Goldmark 14

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AUTUMN 2019

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g AUTUMN 2019 NUMBER 14

Contents 4

The Women of Frank Dobson

10 Jean-Nicolas Gérard 16 Morris Kestelman - Image on Green Ground 18 Joe Tilson 26 Mike Dodd - The First Pot I Ever Bought 30 Eric Ravilious - High Street 36 Anthony Gross - French Landscapes

It seems appropriate, as summer gives way to autumn, that our October issue turns to themes of earth and wood; whether it’s the generousness of Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s earthenware pottery, Anthony Gross’ paintings of living landscapes, or the earthiness of Frank Dobson’s nude sculptures. Our feature on the Goldmark Atelier’s latest venture offers a fascinating insight into the woodblocks of John Nash, while wood – in various guises – marks just one of the elemental refrains of the work of Joe Tilson. Enjoy these and more in our latest autumnal offering.

42 Paula Rego - The Neverland 44 Three Armenian Artists 50 Lisa Hammond - Grace & Resolve 56 Howard Hodgkin - Nick 58 John Nash - Engravings from the Original Woodblocks

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 26 © Mike Dodd 44 © Baykar Demir Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Callum Crawford Design: Porter/Goldmark, October 2019 ISBN 978-1-909167-69-8

goldmark Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 info@goldmarkart.com www.goldmarkart.com

CONTRIBUTORS Mike Dodd is one of Britain’s top working potters. A fervent supporter of animal welfare, conservation, and environmental causes, he has held international workshops in Germany and India and worked extensively with potting communities around the world. Dodd’s work is now held in collections at the V&A, the British Crafts Council, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Baykar Demir is an Istanbul based Armenian art historian and curator. He is studying for an MA in History of Art at İstanbul Üniversitesi.

Wrested from the earth

THE W0MEN OF FRANK dOBSON Who are the women of Frank Dobson’s art? Not the delicately posed portraits of aristocratic dames – of Sitwells and Harrisons and Rutherstons, Ladies Barlow and Cooper (the latter especially fine), or the exquisitely sylphen models of the dancer Lydia Lopokova and the actress Tallulah Bankhead that cemented his reputation as a society portraitist par excellence. No: who are these universal, spiritual women, large and sublime, their frames thick and rhythmic, a contradiction of gentle, graceful primitivism, their bodies built in clay as if wrested from the earth, to borrow Duncan Grant’s phrase, like primal Eves from Adam’s rib.

These are the women to whom Dobson dedicated virtually his entire sculptural output and outlook. He was not unusual in his devotion to this narrow theme: both the younger Henry Moore and the elder Jacob Epstein took women, and womanhood, as essential subjects in their sculpture; and they did so in a reinvigoration of millennia-long traditions of taking the female form, absurdly curved and slendered according to the needs of the peoples who fashioned them, as symbols of earthly generation, fertility, fecundity, and fleshly promiscuity.

Epstein and Moore carved and modelled women to all of these themes: Moore’s mother and child, seated and reclining, became a lifelong obsession, while Epstein produced god-like Gaias, ancestral mothers of titanic power, and made smouldering portrait busts of female sitters, where the bust is often their most prominent aspect. None of this is absent in Dobson: sex, birth and feminine tenderness are there to be found in abundance in his models of women, and like Moore and Epstein they sometimes skirt the divide between authentic feeling and sexist cliché with mixed success. But there is something different in Dobson’s depiction of women that is more than just formal; that goes beyond the built up roundness, the generousness of their figures. Their faces are at once anonymous and particular: they describe real women,

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posed singly with bowls and founts or unusually in pairs, where the male gaze feels absent; friends, not lovers, in close conversation, with titles like ‘Gossips’ and ‘Leisure’, the latter of which provided the model for Dobson’s most celebrated public sculpture, ‘London Pride’.

Epstein, Dobson and Moore all drew directly on the women central to their lives. For Dobson, they were his first wife, Cordelia, the young girl from Newlyn who he met before the war during his time working in Cornwall; and later, when their marriage broke apart, his second wife, Mary, and their daughter Ann. He drew all of them, modelled portraits of Ann, and subsumed Mary’s distinctive face and shape into a great many of his models. Most produced after they met in the mid-1920s could, at a push, be said to be ‘of’ her; you feel her emanating from the core of his sculpture.

But most significantly, and unlike Epstein or Moore, Dobson worked closely with women throughout his career.

The era in which he established himself saw the world of art opening up to women artists, albeit slowly and reluctantly, and key figures including Laura Knight, Gwen John, or Winifred Nicholson, whom Dobson knew personally, were establishing respected careers independent of fathers, husbands and brothers. But women in the world of sculpture were still rare: the successes of Barbara Hepworth were by far the exception, and bitterly hard-won; sculpture, especially stone carving, was still a man’s game.

Dobson was unusual, then, in taking several female studio assistants, many of whom established fruitful careers of their own, among them Elizabeth Muntz and Sylvia Gilley. Gilley remembered that Dobson preferred women as pupils and apprentices to men: the boys, she recalled, ‘wanted to do what they wanted to do’; the girls by contrast stood to lose or gain a great deal more from the relationship, and were happier to listen and learn than challenge or ignore. He was a good teacher, by all accounts – attentive and effective, kind, never condescending, and always ready with practical tips of the trade when it came to the grubbier aspects of casting, carving and polishing.

Being surrounded as he was by women – in relationships personal and professional – must have impacted his approach to the female form, which manages a startling realism despite its ‘ballooning’ of arms, legs, waists and breasts. It likely

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impacted his first marriage too. What ultimately drove Dobson and Cordelia apart is not clear, though their arrangement seems never to have been happy. Perhaps the ‘preference’ of which Sylvia Gilley spoke was more exploitative than she let on. There were of course models, too; and he would not have been the first, and certainly not the last, to have taken undue advantage of the regular sittings of vulnerable young women. Likely too the all-consuming nature of Dobson’s workshop space, which must have been exhausting for both, never helped. Whatever the cause, by 1925 he had met Mary Bussell, a young dancer and daughter of an art dealer. Their affair put a messy end to Dobson’s failed marriage, and she quickly became his most important muse, her long, oval face, her long, large frame, and her eyes, large and dusky, set deeply into her head; no wonder Augustus John had wanted to paint her. ‘Woman Seated’ (1926), newly editioned by the Goldmark Gallery, is undoubtedly a portrait of her – intimate, and nervously sensual – made in the first months of their liaison.

When Wyndham Lewis had tried to recruit Dobson’s talents as the new sculptural focus of a revived Vorticism, Dobson had joked that he could not keep to angles: ‘After all, I like my gals round and full’. Fullness – of form, and of purpose – is the defining characteristic in Dobson’s female sculpture, arrived at from a variety of influences (not least, personal taste). Maillol is the preferred reference point, and certainly, the Frenchman’s neo-classical plenitude was of lasting importance to Dobson. But there is more vital, if subtler, modernism to be found here: the tubular trunks of Leger, for example, whose spheroid figures find a counterpart in Dobson’s drawings. Women broad shouldered and big-thighed owe some of their debt to Picasso, too, though they lack any of the occasional nastiness, or the ravenous randiness of the Spaniard. Dobson’s nudes are in effect a kind of amalgamation of two types of semi-erotic art: the post-impressionist toilette of Bonnard, women as towelled bathers in quiet, domestic frisson; and a classical, mythic eroticism of

Dobson is celebrated for his rhythmic treatment of mass and volume, for the grandeur and complexity of his figure subjects...

Andrew Lambirth the kind found in a Palmer or Calvert idyll, with naked women collecting water and washing clothes at the river. And they combined with historical figurative iconography a deeply personal, experiential influence that came not from art or tradition but from life. On a visit to Colombo in 1925, where he had hoped to find Hindu temple carvings of the kind that had so inspired Eric Gill, Dobson was instead met with scenes of a more open, overt womanhood: women cooking and bathing in streets, Tamil girls feeding their children, cloth bound with breasts bared and clothes parted. The experience never left him.

When Dobson took over the sculptural school at the Royal College of Art in the aftermath of the Second World War, he set only one subject as exam material: a female nude figure, which he judged as much by feel as eye. As far back as 1922, when Dobson was really just emerging as a sculptor of recognition, the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell had mourned his neglect of humanity in pursuit of a formal perfection: ‘Mr Dobson shows himself to be almost exclusively preoccupied with pure form in its essence… The pure aesthetician, like Mr Dobson, is apt to be so much interested in the external forms that he ignores the significance – the humanity, that is to say, of his model.’ To anyone looking at Dobson’s sculpture now, the words hardly match the work with which we are faced: the human quality of his sculpture, for which he has been largely neglected subsequently as ‘old-fashioned’. What really differentiated Dobson from Moore – and which Epstein had anticipated long before – was that Dobson could never be fully seduced by modernist abstraction.

Ultimately, the various aspects of womanhood his sculpture sought to represent – sensuality, motherhood, fertility, yes, but protection, companionship, compassion, too – trumped any aesthetic of pure, geometric form: the squared off edges, the geometric curves, the negative spaces which Moore made his sculptural language. To Dobson, these things could only be so abstracted, so symbolised, until they were lost. And the subject – the women who supported, loved, and shared themselves with him – mattered too much to lose.

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My sister once told me how on an afternoon pottery course she set out to channel the work of Jean-Nicolas Gérard. Forming a squat, dumpy beaker with her clay, she gently clasped it in her hand and squeezed middle finger and thumb, forming two personal ‘nooks’ to help the hand settle around the pot. The course instructor, peering over to inspect her work, smiled: ‘Here, let me fix that for you,’ she said, gently taking the cup and rethrowing and thinning it until it sat perfectly symmetrical and slender.

jEAN-NICOLAS GÉRARD Could a better story be contrived to illustrate the disjunct between Gérard’s approach to clay and that of most contemporary studio pottery? Somehow, I doubt it.

Gérard is a potter who will always split opinion. One self-described lover of ‘proper’ ceramics wrote to us recently to pronounce his work – rather too delightedly, I thought – ‘an insult to the art of Pottery!’ (her capital, not mine). And I am told that his work elicits more comments from window shoppers than any other potter at Goldmark; a fact I can well believe, having spent a few summer weekends manning the gallery pot shop and watching the doubletakes of passers-by who, glancing once absentmindedly at the displays, were abruptly stopped in their tracks and compelled to move closer, squinting in at the jugs and tureens. Reactions to his pots vary wildly, from the effusive to the confused and disbelieving. One family, noses drawn up against the glass, seemed divided on

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the spot: the mother, her curiosity piqued and a bright smile spreading over her face, turned to her husband, but he, hurrying the group along, replied flatly that ‘a kid could do that.’

It’s an unthinking accusation – one too easily levelled at an artist like Gérard, and which takes the appearance of difficulty in place of beauty, joy, or meaningfulness as its baseline, as if simplicity or naivety were easy things. For one, it misunderstands how deft the hand and eye must be to maintain the inner form on which Gérard’s looseness rests. If you were to watch him throwing his large salad bowls and dishes, you would see how carefully he draws up his clay, how watchfully he approaches that imperceptibly fine line between form and formlessness and, with gentle confidence, how he leaves the clay alone just as that line is met and a balance between freeness and structure is arrived at. This is ‘the moment’, as articulated by the Polish poet Julia Hartwig, when ‘shape surmounts the shapelessness’:

it is a difficult thing to describe, far better witnessed in person, and is the source of that unquantifiable ‘justesse’ – the quality of rightness – that Gérard’s pottery possesses; and which those who try imitating it, thinking it simple, find almost impossible to replicate. In a world where ceramic artists so often overwork their clay, exacting a mean and contradictory thinness from a stuff that is fundamentally tactile, Gérard’s throwing – ostensibly casual – is a masterclass in restraint; and yet unlike such contemporary ceramics, his pots lack any sense of restriction, reminding us instead of the imperfect and primitive beauty of the earth from which they were formed. There is a reason he is known as ‘the potter’s potter’.

Ignorance of Gérard’s unsung skill aside, it has always struck me as odd that the charge that an artist’s work is ‘childlike’ should be taken as an insult. Matisse, a great influence on Gérard, wrote perceptibly on this very point in a short essay titled ‘Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child’ the year before his death (1953): ‘…for the artist, creation begins with vision. To see is itself a creative operation, which requires effort. Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by acquired habits, and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind.

The effort needed to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did when he was a child and, if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.’

To look and to create as children do is to be unencumbered with the anxieties of

technique and ultimate control – concerns Gérard has made a concerted effort to shed.

Rather, the childlike perspective is characterised by frankness, limitlessness, an embrace of accident and of spontaneity, all of which in Gérard’s hands have directed him more closely to the ‘essence’ of which he often speaks. Like children who eagerly throw their whole person into creation, Gérard’s presence is gloriously embedded within his pots in crumpled rims and the indents of squashed fingers and thumbs. It seems strangely serendipitous that the shallow round metal tubs, inherited from his grandmother and in which Gérard’s larger pots are now daily bathed and daubed in slip, served once as the baths of his own youth.

Much of Gérard’s pottery evokes the innocence of Matisse in its markings: plates bearing sgraffito spirals and miniature loops scratched onto the sides of vases recall the artist’s flower motifs, the expressive line of his drawn portraits. More generally, there is

a likeness in their philosophy of making.

‘Travail et joie’, bore the title of one Matisse exhibition: ‘work and pleasure’. For Gérard, who speaks excitedly about ‘la joie’ as his objective, the two are indistinct. And for both Frenchmen, the central importance of colour as a medium for expression, form as fundamental, and nature as a source of influence are encapsulated in their work.

Gérard’s pottery, with its scarifications, its radiant yellows and browns and brilliant fingertips of blue and green, is the perfect portrait of the sun-baked furrows, vines, and lavender fields which blanket the hills of rural Provence, withering and flourishing with the waxing of the seasons.

Gérard’s studio has been located in hilltop Valensole for more than thirty years now. The grand vista below, his materials, and the creative parameters these have set for him situate him in a longstanding tradition of southern French terre vernisée – a tradition in which he has firmly

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established his own principles and aesthetic.

All of Gérard’s work, from the pitchers and plates to the gargantuan jars swallowed in his terraced greenery, comes alive in interactions with food and the garden: even the largest dishes, with wires affixed in order that they may be hung on walls for display, feature feet for placing on a table or on the ground for use as a communal platter. Yet this rootedness to tradition and function has not deterred him from change. He has experimented with darker pots, swathes of unglazed clay, and layerings of slip: green, burnt-butter browns, and especially black, applied alongside runny yellows. In combination they bruise and fringe into beautiful mottles of colour, occasionally levelling out into thicker runs of that unmistakable sun-gold yellow, while patches on rims break in their own crests and waves. A white slip, rumour has it, with vibrant new colours is in production, to be premiered at Goldmark next year.

Contrasting this more diverse use of slip, Gérard has also had the courage to leave whole rims and edges unglazed on more pots and to cut with deeper sgraffito, relishing the juxtaposition between the coarse, scorched reds of raw clay and the vibrancy of glistening slip.

The depth and range of expression Gérard achieves in this narrow palette demonstrate he is a master of the slipware medium; a potter endlessly recasting his voice, using the same vocabulary to speak in entirely different ways. Each year, for all their levity and play, the work seems to feel stronger and more purposeful, each pot sitting with greater presence. He is still a conjurer of warmth in abundance: tureens and jars have kept their bobble-hat lids, reminiscent of lop-sided clowns, the mixed slip pooling at their feet in glazings like creme-brulée crusts. But beneath the whimsy is a quiet gravitas, a grounded quality that sustains Gérard’s infectious joy

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but asserts its importance a little more vocally each time, as if to announce, reassuringly, ‘I’m here.’

The late, great poet Seamus Heaney, writing in the literary journal Irish Pages (2002), once described how two American friends, holidaying in Florence on the day the twin towers were struck, dealt with the shock by seeking out and looking hard at the pictures and sculptures they had travelled to see. ‘This was not a case’, he writes, ‘of trying to forget atrocity by escaping into reverie’, but a desire for the ‘upfrontness’ of made things that ‘kept standing their ground…in spite of the shaken state of the world around them.’

Gérard’s deep love for terre vernisée makes his pottery the kind that can ‘stand its ground’, an idiom that aptly captures the essence of earthenware’s rootedness in nature. Heaney knew a thing or two about earth; the man who, in the elegiac Digging, wrote how ‘the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head.’ The quality of vernis – slip as veneer – is a vital aspect of Gérard’s work. It affords his forms a sense of life and liveliness through colour and marking. But ultimately, his pottery is of la terre, clay drawn from the same ground that nourishes and feeds us, bears us up beneath our feet – pottery that is grounded precisely because it is a reflection and celebration of its earthen source.

When my sister tried to recreate Gérard’s beakers that afternoon, moulding the cup’s walls to the shape of her grasp, she sought to do what Gérard’s pottery has always done – to put clay in our hands and make us feel its worth. His work offers solace, not as something into which we may withdraw or retreat, but as a pottery that sustains through its form, through its warmth and confidence, and through the food it so naturally holds for us. His is pottery of great humanity; for it gives us the earth.

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MORRIS KESTELMAN image on green GRound For anyone who caught the Morris Kestelman article in our previous Summer issue, this painting must come as something of a shock. Where are all the moonlit figures? The clowns and equestriennes? The flecked and dappled paint?

Kestelman’s move into abstraction, spanning the last 30 years of his career, was not as rude as it might feel here. It was gradual, begun in the 1950s and ‘60s when figures in landscapes and at work, or fruit and vegetables on chopping boards, were increasingly stylised and simplified, the colours segregated into broad, legible shapes and curvilinear planes.

What had happened, so says Agi Katz, Kestelman’s dealer for

his last 10 years, was that he came to the end of his figurative vocabulary – not so much a development as a meander into new ways of organising objects on canvas, after the magic of traditional people-painting had lost its appeal.

Image on Green Ground, as Kestelman titled it, came from the collection of a neighbour. The Kestelman she remembers was the consummate artist: a free spirit – sometimes too free, when it came to female friends – beautifully in tune with the world while hopelessly disorganised in it. Occasionally when the extremes of emotion, whether melancholy or frustration, made him particularly obtuse company he was sent, at Mrs Kestelman’s entreaty, to a mistress with strict instruction to come back only when he was feeling more cooperative.

It is the Kestelmans who feature in this painting in firm embrace, he on the left, she the right, disguised in an abstract synthesis. Her brown hair has become a zagged curtain, peeled back from her face; his lapel, or a collar, a corrugated edge that teases three-dimensional depth. Where their faces merge to the middle ground, her darker lips pressed between them, they begin to resemble sliced fruit, or a Cubist mandolin of the kind often painted by Picasso and Braque. Braque, a proficient musician, delighted in taking guitars, violins, and other instruments as subjects: for him they held ‘the particular attraction of being animated by touch.’ Touch – of objects and of painterly surface – became important to Braque, as it was to Kestelman, too, across his career; it could even be an alternative title for this painting.

Katz records that Kestelman always felt his abstract work rather neglected beside his earlier figure paintings. The nature of much abstraction – where things and people are hidden, their presence to be deciphered – runs the risk of coldness and intellectualism; of head over heart. Even at his most difficult and removed, Kestelman never fully eliminated his subjects. And in a painting like this, he proved abstraction could be as personal, and as affecting, as the real thing.

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JOE TILSON Empedocles was one of the wackier personalities of the early natural scientists of Ancient Greece. He was first among the Presocratic philosophers, as they are called, to propose a cosmological theory based on four elemental roots – earth, water, fire and air – from which all things in the universe are composed in combination, and which are kept in a constant state of togetherness and separateness, order and chaos, by two opposing divine forces he named Love and Strife; and he elaborated his scientific model with a religious poem of extraordinary strangeness, in which he claimed he was an elemental daimon in mortal form, here to deliver his theory to the masses. Mystery shrouds his identity, and in the absence of fact, apocryphal tales about his life spread through Greece, most famous among them that he committed spectacular suicide by hurling himself into the crater of Mount Etna in an attempt to prove his divinity.

The artist Joe Tilson has also lived in Sicily – though he does not quite share the Ancient Greek’s capacity for self-publicity. You will see the four elements of Empedocles’ theory written in Tilson’s work, again and again. Likely they have not come directly from Empedocles’ writings, which exist today only in fragments scattered in excerpt in other ancient philosopher’s texts; but like many of the words and ideas Tilson has assimilated into his art, repeated as if old mantras, they are there, like seeds carried far from a tree, bearing new fruit at each revisitation.

Now 91, there is something of the sage himself about Tilson, with his wiry frame and white beard.

He is exceptionally learned, both physically in his craft and intellectually. When he left England to live and work in Italy, he arrived not a tourist or an emigré but as someone who had learnt the language, was versed in its literature, steeped in its art history.

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He has lived and run studios in Rome, Tuscany and Venice, and produced works that draw directly upon the Italian environment, from the Crete Senesi suite, named after the ochred hills of Siena, to wooden constructions inspired by Venetian settings. Ca’ d’Oro, a wooden window gilt in gold leaf, is one such piece, a little homage to the Palazzo Santa Sofia known, thanks to its gilded exterior, by its nickname the ‘house of gold’. This is a variation on a theme of Venetian Gothic – a loggia window with its high ornamentation, but also the less familiar cosmatesque tiled floors of its interior, or the gilded cameos that frame one of the room’s renaissance ceilings. It is his skill for quotation – for plucking obscure detail and giving it new resonance – that has set Tilson apart from contemporaries in what is now a 70-year career of making.

Like the various avenues of Tilson’s work, Empedocles’ religious and scientific poetries are complex and conflicting; there is no consensus of opinion on how to unite these two strands, only that unified they must be. Similar threads of interconnection can be traced throughout Tilson’s oeuvre, but the effect is disorienting – like Theseus fumbling through the darkness of the labyrinth with his fateful string. The visual language is much the same, but everywhere there are cryptic dead ends; clues that lead nowhere.

Tilson’s work is all the more confusing – and enriching – because it gives an impression of meaning; often an explicit, single meaning. Words can be read, symbols translated, paths followed. A ladder goes up and down: it can take you to Heaven and Hell, or on an elemental transformation from rung to rung, or give a hierarchy of terms; or it can stand, a physical object propped against the wall, the words seared into its treads to be read over and over like a mnemonic device, where significance slips away the longer you spend with it and words and meanings become just sounds in the mouth.

Classification, order, and dissolution lie at the heart of Tilson’s work. He takes things that are already ordered: alphabets, names, elements, senses, shapes and tessellations, and architectural structures, from ziggurats to labyrinths. And he imposes a sort of visual order where there is none: in politics, celebrity, myth and poetry. Words – in English and Ancient Greek script – are everywhere in the work. Sometimes they trace back to an identifiable source: Homer, Dante, Rilke, Blake, Joyce. Sometimes they are more an intonation: words that in their repetition, their reinsertion in work after work after work, have divorced themselves from an original setting to take on a power all their own. Sometimes they are burned

into, painted on, or built into objects that are themselves newly adopted, as in the wooden ladders that Tilson constructed only to reproduce, graphically, in some of the prints. Whatever the words, they are so effectively placed across a print, or branded into wood, that you sometimes forget how peppered these objects are with language. To contemporary trends of filling any old empty and neglected space on a canvas with edgy, hand-scrawled, misspelled words, they are a welcome corrective.

The irony of all this cataloguing, ordering, like the arranging of a great library, is that Tilson – like other multimedia artists of the 1960s and ‘70s – was looking to obliterate the stranglehold of categorisation. Painting, sculpture, print, assemblage, installation, relief, window, plaything: like Empedocles’ roots, Tilson’s work is sometimes all of these in combination, and sometimes none of them. ‘I made a list of

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wooden fronts for prints like tiny carrel desks containing strange relics, or attaching objects of significance to allocated spaces on the print surface. He has made pictures and prints into altars of things. How do you edition constructions with hand painting and lettering? How do you edition feathers, or a length of rope?

Sometimes these works have a linguistic ‘density’, a double meaning, that teases. ‘Key Box’ was one of several wood relief constructions Tilson made in the mid-1960s to which he has returned and reissued in multiples in recent years. White text below a keyhole reads ‘KEY’ but offers anything but: the lock is empty, leads nowhere, and he gives us no key. Before long, you find yourself repeating the word, feeling for a secondary meaning that might reveal a solution.

This kind of density – where words bear multiple interpretations, sometimes with more than one intended at a time – was essential to ancient philosophers then still delivering their treatises in poetic verse. Empedocles’ Love and Strife are both fundamental forces, like gravity, and thinking, acting, divine beings; Gods, in the traditional sense of the Olympic pantheon. Multiplicity in Greek thought, especially religion, lies at its crux. The gods of the Greek world are not just anthropomorphic representations; they really are

the things you weren’t meant to do [when making a print],’ he told Pat Gilmour in conversation in 1975, ‘such as make it bulge, tear it up, cut it, make it out of materials that fell to pieces, make it out of plastic, and so on’. In his propensity for quotation and excerpt, Tilson was aided, much as ancient authors were, by leaps in print technology. The screenprint revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s yanked collage from the dead clutches of Dada and Cubism and thrust it into the hands of a whole new generation of artists for whom strict separation of the arts was anathema. Friends and colleagues including Kitaj, Paolozzi, and Richard Hamilton all combined print and collage, overlaying separately printed photostrips with screenprint backgrounds, but Tilson took it further. Print, and the idea of the multiple, became in his hands a kind of alchemy.

He has turned two dimensions into three, constructing

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the things they signify, their symbols, their representations: like Christ, Bacchus is god of wine and he is the wine; and the grape on the vine, the figure on the krater, the revelry that ensues, and the invocation of his cult. Ancient Greek culture was not really compartmental in the way that Tilson likes things to be – religion and the arts, sport, warfare, all are intertwined in ritual, embedded in literature, encoded on buildings, and woven through every aspect of daily life.

This is a philosophy Tilson has both embraced and fought.

Like many of the young liberals of the 1930s who travelled to Spain during the civil war only to find the situation more complex than first seemed, Tilson and his wife were swept up in the political activism of the 1960s. His art from this time is heavily invested in political imagery and language; but when the failures of the decade became apparent, they became deeply disillusioned, prompting a move from London

to Wiltshire and a life of self-sustenance. It was probably the single most damaging move in his career, to leave behind the limelight in London and to abandon the cult attraction of Pop; but it led to a way of thinking and making that was powerfully fulfilling. Much of the work he produced during this time – great wooden labyrinths, and painted votive tablets – relate to a kind of pagan living according to the cycles of the land, the rhythms of the earth and harvest not unlike that of Arcadian Greek myth. And while he has disavowed politics, assured that it was the biggest regret of his career to make political art, the cyclical nature of politics, the inevitability of politicisation, has given new political readings in his work.

Constructions like ‘Kore’, which embodies the myth of Persephone, whose imprisonment in the underworld explains the change of the seasons, or ‘Firewheel’, one of Tilson’s most iconic works, had little to do with climate when they were

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imagined: but look at them now, in light of the hellish crisis in Brazil’s burning of the Amazon, or less recently the wildfires in Greece and Italy, and these works take on a greater order of importance; an uncomfortable timeliness.

Empedocles and his fellow Ancients used natural science as a way to determine how we ought to live. Their ethics from ecology, environment, observation and empiricism gave us among the earliest examples of moral philosophical teaching; of leading the good life, in accordance with the cosmos.

Whether he thinks it or not, there is a kind of ethic to be learned in the development of Tilson’s work: a coming to terms with the natural orders and chaoses, the innate flux of life – Love and Strife in moving opposition. The secret joy of reading the Presocratic philosophers – historiographers will baulking at the sentiment – is that so little of their thought

has survived. So scarce is it, and so filtered through later writers, that what we are left with is precious. But the power of their ideas, which are often really very simple, continue to provoke discussion; and their analogies bear interpretative fruit anew. Joe Tilson’s work is much the same. It is at its core, very simple: integrating assembly, compare, and contrast. It is ‘say what you see’ art; but the care taken over its construction, the thought put into collating, dispersing, and reinventing its sources means there is so very much to get out of it. Sometimes its contradictions are frustrating: works that at once seem ambiguous and open, accommodating many interpretations, but which also feel closed – so cryptic as to suggest always that the answer you have arrived at cannot be the one. But that is the joy of it all; to chase him down the rabbit hole.

view more Joe Tilson at goldmarkart.com

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MIKE DODD The First Pot I Ever Bought Those of you who are familiar with my book ‘An Autobiography of Sorts’ will know that the first essay I ever wrote was called ‘In Defence of Tradition: because of the heart, in spite of the head’. In it I made the case for viewing tradition not as something static but as an evolving continuity to be invigorated.

About 18 months ago, an American collector referred me to an essay

by T.S. Eliot titled ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which he thought closely resembled my essay, at least in essence. I have known and enjoyed Eliot’s poetry, but hadn’t come across his literary criticism.

So before I venture into the story of the first pot I ever purchased, I think it’s useful to quote a few passages which, it seems to me, are highly relevant today. Eliot is of course talking about literature; but it is equally relevant to pottery – every one of the arts, in fact – and I have on a couple of occasions substituted the word ‘potter’ for ‘writer’ in the original text.

Eliot writes, “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.” And: “Seldom perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.”

And again: “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, tradition should be positively discouraged.”

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But, importantly: “…tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal is what makes a writer [or potter] traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer [or potter] most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaries.”

Bernard Leach was having an exhibition at the Prima Vera Gallery, then in Sloane Square, London. I had from my midteens been a great admirer of his work and I was excited to see the show. I think I was about 20 at the time. There was, I remember, a particularly fine, tall, medievally inspired, organically glazed (clay/ash) jug with minimal combed decoration which I coveted, but being a relatively poor student at the time, it was out of my financial reach. So I wandered round to the back of the shop where there were many shelves of pots waiting to be displayed. There I saw a cane-handled salt-glazed teapot made, it transpired, by the late Bill Marshall.

I loved it for its strong form, its surface texture and simple impressed decoration. So I bought it.

Much later, I learnt from Bill that it had been fired in a recently built salt kiln at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives. Bill had been taken on as an apprentice at the pottery in his teens and worked there most of his life until he set up his own pottery in Lelant. The teapot had been fired with wood washed ashore from a Scandinavian ship that had run aground off the Cornish coast during a storm and which Bill and others from the pottery had collected. The salt-soaked wood was subsequently dried and used to fire the kiln.

For those unfamiliar with what salt glazing entails, it is simply a process where salt, introduced into the kiln at high temperatures, vaporises and the sodium released chemically combines with silica which is present in the clay body, forming what is called a ‘sodium silicate’ glaze. This is the method by which salt glazed pots, drain pipes, water troughs, sinks and even some baths were created before the plastic revolution.

It is also the preferred method of pot production for such good potters as Micki Schloessingk and Sarah Walton.

On a visit to my parents I presented my proud new purchase. I asked my mother what she thought of it. I received a non-committal grunt followed by ‘what did it cost?’. I replied three pounds. My mother exclaimed loudly, ‘Three pounds, for that!’ It clearly seemed to her to be an excessive amount to pay for a brown teapot. She proceeded to use it over the next 15 years and grew to love it.

In around 1981 when I moved with my family to Cumbria, I reclaimed it. Unfortunately sometime during the eighties it was dropped and a 1” hole appeared in the side with several cracks radiating away from. Over time the broken pieces were lost and my once much used teapot retired to a cupboard gathering dust.

When I moved south many years later the boxes containing my collection of pots were unpacked and I rediscovered my injured teapot. I decided to display it on the kitchen dresser.

It was good to see it again and it wasn’t long before I remembered it was the first pot I had ever bought and that it deserved to be repaired. After all it had contributed to my visual education during my early years as a potter. And it had, in its own way, enhanced my understanding of form and the throwing necessary to achieve that. It had been a silent teaching presence.

I called up Fiona Hutchinson, a fine pot restorer, working in the Worksop area. She agreed to the repair and I apologised that the broken pieces had been lost over time. My son, Ben, collected it from Fiona a couple of months later. When I saw it I was astonished that I couldn’t even tell which side had been broken, where the hole used to be. I kept turning it around to see where the damage had been. Her skill is remarkable.

The teapot remains one of my prized possessions and sits proudly, restored, on my dresser, reminding me of my early enthusiasm and love of pots, which fortunately has never diminished and probably deepened.

Mike Dodd

view more Mike Dodd at goldmarkart.com

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High Street marks what was probably the high point for Eric Ravilious in bridging the worlds of contemporary art, design, and commerce. Art history still laments the lack of home-grown British Modernism in the 20th century: the Bloomsbury trio of Fry, Grant and Bell proved better tastemakers than innovators, and Vorticism, our best contender for a bona fide avant-garde movement of our own, evaporatively snuffed it as the muzzle flash in the machine-gun pan of the First World War. But what they shared with Ravilious and the crop of artist-designers who matured in post-war Britain – Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, and the brothers Nash among them – was a vision, however hopelessly optimistic, that art should form an intimate part of our daily lives; and that art allied to public and domestic service could fulfil a vital need.

High Street was just one of many design projects to grow from the ashes left behind by England’s failed modernists. Its curves and swoops, arcs and globes, the lances and lattices of the Ravilious vernacular, like those of Claude Flight’s Grosvenor School, were taken straight from the winds of Wyndham Lewis’ Vortex, where they mixed, post-war, with Art Deco deluxe. From conception to creation, its story spans less than three years, though the context from which it emerged was rich and multifaceted. Alan Powers, the writer and historian for whom this period of art has been a life’s subject, filled a whole book on High Street’s history, which this article cannot hope to supplement. But what is worth noting, if only briefly, was the extraordinary disorder of Ravilious’ personal life from which High Street arose.

At the centre of this messiness lay his relationship with the artist Helen Binyon.

Eric and Helen began their affair in 1934, when Ravilious was already four years married to his wife, Tirzah Garwood. Binyon had rather expected that they would

price guide inside back cover

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elope together, unaware then that Tirzah was pregnant; when, in 1936, Ravilious revealed that he was going to stay with his wife, the fate of their liaison was sealed. In May of 1937, Ravilious broke off their arrangement, though they remained close, and civil, friends.

She would not be Ravilious’ last mistress, nor he her last paramour. Neither party seems to have held marital vows in particularly high regard, and in an extraordinarily candid letter to Christine Nash six months after their breakup, Binyon disclosed Eric’s shortcomings: he had written lots – copiously, in fact; their letters are today a fabulous scholarly resource – but he was often capricious and non-committal. By then, she had moved on to a new suitor – John Nash, Christine’s husband, disclosing their affair with astonishing candour: ‘he only really wants bed-work from me…[and] to be made to feel it’s all all right…it’s nice to have something demanded of one – Eric just took it all as tribute’.

This bizarre world of musical chairs – one to rival the incest of the Bloomsbury set who famously ‘lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles’ – forms the backdrop to the otherwise charming High Street. The idea for an ‘alphabet’ of shops had originated with Binyon, and was adopted almost as much as a show of affection for her as it was of appeal to him: ‘I promise my contributions to be the liveliest I can do,’ Ravilious wrote in a particularly doting letter, ‘because the job interests me to the bone and marrow…’ Between their not-so-secretive sojourns in London apartments and at Furlongs, the South Downs cottage owned by Ravilious’ artist friend Peggy Angus, he made designs for a growing list of shops, keeping her abreast of their development.

Ravilious had never made a lithograph before High Street was first mooted, though he would produce at least one before the book’s publication in 1938. He wrote directly to Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press, printers of High Street and the preeminent lithographic studio in Britain at the time, to discuss the method and its difficulties, and in May 1936 even bought a copy of Curwen’s Processes of Graphic Reproduction in Printing. He was already then a competent wood engraver, having taken up printmaking under the wing of Paul Nash, but lithography proved an altogether more challenging medium. Drafting the blocks he found a delight: tracing sketches for translation to the stone plate, however, were bemoaned as pure ‘drudgery’.

By 1936 the Raviliouses had moved to the village of Castle Hedingham, just ten miles from the commune at Great Bardfield. He visited often, especially Bawden, with whom he discussed ongoing work on the High Street designs. ‘I can’t imagine how he keeps so fresh an idea in country so thoroughly painted as this is,’ Ravilious wrote to Helen, after looking over a selection of Bawden’s new watercolour landscapes. Perhaps the scenery of rural Essex, which had informed so much of Ravilious’ work in the ‘30s, was beginning to lose its magic; but in High Street he discovered new stalking grounds, visual thrills exhausted in the countryside, and between London stores and local outfitters there was plenty of shopfront inspiration to be had. He would take long bus rides through the East End, scouting out possible inclusions for the series. Sellers of neon signs, spied through the bus window in the evening rain, were a special fascination: ‘A kind of large firework by night, all glowing and sparkling with reflections like buttons,’ he wrote describing them to Binyon, channelling his delight into sketches for a brightly lit amusement arcade and an offbeat shopfront selling illuminated lettering.

Loveliness is not a word that leaps to the pen of most art writers – but there is really no other term for Ravilious’ transformation of what is, on paper, a pretty humdrum idea into these wholly idiosyncratic designs. Seurat appears frequently in Ravilious’ correspondence from this time, and you can see the connection in High Street – the strange, airy quality of light and depth, so beloved of Ravilious, that makes a strangeness of everyday scenes. Certain shops retain the peculiarities of a bygone era: the Submariner’s or the Fire Engineer’s shop, for example, a relic of a time before the 1938 Fire Act when provision of local fire brigades was not legally required of councils, and when insurers, and wealthy private business owners, invested in their own equipment. Others, Ravilious would be pleased to know, have barely changed: Paxton and Whitfield, the cheesemongers, still trades off Jermyn Street to this day, while hardware stores of the kind shown here – saws hung clamouring in shuttered cabinets – persist almost unchanged in rural communities (in Uppingham alone, home of the Goldmark Gallery, two indispensable ironmongers at either end of its own ‘High Street’ run a healthy trade between them).

The accompanying text of High Street was meant to have

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been written by J.E. ‘Hamish’ Miles, an editorial writer for the Times. Country Life had taken charge of the publication and its commissioning editor was Noel Carrington (brother of Dora), famed for his hand in a number of series including the Puffin children’s books. Miles passed away before he could complete the text, and as his replacement Carrington approached Jim Richards, an architectural writer and husband to Peggy Angus. Ravilious knew Richards well – he had shared the rent on a London studio space in the summer of ’36 with the couple; but unknown to him at the time, Richards had also become Helen’s rebound in the wake of their break up (and on the game goes!).

Whether the revelation of that relationship seeded any tension between the two is uncertain; but Richards’ text is wonderful. Ostensibly written for children, it combines clarity with an incisiveness that is surprisingly refreshing. Some winking deadpan turns of phrase are assumed for adult readers (on shopkeepers clearing out ‘dead’ stock: ‘the best he can do is to try to make up a little of his loss by having a Sale, when people may buy things they do not like very much

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Hardware

Fire Engineer

because they are cheap.’). And when distinguishing differing display styles to suit a shopkeeper’s needs, he brings a delightful, if rudimentary, insight into consumer psychology: ‘the butcher’s shop, for example, with its big window with the door at one side, and with rows of joints hanging up, arranged so that customers inside can point out which one they want, and the chemist’s shop and the hardware shop with smaller windows containing shelves to hold a lot of miscellaneous objects, usually with the door in the middle...’ But it is at its best on the physical kicks of shopping; the colours and patterns made by products crammed onto shelves or strewn in window displays that make retail therapy such a joy, and which we find innate to Ravilious’ design: ‘Nothing is more satisfying than things arranged in order, and nothing could look better...than the whole shop window packed tight with cheeses or the shop interior lined with rows of wedding cakes in identical glass cases…the happy effect of crowds of the same things, arranged in rows on shelves and gay with the colours of their own packages and bottles…’

Cheesemonger

Family Butcher

Beyond a report from Bumpus, the Oxford Street book sellers, that Queen Mary had ordered an advance copy, Ravilious never really got a sense of the reach of High Street’s success. As early as May 1936 he had written to Binyon to say he had offered ‘that “book of shops”’ to the Golden Cockerel Press, with a 20% royalty. Together they had scoffed at the percentage; she thought it ‘outrageous’ and that no less than 50% would be appropriate, but by the time Country Life were involved in negotiations a year later pre-war pressures had squeezed any hope or expectation of great financial success. They proposed at first 10% on 3000 copies – a sum of £112, less than half of which would be paid in advance.

Whatever rate was eventually finalised, only 2000 copies of High Street were ever printed. The edition was never intended to have been limited; but when the lithographic plates were destroyed a few years later during a German bombing run, the possibility of any future reissue went with them. In the same year Ravilious was gone too – lost on an

RAF search and rescue mission off the coast of Iceland. His body and those of his four fellow crew members were never found.

And so we are left with High Street; almost a perfect thing, recently republished by the Victoria and Albert museum, and a masterpiece of this very British – even very English blend of art and design. That element of ‘design’, so different in its results to the vigours of the avant-garde, demanded just as much discipline. It even operated on similar principles: a kind of intense economy, one that is both formal and expressive; an economy of line and feeling. It required total efficiency, and efficacy, of composition. It is geometry and harmony; it is playfulness. It means to take life, with all its fuzziness and flourish and lopsidedness, and arrange it in a way that is instantly intelligible. And it required a special kind of ingenuity.

Where the Cubists took a knife to the material world, cutting space and dicing time at their whim, Ravilious took to it his pinking shears; from the everyday fabric of life he cut delicious zig-zags and stripes, ribbons and ringlets, that are to this day a welcome pleasure.

view more Eric Ravilious at goldmarkart.com

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ANTHONY GROSS French Landscapes In an Anthony Gross painting, a hedgerow swarms with life.

Seedheads stir, snake and face the sun, the whole thicket mass writhing in colour and wild line. To the right, the bush breaks to a curlicue edge and a landscape emerges. The hedge is a riot: foliage painted with the excitement of a young boy’s fingers in scrub and mud, marvelling at the microscopic architecture of an undergrowth underworld; but my god, is it made by the audacity, the economy of this right-hand side – this fence that just is, though the brush has barely touched the canvas, plotting its broken string of posts and their shadows, the merest smudges of paint. All of a sudden, Gross has conjured a path.

He has given us place; he has given us context, colour, and depth. He has told us everything we need ever know about this tiny slice of southern French après-midi.

price guide inside back cover

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Gross painted earth as Turner painted light. Just as Turner’s paintings of ships in squalls took the behaviour of light, its cast across waves and through mists and clouds, as their real subject, Gross’ landscape paintings are ultimately about growth: a landscape growing around him and he growing with it in the swell and subsidence of yearly change, life unfurling on the smallest and tallest of scales. The smoky waters in Turner that rock you from side to side, throw you from the glare of the sun to the lurch of the sea, become in Gross’ hands the sweeping contours of a valley, belts of bocage hills smoothing and cresting into one another like waves of vegetation merging at glacial pace. The effect in Turner is a kind of hypnosis – like a whirlpool that draws you in, closer and closer to the surface of the paint. So too with Gross. You are never quite sure of the scale in these paintings: whether you are looking at a single clutch of brambles, a vast, teeming panorama, or even an aerial view of the country below, that familiar effect of flying over woods and farmlands delineated like a giant patchwork quilt (it comes as no surprise to learn that Gross had cartographers in the family).

Turner has suffered less favourable comparisons. Mark Rothko, visiting a Turner exhibition in New York in 1966, is supposed to have claimed afterwards, ‘This man Turner, he learned a lot from me.’ The episode says rather a lot more about Rothko, who looked more to benefit from the association, than it does Turner’s work; but it has not stopped other abstract painters somewhat dishonestly recasting those late, light-spilt paintings of his as examples of a kind of protoimpressionist abstraction.

Gross’ abstraction – if you could really call it that – came, more or less, at the same time as the American Abstract Expressionists, and was at its most adventurous from the late

1950s to the early ‘60s. On the surface of it, it shares with them a certain feeling for colour, and for paint as lush and tactile stuff, to be put down with abandon, illustration be damned. But Gross, like Turner, was a draughtsman, where the Americans were performers; observational drawing underpinned all that he did. His paintings were of things, not just feelings – and things have structures, inner bones and outer shapes, which could only be understood in the looking.

The idea of the canvas ‘as an arena in which to act’, as Harold Rosenberg described it, where you found ‘not a picture but an event’, could never have sufficed.

Gross’ landscape paintings are not straightforward pictures. Nor are they events, in Rosenberg’s sense of the ‘spectacle’ of those American painters unleashing themselves onto the canvas; though in the way that the paint tangles and overlaps, knitting itself into knots, they do read as an organic evolution as the brushstrokes build into a verdant mesh. They are more a kind of painterly equivalent of those slow-mo, sped-up, time-lapse films of plants and jungle growth sprawling and expanding, a world of movement and life of which we are superficially aware but which is often oblivious to us, for whom time feels to pass at a quicker pace.

Time, lapse: the phrase has a poetry to it, the slip and eventual loss of time in the landscape that swallows all that lives within it in its cycle of old and new. But it is only by living in it, by letting it swallow you, as Gross did, that you can ever hope to see that change in all its glory. These paintings itch with life, details of the kind Ruskin called the ‘litter’ of Turner’s paintings: ‘…he not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market.

His pictures are often full of it, from side to side; their foregrounds differ from all others in the natural way that things

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have of lying about in them. Even his richest vegetation, in ideal work, is confused; and he delights in shingle, debris, and heaps of fallen stones.’ Shingle and stones in Turner; vine, creeper, thorn and insect in Gross. ‘I slowly begin to understand the landscape and the people, to start to see what really lies beneath it all,’ Gross wrote in the 1960s. ‘As I paint it becomes a kind of contemplative action in front of, and with the help of, the life and landscape around me.’

Gross moved to Le Boulvé in the Lot valley, the source for most of these paintings, in 1955. Like Moore and Hepworth, he saw the human figure in landscape, painted its undulations like breasts and bellies, and described the basin that surrounded the town, raised on a little hill, like a ‘womb’. In the more sweeping landscapes, where lines of paint define mounds and dips like a topographic map, he seems to sense the land around him as a sculptor does form in stone or clay.

An account of a drive through the Pennines by Barbara Hepworth could as well be a description of a Gross Le Boulvé painting, where, ‘The hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours, of fullnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye.’

Ruskin wrote of Turner that ‘the last words he ever spoke to me about a picture were in gentle exultation about his St. Gothard: “that litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent.”’ Le Boulvé was undoubtedly Gross’ Gothard; its brush and bracken his litter. He let it feed him, its hills house him, and over a period that covered half his life and career he felt and saw and watched it come alive around him, giving us an account of place that has virtually no equal in 20th century British art.

view more Anthony Gross at goldmarkart.com

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PAULA REGO The Never and When Paula Rego embarked on her Neverland etchings in 1992, illustrations for a new edition of J.M. Barrie’s masterpiece, she held back from revisiting the text. She had cherished the book as a young girl in Portugal, one of her earliest encounters with English literature. Instead, she gave a copy to a friend – her model for Hook – and remained at a remove from the original, designing scenes at his suggestion.

Any adult who does return to Neverland finds that removal of a sort is an uncomfortable necessity. Andrew Birkin, who gave us the most detailed biography of the author to date, was first to properly expose the relationship between Barrie and the Llewellyn Davies family who inspired the play. Barrie, childless in marriage, insinuated his way into the Davies sons’ lives in a manner at turns sympathetic and distressingly sinister.

The complications of his surrogacy, and subsequent adoption of the boys after their parents’ death, are now common knowledge; and between the more cloying lines of Peter and Wendy reads a far stranger, more menacing thread, laced with the cruelties and sadnesses and forbidden attentions that Barrie – and now Rego – aired so poignantly on the page.

25 proposed plates were whittled down to 15, of which The Neverland is far the largest, the first detailed description of its setting at the Darlings’ aerial approach. Pan is the island’s symbolic life-force, and in his absence it has fallen into a circular stupor as the Lost Boys look for their leader, Hook’s pirates hunt the boys, ‘Redskins’ stalk the pirates, and a train

of beasts seek revenge on the Redskins, round and round the island in a stealthy pageant.

At the centre of this great revolution, all eyes train on ‘the blackest and largest jewel in that dark setting’: Hook, resplendent in Caroline attire, exhibiting airs ‘of the grand seigneur’. Deathly murk surrounds Hook in Barrie’s text, ‘cadaverous and blackavized’, his curls ‘like black candles’; but in Rego he appears as bone white and skeletal as the peg-legged poltergeist far right of the scene, and absent from Barrie’s original. She, in a fit of confessionary Catholic guilt, looks to have made him a morbid Pope in ignoble procession, his men – ‘as dogs’ – slaves to the cavalcade.

Neverland, as the name suggests, is a paradox; a place imagined and true. A model for the domestic paradise Barrie enjoyed only vicariously, and precariously, through the Davies boys, it slides, like Rego’s pictures, between levity, jest and sadism with alarming momentum. All this simmers in Rego’s prints, where the relations between children and parents, the extremes of devotion and disavowal, are ever present. She described The Neverland to art historian Tom Rosenthal as ‘the mulch of the imagination where memories are stored in the manner of a compost heap.’ Whose memories she means – hers, ours, or Barrie’s – is anyone’s guess, but in a print as thick with significance as this, she leaves plenty to unearth.

‘Her work is all an exorcism,’ writes Adrian Searle; hers and Barrie’s, too, it would seem.

view more Paula Rego at goldmarkart.com

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Current Exhibition

THREE ARMENIAN ARTISTS

TIGRAN ASATRYAN

ASHOT YAN

Tigran Asatryan was born in 1968 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. After studying in a Russian school, N:28 between 1977-1981, he continued his education in Hakop Kojoyan High School of Arts. He studied between 1982 and 1986 at Panos Terlemezyan School of Arts and received his MA degree from the Academy of the Fine Arts. His works can be found in public collections including the Modern Arts Museum of Armenia and in international private collections in USA, Lebanon, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and Qatar.

Ashot Yan (Grigoryan) was born in 1983 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He graduated from Hakop Kojoyan High School of Arts in 2000. During his high school years, he used to run away from school to local museums, where he spent time copying the classics. He received his MA degree in Painting from Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts in 2006.

Between 2008 and 2011 Yan worked as an instructor at Maluntians Art School and illustrated more than 15 books.

Since leaving his teaching post he now works full time as a painter. His work can be found in public collections including Imoga Art Museum in Turkey and in international private collections in Italy, France, USA, Russia, Lebanon, and Malta.

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ARTHUR HOVHANNISYAN Arthur Hovhannisyan was born in 1984 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He graduated from Terlemezyan State College of Fine Arts in Yerevan and received his MA in 2007 from Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts, where he also received his PhD. During his PhD, he worked as a lecturer in the Academy’s painting department. In 2006 he was awarded with the Laureate of State Prize of the President of the Republic of Armenia. His works can be found in various collections including the Museum of San Lazzaro degli Armeni (Italy) and private collections in France, Russia, USA, UK, Turkey, Georgia, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, and Singapore.

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Ashot Yan

Tigran Asatryan

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Dating back to the fourth century, Armenia has been productive in various artistic fields. While Armenian art has its unique cultural heritage, how it has combined with Western tradition has brought contemporary Armenian artists to distinguished ground. This combination can be most famously traced in the work pioneered by the most celebrated Armenian artist of the 20th century, Arshile Gorky. To Gorky – a leading name in the development of Abstract Expressionism – can be added Ivan Aivazovsky, the Russian artist of Armenian descent who reached world-wide fame for his seascapes; and two Armenian compatriots, Martiros Saryan and Minas Avetisyan, who were among the most prominent artists to have reflected on their experience of the Soviet Regime and incorporated Western stylisation in their works. While their pictorial language was nourished by the innovative aesthetics of the West, at the core of their artistic expression lay traditional and Soviet Armenian influences. In other words, Armenian artists have been able to create links between past and present, between tradition and innovation, which have carried them far beyond the labels of Modernism. Thanks to this enriched cultural vision, Armenian art has gained an important position in contemporary art as well. Having held numerous international exhibitions, these three contemporary Armenian artists – Tigran Asatryan, Ashot Yan and Arthur Hovhannisyan – present the inimitable style of Armenian art and its blend of histories ancient and current.

Inspired by the imaginative worlds of David Teniers, Frans Francken, Bosch and

Bruegel, Ashot Yan’s style echoes the Renaissance with his distinctive understanding of aesthetic and grotesque. His surreally sketched satirical figures lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Subjects dressed in period clothing mischievously refer to the emotional and intellectual conditions of today’s individual, while strange features of Yan’s dream world are used as tools to reach into the socio-psychological sphere.

Portraits of figures with wise, solemn expressions point to the whimsical portrait tradition of Arcimboldo; despite their dignified looks, they are bejewelled with ornaments worthy only of fools. In these portraits various symbols and motifs appeal to contemporary topics of identity and gender. Faceless characters in quattrocento attire, a portrait of a young man in feminine garb, all highlight the social problems of the modern world.

Such contradictory symbolism is performed in perfect harmony, reflecting the hidden sides of human lives.

Nevertheless, no matter how widely that symbolism is deployed, Yan’s sophisticated style always distinguishes itself from the margins of traditions by reaching deep into his dream world.

Accompanying the work of Ashot Yan is Arthur Hovhannisyan, another acclaimed artist to be presented in this exhibition. An Associate Professor at the State Academy of Yerevan in Armenia, Hovhannisyan’s style combines the familiar hallmarks of the classical academic tradition along with those of modernist movements. Among the most remarkable aspects of his work is his striking use of colour, both in harmony and contrast. Thanks to Chevreul, the

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French chemist who revolutionised colour theory in the 19th century, the technique of bringing two distinct colours side by side to strengthen the impact of each has long been employed since the mid1800s. Hovhannisyan applies this approach in forms that range from traditional motifs to daily life experiences.

But what is most interesting is how he maintains the structural unity of his large figures. There emerges in the thick use of colour a kind of optical ‘objectivity’, where the raised layers of paint lend his subjects a ‘real’ presence. This sense of reality is united with a spiritual aspect promoted in his figures’ facial expressions. The dichotomy between psychological chaos and serenity is expressed in such outstanding works presenting young floral girls with mysterious gazes, or the thoughtful musings of a man sitting in the barber’s shop. Being able to create these deep, psychological reflections with only colour and brush, Hovhannisyan makes his craft seem like magic.

To understand what kind of spirit Tigran Asatryan brings to this exhibition, one cannot disregard his educational background. The early years of Asatryan’s long career coincided with the rule of the Soviet Regime in Armenia. As an art academy student, he witnessed the decline of the Soviet Union and Armenia’s declaration of full independence. Such political events deeply affected the art of those artists around him, and they have contributed much to the development of Asatryan’s own expression. In spite of carrying many of the features of Russian Naturalism, he has not adopted a didactic or picturesque language in his realism.

Free brush strokes dance while the

deformed figures of his compositions skirt the divide between classical and modern.

A significant aspect of Asatryan’s pictorial language is the softness of his colour tones, which evoke the sensation of touch. Surreal narratives are suffused with fairy-tale iconography, the shining elements of Asatryan’s art. Such extraordinary literary subjects range from Biblical references, with angels and lions, to Greek myths, with congresses between satyrs and nymphs. Apart from political and historical influences, an important influence dating back to Asatryan’s early career has been working with stage actors. Using actors as models was a major part of Asatryan’s academic education. His work Magical Concert is one of the very best examples of this approach, with its theatrical characters set almost as if on a stage. Asatryan’s sophistication in handling his many influences has produced an artistic style that achieves a unique understanding of art history, and one that has gone well beyond the bounds of tradition.

Sharing the same cultural background, all three Armenian artists in this exhibition present the fruits of their imaginative world by creating close links between the old and the new, with great respect to the past and enthusiasm in their discoveries.

How they have preserved the classical tradition with their contemporary outlooks in today’s art market is remarkable. And while this text offers a short glance at the artistic style of these painters in general, there is much more to discover. ‘Three Armenian Painters’ at the Goldmark Gallery promises an exciting journey into the authentic world of the contemporary Armenian art.

Baykar Demir

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Arthur Hovhannisyan

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Current Exhibition

LISA HAMMOND Grace & Resolve What is a potter’s most valued resource? Is it her supplies, her equipment? The pounds she pays for a studio space?

I wager most potters working at the very highest level would agree that time, more than any material thing, is most precious. A potter’s life is all rhythm: a dance, or juggling act, between the stages of making that pottery entails, each step in the process dependent on the others. Upset the rhythm – speed up , stretch out, stutter or halt – and for all that work, you may have nothing to show for it. Clays and minerals can be bought, kiln bricks cadged, tools handmade or hand-me-down, pots sold and money made; but time, at the end of it all, is irredeemable.

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Lisa Hammond is exceptional in the share of her time she has surrendered for the sake of others. Over a span of two decades, she has brought up as many as 14 apprentices at her Maze Hill pottery in Greenwich, where she has been based for the last quarter of a century. With them all she has sacrificed prized kiln space and materials, inculcated rigorous standards and technical expertise, all while giving each assistant the time and space to grow their own ideas. That they have emerged makers of diversity and individuality, successful and self-reliant, is a testament to her compassion as a teacher.

In institutionalised ceramic teaching, where design and concept are now king, applicable, practical advice of the kind Lisa imparted to apprentices has been sorely lacking. To address that oversight, ten years ago, she and her trustees founded Adopt a Potter, a charity that places ceramics graduates with established potters to provide the invaluable experience of working in living, breathing pottery workshops.

Two years ago, almost to the day, the foundation was extended a step further as Clay College Stoke opened its doors, welcoming its first 13 students on an intensive twoyear diploma course. At the core of the college’s focus lie the practical skills for self-sufficiency. Few charitable boards were willing to back this renegade proposal: an independent, nonprofit organisation, it received no public funding at its setup, forcing Lisa and colleagues to raise funds from fees and donations alone. Just weeks ago, its first cohort graduated, while its second have already begun their first term.

For all this and more, at the close of 2016 Lisa Hammond was appointed an MBE for services to ceramics. Her medal is hard-earned and enjoyed; the gratifying result of nominations from peers and fellow pot enthusiasts, it can represent only the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the commitment and the contributions she has made, internationally, to the world of clay. But it will have offered her no respite. At the coalface of social enterprise she will have met new standards of bureaucracy, all amid a desperate chase for funding. Running an organisation like Clay College presents all the expected problems of an ordinary pottery, amplified by the scale of operation, and compounded by the multiple parties involved. More than patience, courage, conviction, or principle, it will have tested skills of negotiation and persuasion, the management of contingent groups and

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conflicting expectations, new pastoral responsibilities, public communications and electronic paper trails – demands that extend far beyond the gruelling remit of running an autonomous studio, and which inevitably, excruciatingly, sap away at those precious free moments, dragging attention and hands further and further from the immediate joys of clay.

Somehow – somehow – Lisa has managed in the three years hence to keep Maze Hill production at full pelt, replete with new apprentice, continued classes, and now a major new exhibition. And what an exhibition it is: pots that do not just match but exceed the breadth of those of the past ten years.

As if reducing the time available to her were not taxing enough, she has increased her workload and reinvigorated her range. There are new shapes, new glazes – innovations that will have taken months to develop, test, moderate, and master. The febrile spectrum of colours in her Lichen/Moss pots is exclusively the result of reactions between soda, a simple clear glaze, and the composition of a dark clay, a combination now years in refinement. Some of the darker blues – as black and slick as ink – are of a quality it feels we have not seen before. But the stand-out addition are surely the paddled oval bottles. These are a kind of generosity incarnate: gorgeous, full swells of clay that, like a Brançusi head, seem so sure of their place in the world, the space and shadow they inhabit, the weight they put beneath them. They give at once grace and earthly gratification: like fat, ripe fruit, or a pebble rounded in the lap of the sea.

A favourite of Lisa’s own among this exhibition’s novelties has been her ‘horse eye’ decoration. Like much of her work, it has a Japanese precedent in Umanome, the nested iron brushwork circles used in some historical tableware from the Seto region, the effect of which is something like a stylised eye. But Lisa’s ‘horse eye’ is quite different – born more of her own love of the animals than the sight of some Japanese forebear. Taking a traditional hakeme brush, when the bound twigs have snapped and snagged a little, she drags quickly and roughly through a layer of applied glaze to form these beguiling designs. So much of Lisa’s pottery has its relations in ‘the East’ – the hakeme brushwork, the tsubo form and sake sets, the shino glazes, and the Zen-style ensō ring decoration this ‘horse eye’ recalls – but it never feels, or pretends to be, Japanese; it has remained exclusively hers,

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with a sort of personal intimacy that bypasses every subsumed influence.

Lisa has been firing with soda for four decades now. Its sudden movement across her pottery, its unsure, erratic temper, has become a fundamental part of her potting identity.

Soda shares its basic, chemical principles with salt firing, and its effects are rudimentarily the same: as soda ash or salt is added at high temperatures it vaporises, and the sodium released throughout the kiln reacts with the clay creating a glaze that looks and feels like citrus peel. When salt firing was first chanced upon in Germany in the late 1300s, it was adopted in part for its efficiency: pots could be packed into kilns unglazed, leaving salt and silica to do their work. There is an inescapable irony that what was once a time-saving method has evolved into the process which has consumed so much of Lisa’s research and practice; one that continues, in her hands, to fascinate and surprise even after so many years of exploitation.

Soda suits Lisa’s environment and temperament. The waste product of soda ash vaporisation is carbon dioxide – far less harmful than the hydrochloric acid of traditional salt firing, and better suited to her urban location. But also its injection as a solution, through two tiny portholes at opposite ends of the kiln, makes for a very different distribution. Where salt vaporises with ease, flooding every corner of the kiln, soda – squirted in simultaneous streams and aimed to clip the inside edge of the kiln bricks, so dispersing vapour across the pots – is far more dependent on the variables: the cone of the spray, the shifting of the flame, with a contact point more violent and varied. High winds and weather extremes can play havoc with flame paths or climbing temperatures, all with knock-on effects on the circulation of the soda. Lisa has become expert at predicting these reactions; and in a kiln that would take the average potter less than two hours to fill, she will spend two days painstakingly composing a pack that will realise the most interesting results from a firing. Her moon jars and tsubo, and the tall, cut vases, are shaped with similar anticipation: the perfect foil to the vagaries of the soda’s movement. Its capriciousness is matched by the serenity of arcs and bellied shoulders, curves that ring they are so true, or by the severity of plunging facets. These forms have been

honed for their setting: they lend themselves to every fickle change in the soda’s behaviour. Their chemical scars, flashes, bleeds, and scorched whorls are worn as if they were never meant to look any other way.

Spend enough time with potters, and you find that the world inside the kiln is a kind of theatre of life. Every firing is a test, a challenge to years of experience and measurement; one that reinforces old forgotten lessons or teaches new ones with every disaster. It is also the point at which the precariousness of life as a working potter is most violently apparent, as the kiln takes months – sometimes years – of effort and calculation to task in a matter of hours. The measure of a great potter is the limit they push with the work that they put in; and the fight they can give to getting as much of it out in one piece.

The atmosphere of a soda firing is not a kind one. In its intensity, it mirrors exactly the stresses with which Lisa has surrounded herself these past three years. She submits her pots to the kinds of weathering she embraces; that combination of mad chance and furious industry, without which the change she has brought to so many people’s lives could never have been achieved. In a beautiful allegory for her working attitude, the photographs illustrated in this catalogue were taken on a day this July as a recent firing was unpacked. Lisa had fired through some of the hottest days of the year, in one of the hottest summers on record. Three days later and the kiln was still clinging to its heat, topping 60˚C on the pyrometer; and from the oppressive heat of that space these pots emerged, defiant and resolute in their survival.

Lisa Hammond is a woman who faces every difficulty – and in ceramics there are a great many – with deliberateness, decisiveness, a composed poise and determination that is innate even to her calmest and wildest pots. As I write, another firing is taking place in Greenwich: another test of resolve, another throw of the dice, another chance for change and experiment. Fearlessness and openness have defined Lisa’s career; have shaped her approach to clay and seen her command projects many would have fated for early failure: in this extraordinary show, we see them instilled in material substance.

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A combination of cringing evasiveness and teariness made Howard Hodgkin a ruinous interviewee during his lifetime; but on form, he could deploy encyclopaedic knowledge and extreme particularity to lethal effect. ‘The acme of feebleness, timidity,’ he described Roger Fry, one of many famous Hodgkin ancestors, in conversation with Frances Spalding: Fry’s belaboured paintings, he thought, wilted before his infinitely more fascinating art collection.

HoWARD HODGKIN NICK A voracious collector himself – of Mughal courtly paintings, carpets, and Ottoman tiles – he was acutely aware of succumbing to the same fate. ‘Weakness’, whether of paintings or memories, often cropped up in his discussions. He turned to print in part with the hope that he could make permanent on paper the kind of transitory experience that would not ‘stand up’ in painting; those too momentary for enshrining on board. Like the heavy painted frames he made as a kind of bulwark to the paintings, the thick blue border in a print like ‘Nick’ ensures a similar protection: a wall of colour to cushion an otherwise ‘feeble, timid’, retiring moment.

The Tate, who acquired a copy of ‘Nick’ in the mid-1980s, describe the etching as Hodgkin’s first ‘mature’ print, editioned in 1977 at Petersburg Studios with the assistance of printmakers Maurice Payne and Danny Levy.

Though released as a print, there is probably more paint here than printer’s ink: two separate copper plates were used for the black lines and the green rectangles; the blue surround, yellow background, and pink detail were all added in watercolour by hand.

Payne had first suggested Hodgkin try etching, and it was to Payne that Hodgkin entrusted his hand-painting. All of Hodgkin’s hand-colouring was performed by atelier assistants, he confirmed in conversation with a gallery compiler. There was a temptation, in the artist, to fiddle from print to print; better to leave it to a technician, who under his direct supervision could keep consistency to the minutest of degrees.

‘Howard Hodgkin is a writer’s painter,’ says Julian Barnes, author and an old friend. His paintings have cryptic titles that imply narratives that are never really there.

‘Sometimes he is teasing us. And writers like to be teased.’

Hodgkin gives no clue who the ‘Nick’ is in this picture; nor even what he is, whether the strange, peach-pink balloon peering round the green block in front of what looks like a blind, a small lamp behind it, or an undisclosed presence elsewhere, unseen, in the room.

Perhaps this was another friend, Nicholas Serota, now ex-Tate tsar and then, in the mid70s, Director at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, who had curated Hodgkin’s retrospective there in the spring of ’76.

Or perhaps it doesn’t matter. Hodgkin did not deal in stories; the specifics of his pictures are feelings, born of the kind of intense looking where scene, colour, and emotion seared into a single impression in his head.

Barnes calls them ‘operatic’ because of that very intensity – but Hodgkin thought cinematically too, knowingly committing memories for later use and curating his immediate past: remembering the green framed square of grass through a window, for example; or a friend, a conversation, a lulled silence, in a low-lit shuttered room.

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JOHN NASH

A typeset sign taped up in the Goldmark Atelier reads ‘Never Work’. Like the flying pig on the outside wall of the main gallery in Uppingham, it teases, for to visitors

Engravings from the Original Woodblocks

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of the atelier this is a hive of coordinated activity: Goldmark Atelier is the busiest it has ever been.

One of the quieter projects currently taking place in this befumed space involves not contemporary screenprints but hundred-year-old engraved woodblocks made by the artist John Nash. For a span of 10 or 20 years, Nash was probably the most competent wood engraver working in this country, an illustrator responsible for dozens of publications and a printmaker of independent editions too. Some years ago, the Goldmark Gallery bought from the artist’s estate over 70 of the 90 or more blocks Nash made in his lifetime, with permission to print new editions from them. Numbers of these were commissioned solely for book illustration and have never been individually editioned before.

Jan Wilkinson, one half of Goldmark Atelier’s husband and wife team, has since taken charge of the blocks. In an unusually

quiet half hour, she offered to show me the processes involved in preparing and printing them. She spreads a number of recent proofs out over a workbench. These have been taken from blocks that have survived a century in storage. Have they weathered that time well?

‘They are remarkably stable,’ Jan reassures me, especially given the extreme changes in temperature and environment they will have undergone over the years. Woodblocks are commonly made from cut and glued sections of hard fruit woods – cherry, pear, and sometimes apple – or boxwood.

These are polished until the surface is hard and glassy, making them extremely hard wearing. Jan’s duties began with thoroughly cleaning the old blocks which were covered in dried ink residue, a thankless task that can take anywhere

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from hours to a full day per block, depending on their condition. The longer ink is left to sit in the grooves, she tells me, the harder it is to get it out, and these have been sitting for some time. ‘Ink also attracts ink,’ she cautions; unless you are especially careful and clean the block immediately after use, further printing will only compound the problem.

Jan shows me first ‘Datura’, one of the better-known images in Nash’s ‘Poisonous Plants’ series published in 1927. She points out some of the very thinnest lines that sometimes fail to register on the page, cuts so slight that you have to catch them at an angle to see them. The block itself is a wonderful thing; silky black with use and almost sculptural, the engraved lines exceptionally fine. ‘I don’t know if Nash himself engraved them’ – he did – ‘but they are beautifully cut,’ Jan tells me. ‘You would struggle, I think, to find someone who could make this today, certainly in this country.’

She has lived and worked with these objects for many months now; like a teacher and her unruly pupils, she knows their virtues and their vices intimately. ‘I do like the them,’ she says, turning one over in her hand: ‘I like printing from them; and I want to get the very best out of them.’

The standard she has set herself is daunting: at the very least, no worse than Nash’s original printings. The principle, she explains, is simple: if the lines are there, then we get them to print. It is an approach that defeated Jeremy Greenwood, compiler of the 1987 catalogue of Nash’s engravings: ‘Nash was an artist rather than a craftsmanengraver,’ he writes, ‘and does not seem to have been greatly concerned with producing blocks that were easy to print.’

This is putting it rather lightly; some of Nash’s lines are razor fine, undetectable even with a fingernail. A great many appear

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not to have made it into the reproductions made for the catalogue, ‘for which,’ Greenwood explains, ‘the printer is not to be blamed.’

Jan introduces me to an especially difficult block – except she calls it something much less polite, which she asks me not to print. This is ‘Goat and Kid’, cut in 1920. It’s a small image, less than three by four inches, of a goat kneeling to eat in a craggy field, two kids behind it and another with its back to us surveying a dry-stone wall. With an eyeglass, she points me to the hair’s-breadth incisions around the goat’s back hoof that she is struggling to get to print: ‘they are just so fine,’ she says a little exhaustedly, ‘and I think probably caked in ink.’ A recent proof has found a few; and as Jan is eager to point out, they do transform this tiny black area, anchoring hoof and leg in place. As we continue to review the block, what looked like an ink stain we discover is yet more fine hatching on the back of one of the kids. ‘I’ll have to try and get those now, too’ she says – and discard the thirty

or so good impressions she had put aside.

Jan decides to ink and print a block for me; a miscellaneous image, never editioned, of tree stumps in a wood, which Nash later adopted separately for the frontispiece to Ernest Rhys’ Rhymes for Everyman in 1933 (Rhys is best remembered as the original editor of the Everyman’s Library series). This is one of Jan’s favourites: ‘well-behaved’, she calls it, singling out its enjoyable strangeness compared to Nash’s more straightforward countryside prints. With a palette knife she spreads some ink, black and tacky, over a worktop and rolls it repeatedly with a rubber brayer, over and over again, until it has picked up a thin coating of the right consistency. When she then rolls onto the block, the brayer barely skims its surface – ‘no pressure,’ she warns, or you risk flooding all those delicate lines with ink.

Jan places the inked block on the press bed, lays a sheet over the block, and folds the ‘lid’ of the bed over. She then ‘packs’ the bed, a method where papers or card are stacked

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binder or swatch of tissue paper in single sheet steps: one sheet, two, three, four. It is only now, with the blocks in front of me, the piles of rejected proofs, and this thin set of papers, that the extraordinarily narrow window in which Jan is working begins to dawn on me. When your lines are the slightest fraction of a millimetre deep, your equipment and your expertise need only differ by that degree for those lines to be lost. Jan is at the mercy of parameters of tissue paper thinness: she expects maybe as many as a quarter of her impressions will be rejected, with more losses in the morning than the afternoon as the calibrations for a block are adjusted and she begins to feel how press, block, and paper are all working together.

The press itself is magnificent: a colossal Columbian, instantly recognisable by its Bald Eagle counterweight. Once owned by the artist Michael Rothenstein, it was removed from his studio and reinstalled with great love and attention in the Goldmark Atelier when the gallery took on the Rothenstein estate. At well over 100 years old it remains a masterpiece of mechanical design, adorned all over with handsome wrought iron embellishment promoting luck and prosperity:

in piles to ensure block and sheet will be ‘sandwiched’ (for want of a better term) with the right amount of pressure.

Where most printers would pack from underneath the block, Jan packs from the top onto the cover of the bed, which she thinks is probably unusual – and points out that, like a great many printmakers, she is totally self-taught. Only the finickiest of purists could quibble with her approach; printers are judged by their results, and hers leave scant room for argument.

Every block is of course different, with its own peculiar unevenness, and so each is packed individually to suit. When the print is eventually ‘pulled’, paper and block must just kiss, ideally with little indent – misjudge the pack and you might get an overimpression, with the outline of the block deeply embossed in the paper. Jan explains that she has made a special gauge to help determine how each of her blocks should be packed. Expecting something like a set of thin wooden wedges, she produces instead what looks like a

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wheat sheaves and snake-wreathed caducei, symbols of trade, frame the bed, with a cornucopia of fruits and two heraldic dolphins spread along lever and counterpoise. When its American inventor, George Clymer, moved to London in 1817 and began marketing it internationally, the unusual ornamental counterweight inspired foreign purchasers to adapt their own designs, from Prussian eagles and lions to globes, lamps, and figures of liberty. For all its hulk, Jan informs me it is still sensitive to atmospheric change – of which there is much in the fluctuating environment of the atelier workspace.

Sometimes the press can change overnight, particularly when a hot day is followed by a cold night and crisp morning. The metal expands and shrinks, and the press must be reset (using the largest spanner I have ever seen) before printing can resume.

And what is it like to print on? ‘Oh,’ Jan says, proudly, her fingers lovingly pressed to the bed: ‘She’s a beast.’ Setting a sheet over an uninked block, she points to a side handle and invites me to take a proof. With a tug the handle begins to turn and the bed glides into place beneath the press. I take hold of the wooden arm which lowers the ‘platen’, the flat metal plate which depresses the paper to make an impression, and ‘pull the bar home’. As pistons and weights slide into position, it offers virtually no resistance; taken aback by the ease of the movement, I hold it locked for a few seconds at Jan’s instruction before gently guiding it back to rest. On a good day, she tells me, when all preparatory work is done, she might make as many as 100 prints – at which point arms, backs and shoulders are thankful for this machine efficiency.

‘What really tickles me,’ she says, ‘is that you have a block with these teeny tiny lines, and then you have this bloody great piece of machinery. It feels like overkill. But all this engineering is designed to get the most out of that block.’

Looking around at the prints Jan has made so far, the care and investment with which she works, and the unbelievable detail she is extracting from these beautiful, intractable pieces of wood, I think this upcoming edition might do just that.

Goldmark will edition 60 prints from John Nash’s original wood blocks later this year.

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Impression of finished books

goldmark books new

John Nash Artist & Countryman Special Edition Written by Andrew Lambirth.

352 pages, over 350 colour illustrations.

Special edition limited to 120 cloth covered hardbacks numbered and signed by Andrew Lambirth with folder containing 3 wood engravings from the original blocks all housed in a slipcase. rrp £450 Special offer price £350 +p&p

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Andrew Lambirth’s book is the first full-length monograph to deal with all aspects of John Nash’s career, showing us the wealth of work hidden in both public and private collections. Few realise that it was John Nash who pioneered the new approach to landscape painting associated with Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Nash taught and inspired them both, but their recent popularity has rather obscured his own contribution. As interest in the masters of 20th-century British painting continues to build, there is a real need for reassessment of his life’s work. John Nash: Artist and Countryman attempts just this.

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cover image: detail, Michael Rothenstein, Blue Circle, colour woodcut & linocut, 1961

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