and spiritual energy to nautical illustrations for a children’s ABC. He can be realistic, or interpret dreams, myths and the edges of nightmares. Throughout his work, no matter in what medium, certain elements remain. He presents humanity as a flawed but positive project, often surrounded by forces greater than itself. As a child he watched Joan Firmin knitting pink Clangers for Oliver Postgate’s and Peter Firmin’s wise and crazy children’s TV show. (Firmin’s studio wasn’t far away from a childhood friend’s home.) Dodds seems to share something of Postgate’s melancholy, quietly angry tenderness about our species and life in general. And the warm response to Seamus Heaney’s poetry is again looking towards the human project with concern, sadness, tenderness and wonder.
There is a sense in which the conflicts in parent’s relationships as he grew and the other challenges in Dodds’ life have been most consistently eased and answered by art. Perhaps it’s partly because of this, his finished pieces seem to offer a kind of refuge, or empathy to the observer. They have a peace about them, but it derives from a hard-won balance rather than an absence of movement. Dodds the boat builder, Dodds the artisan, Dodds the dyslexic – they have found their mirror images in Dodds the sailor, Dodds the artist, Dodds the printer and storyteller. Long obsessed with the contest between the angel and the carpenter – the high-faluting artist and the straightforward artisan – Dodds has translated what seemed a wrestling match into a kind of dance between an understanding of the material and a journey towards something beyond aesthetic beauty.
12. Southwold Lifeboat
oil on linen 120 x 120 cms 47 1⁄4 x 471⁄4 ins
13. Stern of a Venetian Work Boat 1 (Study)
oil on linen 30 x 50 cms 115⁄8 x 191⁄2 ins
14. Bow of a Venetian Work Boat 2 (Study)
oil on linen 30 x 50 cms 115⁄8 x 191⁄2 ins
The numinous quality in the art can express human solidarity, compassion and also provide secular symbols of spirituality so potent they are not out of place in a church. From an early woodcut ‘Building Eleanor Mary’ where the eponymous boat, although supplied with props, hums with a possibility that she could be self-sustaining, we move to ‘Out of The Marvellous’. This takes its title from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Lightenings VIII’ and shows the vision of the Clonmacnoise monks. In Dodd’s painting of the subject a boat hovers vertiginously above the viewer, its sanctity glowing softly, the form barely tethered by its anchor rope. The piece hang in Salthouse church near ‘Salthouse Altarpiece’ – a triptych which turns the trinity into a quietly perfect boat, its lines both flawless and broken in to three. It aches with a desire for unification.
The linocut ‘Out Of The Marvellous’ shows a monk floating along with the boat, contagiously risen, holding fast to the anchor rope while his brethren look on. ‘Out From Under’ in which a man stands, weighed down by his heavy craft, but has a lightly sailing boat on the waves behind him and ‘Fear Not’ in which a man steers a dinghy blithely onwards into the unknown, Dodds can seek to offer a vision into which, like the monk in Heaney’s verse, the reader may actually climb. The dream may be a boat which can bear us away.
15. Bow Detail
oil on linen 61 x 46 cms 24 x 18 ins
16. Life Belt
oil on linen 90 x 90 cms 353⁄8 x 353⁄8 ins
17. Varuna CK442
oil on linen 110 x 120 cms 431⁄4 x 471⁄4 ins
18. Fullbridge Shipyard
linocut in an edition of 150 50 x 68 cms 19 5⁄8 x 263⁄4 ins
This use of narrative and metaphor has led Dodds into collaborations with the written word. His long term association with Martin Newell has been especially rich and has made the humour in his work more manifest. Jardine press publishes beautiful little volumes winding together poetic and seafaring lines. The uncanny qualities of the sea, the wildness and variety of its life, its history and its reach beyond human timescales are all wonderful sources for illustration and for an exchange of ideas with writers responding to Dodds.
Dodds chooses, among other words for his house, to display a quote from another guardian of craftsmanship potter Bernard Leach, “I found the craftsman is almost the only kind of worker left employing heart, hand and head in balance.” This comes close to the heart of Dodds’ philosophy. His work consciously stands outside an age when many arts and crafts have agreed to be bought, to forget old skills, to mock quality and lose dignity. He reminds us that the bad bargains we have made with ourselves and our skills can still be subject to change and to better examples. Dodds may be a modest man, but he is not modest about his craft – he thinks enough of it to serve it. He brings to it a Calvinist work ethic and a pagan joy.
19 Foureen
oil on linen 152 x 86 cms 60 x 34 ins
20. Danish Tender (Study)
oil on linen 30 x 50 cms 115⁄8 x 191⁄2 ins
21. Eel Drifter (Study)
oil on linen 30 x 50 cms 115⁄8 x 191⁄2 ins
The forms of boats take logical and necessary shapes, are the beautiful solutions to fatal problems and Dodds’ pieces elaborate on the levels of necessity that both the sea and art require if humanity is to survive. If a boat fails, if art fails, this is a matter of life and death. The shapes he reveals aren’t just about pleasing aesthetics, they’re not simply examples of elegant styling, they’re about truth. The ease with which the eye moves along the lines he marks out is the result of a difficult process, of experience and of making fair. In Dodds’ work there is the kind of truth that can’t help but be beautiful, the kind of truth that hopes to be useful and sustaining. And it’s the kind of truth that resonates outwith itself, producing the looped figure of infinity, the figure of eight that Dodds sees in the open shape of a boat. Vessels, like art, and visions are intend to reach us forward to somewhere near the infinite. While his sails rise and his wings take flight, his boats – of course – fly in an element portrayed as something more miraculous even than water, a kind of distilled light. They always stare at us, almost challenge us, looking out of the Marvellous.
And in Dodd’s world, as in ours, the water is always there. His landscapes, rather than showing a fish-eye view, show a sea’s-eye view. Here mankind and its works are laid before us – frail, clever, tender, damaged, beautiful and trying to stay safely alive. His perspective shows us our home from the point of view of the outsider. We are perhaps seeing as a boatman would, or a Viking raider, a Wivenhoe smuggler, a war time mariners. We may be aloft at a masthead, we may be adrift in time. And we may be angels. Something about the work insists – we may be angels with salt on our wings. A L Kennedy writer and broadcaster
22. Green Pram Dingy
oil on linen 70 x 120 cms 271⁄2 x 471⁄4 ins
23. The Stern of a Lerwick Foureen with an Upright Stem
oil on linen 90 x 120 cms 353⁄8 x 471⁄4 ins
24. Viking Skiff 1
oil on linen 90 x 100 cms 353⁄8 x 393⁄8 ins
25. Viking Skiff 2
oil on linen 90 x 90 cms 353⁄8 x 353⁄8 ins
Biography 1957 1972 1973 1976 1977 1981 1984 2007
Born in Brightlingsea Mate on Baltic Trader, Solvig Apprentice Shipwright, Walter Cook & Son, Maldon (until 1976) Shipbuilding Industry Training Board, Southampton (until 1974) Colchester School of Art (Foundation) Chelsea School of Art (until 1980) Royal College of Art (until 1984) (won Anstruther Award 1983) Started Jardine Press, Stoke-by-Nayland Received Doctorate from the University of Essex
Selected Group Exhibitions
1991 Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts 1993 “Six Artists”, Wetzlar, Germany 1994 John Callahan Gallery, Boston, USA 1995 “4 from Wivenhoe”, Courcoux & Courcoux, Stockbridge “Ultra Marine”, Liverpool Maritime Museum “Forth, Tyne, Dogger”, Brewery Arts, Cirencester 1996 Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster University “The Sea”, Black Swan Arts, Frome 1997 City Art Gallery, Leeds “An English Perspective”, Union of Artists, St Petersburg, Russia “Marine Artists”, Mall Galleries, London 1998 Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts 1999 Eastern Open, (Best in Show) King’s Lynn Arts Centre, Norfolk Mystic Seaport; New York Ship Terminal, USA Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts 2000 Hunting Art Prizes, Royal College of Art Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts “Alphabet Soup”, Printworks, Sudbury 2001 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2003 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2006 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2007 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2008 “East Coast Influences”, Messum’s, Cork Street, London Geedon Gallery, Fingringhoe, Colchester “Salthouse 08: SEAhouse, LIGHThouse, SPIRIThouse”, Salthouse, Essex The Nottage Maritime Institute, Wivenhoe, Essex 2009 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2010 “Atelier, Artists & Artists’ Estates”, Messum’s, Cork Street, London “East Coast Influences”, Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2011 “New English Art Club and Others”, Geedon Gallery, Fingringhoe, Colchester 2013 “Masterpieces, Art and East Anglia” Sainsbury Centre, UEA, Norwich. 2014 “Easterlies”, Abbey Walk Gallery, Grimsby. 2014 Messum’s, Cork Street, London
Shipshape Tour 2001 Firstsite at The Minories Art Gallery, Colchester 2002 Whitstable & Herne Bay Museums & Art Galleries, Kent Black Swan Arts, Frome, Somerset Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham 2003 National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth 2003–4 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 2004 Messum’s Fine Art, Cork Street, London
Shipshape & The Year of the Sea 2005
Time & Tide, Great Yarmouth Buckenham Gallery, Southwold Hartlepool Art Gallery, Hartlepool
Thurso & Wick, Scotland Fermoy Gallery, King’s Lynn Arts Centre (with Guy Taplin) Hayletts Gallery, Maldon Chappel Galleries, Chappel
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1983 “Icarus”, The Minories, Colcester 1984 “Peter Grimes”, at the 37th Aldeburgh Festival 1985 Ship of Fools”, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne The Quay Theatre Gallery, Sudbury 1986 “Fish, Flesh or Fowl”, Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich (with Bridget Heriz-Smith and Jane Truzzi-Franconi) 1989 Printworks, Colchester (and in 1990,1995 and 1997) Bircham Contemporary Arts, Norfolk (and in 1992, 1995 and 1999) 1990 “The Shipwright’s Trade”, at the 43rd Aldeburgh Festival Chappel Galleries, Chappel, Essex (and in 1994) St John Street Gallery, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk 1991 “From the Glasshouse”, Heffers Gallery, Cambridge 1992 Sue Rankin Gallery, London (two man show with John Bratby RA) “Peter Grimes”, Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich 1995 “Wild Man”, at the 48th Aldeburgh Festival Simbouras Gallery, Athens, Greece 1998 “On The Beach”, at the 51st Aldeburgh Festival “Waterworks”, Printworks, Sudbury “Boatshow”, North House Gallery, Manningtree 2000 “Full Circle”, at the 53rd Aldeburgh Festival 2001 North House Gallery, Manningtree (two man show with John Reay) “Blue Boat”, University of Essex Gallery “Shipshape” Tour Firstsite at The Minories Art Gallery, Colchester 2002 Whitstable & Herne Bay Museums & Art Galleries, Kent Black Swan Arts, Frome, Somerset Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham 2003 National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth 2003–4 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 2004 Messum’s Fine Art, Cork Street, London “Shipshape” & “The Time of the Sea” Tours 2005 Time & Tide, Great Yarmouth Buckenham Gallery, Southwold Hartlepool Art Gallery, Hartlepool Thurso and Wick, Scotland Fermoy Gallery, King’s Lynn Arts Centre (with Guy Taplin) Hayletts Gallery, Maldon “Lifeboat”, Chappel Galleries, Chappel, Essex 2006 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2007 “Fore and Aft”, University of Essex Gallery Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2008 “Vessels of the East Coast”, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington, Hampshire “Mainly Linocuts”, Hayletts Gallery, Maldon, Essex 2009 “American Boats”, Messum’s Fine Art, Cork Street, London “25 Years of Jardine Press”, Messum’s Fine Art, Cork Street, London Bircham Gallery, Holt, Norfolk (two man show with Stephen Hendersen) 2010 “James Dodds and the Jardine Press”, Lewis Elton Gallery, University of Surrey. Dowling Walsh, Rockland, Maine, USA 2011 Church Street Gallery, Saffron Walden, Essex Messum’s, Cork Street, London.
A book about James Dodds
In this richly illustrated volume Ian Collins charts the voyage James Dodds has made from boatbuilder to artist.
IAN COLLINS
Born in Norfolk, and now living in Southwold and London, Ian Collins hails from a long line of Broadland boat-builders. His writings on East Anglian art have appeared in the Eastern Daily Press since 1978 and widely elsewhere. His books include A Broad Canvas (1990), Making Waves: Artists in Southwold (2005) and Water Marks: Art in East Anglia (2010), with monographs on Guy Taplin (2007), John McLean (2009) and John Craxton (2011). He has co-produced a television documentary on Margaret Mellis (1993) and appeared on BBC2’s Coast and The Culture Show, also curating exhibitions from the 50th Aldeburgh Festival in 1997 to Salthouse 08 and the Mary Newcomb memorial show at Norwich Castle (2009). He has worked with Messum’s in London’s Cork Street for many years.
“It is not often that art is able to curtsy to craft – but James Dodds’ fabulous and strangely moving paintings of wooden boat building are a superb testament to the skills of marine craftsmen.” Felix Dennis, publisher, poet and art collector.
Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh;Victoria and Albert Museum; Clacton & Rochford Hospitals; Chelmsford and Essex Museums; Ipswich Borough Council, Museums and Galleries; Colchester Borough Council; Horniman Museum, London; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; UCS East Contemporary Art Collection, Ipswich; MMoFA, Madison, Georgia, USA; Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art; Bermuda;The Sainsbury Centre, UEA Norwich;The Victor Batte-Lay Foundation collection, and many private collectors
2007 2012 2016
Awarded GMC Trust Best in Show ‘Aldeburgh Beach’ Honorary doctorate from University of Essex. Ian Collins biography of James Dodds “Tide Lines” wins EDP Jarrolds East Anglian Art & Photography Book Award John Nash medal from Colchester Art Society
A L Kennedy; Southwold Lifeboat, Alfred Corry Museum;The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark; David Patient, Shipwrights, Maldon; Harkers Yard, Brightlingsea; Rob Maloney, Boatbuilders, Wivenhoe.
Films
A short film, “Shaped by the Sea”, about James Dodds, produced by Emily Harris for Classic Yacht TV released in May 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDoPZf_Iooc Timelapse film of James Dodds painting Colchester fishing smack “Peace” in fourteen days. Lofting out the traditional way and then painting onto 5 panels. https://youtu.be/Co0VrnreSHA
CDXXIV
TIDE LINES
THE LIFE AND ART OF JAMES DODDS
TIDE LINES
IN THIS EVOCATIVE VOLUME Ian Collins charts the voyage James Dodds has made both from the literal to the poetic and from shipwright to painter, printmaker and fine-press publisher. Richly illustrated with pictures spanning more than three decades of inspired endeavour, the biography adds a supporting cast of artists, poets and other nautical characters. It also includes a wider study of “boats the sea has made” – vernacular vessels from the Shetlands to the Scillies and across the Atlantic to New England which punctuate the artist’s intriguing story.
IAN COLLINS offers the perspective of a writer steeped in the art of East Anglia. His engaging text is informed by a decade of writing about James in exhibition catalogues and regional books, and also draws on the artist’s own biographical notes.
TIDE LINES… marks on the shore left at the tide’s highest point, made of whatever flotsam and jetsam, litter and treasure, the sea flings up.The tides’ lunar cycle could also be a metaphor for the ebb and flow of the creative process.The line between land and sea is constant and ever changing, and this state of flux and fixture is the place that art inhabits. From the small craft of the shore line James Dodds has created a truly seaworthy art.
Ian Collins
by Ian Collins (Jacket) North Norfolk Beach Boat triptych. 2009 Oil on linen. 38 x 116in (96 x 295cm)
Published by Jardine Press with Studio Publications 240 x 300mm, 216 pp. 300 illustrations in full colour
Edition of 200 Special Hardbacks in slipcases, signed and numbered: £150 (Including exclusive hand-printed, signed and numbered linocut, worth £250)
Thanks to,
Ian Collins
Collections
1999
JAMES DODDS
“Magnificent. A re-vision. The marvellous as he has shown it.” Seamus Heaney on James Dodds’ response to his poem From Lightenings viii.
Salthouse Altarpiece (Cromer Crabber) triptych. 2008 Oil on linen. 36 x 108in (92 x 275cm) (see p174–5)
Awards
TIDE LINES
Pen and ink drawing of Ian Collins by Andrew Dodds for East Anglia Drawn, 1984
DODDS
2012 Dowling Walsh, Rockland, Maine, USA Drang Gallery, Padstow. Hayletts Gallery, Maldon, Essex. 2013 Messum’s, Cork Street, London 2013 Bircham Contemporary Arts, Holt, Norfolk 2015 Messum’s, Cork Street, London. 2015/16 “Wood to Water”, Firstsite, Colchester 2016 Messum’s, Cork Street, London. 2016 Hayletts Gallery, Maldon
ISBN 978-1-910993-16-3 Publication No: CDXXIV Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Printed by DLM-Creative
Photography: Doug Atfield and Mary Dodds
Standard Hardback edition with Jacket: £35 “Tide Lines is a joy from start to finish and in these miserable days is one of those rare books that make one glad to be alive.” Review by Ken Worpole in “Caught by the River”
“This is a book to treasure, relish and enjoy on many different levels.” Review by Peter Willis in Classic Boat
“Realism and mystery are two opposing strands whose friction make James’s art so compelling.” Review of Tide Lines by David Burnett in The Marine Quarterly
Ian Collins is a writer and curator who hails from a long line of Norfolk boatbuilders. His Tide Lines book on James Dodds was runner-up for the 2013 New Angle Prize for Literature. The title also won the Art and Photography prize in the 2012 East Anglian Book Awards. Announcing the award judge Mary Muir said: “This is a book written from the heart by someone who not only cares passionately for our region but for the artists who help us to see, understand and celebrate it. “Tide Lines is a homage to one of our most individual and authentic artistic voices. This beautifully produced and illustrated book charts, in rich biographical detail, the journey of James Dodds from shipwright to internationally regarded artist and finepress publisher. It is also a wonderful homage to boats, the art of boat-building and what it means to live in a place shaped physically and culturally by the sea.” Ian has also written monographs on John Craxton, John McLean and Guy Taplin. His Water Marks: Art and East Anglia volume features many Messum’s artists – including James Dodds. James was also included in the Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia book Ian co-wrote and edited for the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, which was the overall winner in the 2013 East Anglian Book Awards.
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