Goldmark Magazine - Number 30

goldmark

AUTUMN 2023

Henry Moore Exhibition November 2023

g AUTUMN 2023 NUMBER 30

I find that the great benefit of giving oneself too much to do is the diminishing interest one has in milestones. We are quite used to moving quickly from one thing to the next at the gallery, as many of you will know. So it took me by surprise to learn that this year we have surpassed our 60th pottery exhibition monograph, and that this will be our 30th outing of the magazine.

As is so often the case, the connections in this latest issue are organic but plentiful. Anne Mette Hjortshøj and John Piper confront tradition with modernity in very different ways. The prints of Chloe Cheese, who as a child watched Edward Bawden working with her mother, sit alongside his London markets. And space is newly arranged, to mysterious effect, in works by gallery artists Chris Wood and Oliver Bancroft.

Here’s to another 30 more.

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 4 © Robin Holt 22 © Emma Mason 32 © Kerry Harker Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Waterhouse, October 2023 Printed in Wales by Gomer Press ISBN 978-1-915188-13-7

CONTRIBUTORS Robin Holt is a Professor of Strategy and Aesthetics at the University of Bristol and Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, specialising in the nature of organizational form and how it emerges from craftbased production and consumption techniques. A former visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School, his work often brings him to the intersections of economics and entrepreneurship, aesthetics and philosophy, strategy and ethics, and media and technology. His latest book on craft is forthcoming.

Emma Mason is an art dealer and gallerist specialising in British printmakers from the 1940s onwards. Having studied History of Art & Italian at Leicester University, she worked for many years in the fruit trade as an importer, much of the time based at New Covent Garden in London, before establishing a gallery in 2004 with her husband, Richard, after meeting with the artist Robert Tavener. In March 2020 she moved to new premises in Lushington Lane in central Eastbourne. Books on several of the artists Emma represents have been published under her imprint Bread and Butter Press.

Kerry Harker is an independent curator based in Leeds. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of the East Leeds Project, a visual arts organisation. She is also a Postgraduate Researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, where her research focuses on artistled initiatives across the UK since the 1990s, particularly in relation to questions of cultural value. She was formerly Curator of Exhibitions at Harewood House from 2008 to 2011, interim Director at The Art House in Wakefield from 2015 to 2016, and Co-founder and Artistic Director of The Tetley, a centre for contemporary art in central Leeds.

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Contents 4. Anne Mette Hjortshøj: Rewilding Tradition Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s pots have been shaped by a melting pot of influences: from the Anglo-Oriental Leach school of her former mentor, Phil Rogers, to the rich history of pottery on the island of Bornholm, where she now works. As Anne Mette sets out to discover the island’s lost wild clays, Robin Holt finds her enriching tradition once more in this latest exhibition.

14. Off to Market, with Edward Bawden As a lifelong citizen of sleepy Essex villages, Edward Bawden had an unusual arms-length relationship with London, where in the late 1920s and ‘30s he became a celebrated promoter of the city’s transport and tourist traps. When the opportunity to illustrate the capital’s ancient markets arose some 30 years later, he found their Victorian tracery ripe for linocut experimentation.

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22. A Life in Art: Chloe Cheese Growing up with artist parents in the creative community of Great Bardfield, a life in art seemed an entirely natural course of action for Chloe Cheese. Now a celebrated painter, printmaker and illustrator in her own right, in this interview Chloe looks back with friend and gallerist Emma Mason on the events that shaped her career: from watching Edward Bawden at work in his home to becoming a regular of the renowned Curwen Studios.

32. Christopher P. Wood: On Solid Ground?

57. HIGHLIGHTS

Chris Wood’s fascination with photo-collage began in the attic of a new house with the discovery of a box of old, abandoned snaps by an anonymous photographer.

Over the last four years he has expanded his collection with further auction finds, cutting, over-printing and painting onto their surfaces to create strange worlds anew. Kerry Harker explores the significance of these recent compositions.

• A preview of our upcoming October exhibition finds 89-yearold John Allen excited as ever to bring the splendour of the English countryside to his carpet designs

• From Mark Hearld to Michael Rothenstein, our latest arrivals continue a theme of riotous ruralism

• Prunella Clough – the ‘artist’s artist’ – and the eminent Victorian designer Owen Jones shared little in common, but in a quiet collage Clough brought Jones’ love of ornament into the messiness of the late 20th century.

50. Colours by Number: Andrei’s Gold

40. A Retrospect of Churches John Piper’s return to architectural painting after years of abstract flirtation was seen by fellow abstract artists as a kind of apostasy.

But in the Retrospect, Piper’s magnum opus in print, he proved that the contemporary and the traditional could go hand in hand, with surprising – and moving – results.

From the moment of its discovery several thousand years ago, humans have been beguiled by the beauty of gold, earthly form of the immaterial. Oliver Bancroft’s new paintings, delicately encrusted with layers of gold leaf, resonate with old Christian icons and hark back to the story of one of the most famous iconographers of them all: Andrei Rublev.

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REWILDING TRADITION

ANNE METTE HJORTSHØJ

Anne Mette’s mission to unearth the hidden clays and minerals on the island of Bornholm shows that tradition need not be staid and sterile, writes Robin Holt.

Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s originality is born from observing, remembering, and repeating tradition to a point where it becomes a unique and hard-won ‘giving over’ to what has gone before. Her tradition is that of Bornholm, an island where working with clay became a staple way of earning a living, alongside catching and smoking fish. It is the tradition of Danish ceramics, grounded in directly apprehended forms and subtle, natural colourations. It is the tradition of British studio ceramics in which Anne Mette was schooled by English teachers in the Design School on Bornholm, by apprenticing with Phil Rogers in Wales, and by exposure to the grounding influence of Gutte Eriksen, who studied with Bernard Leach in 1948 and did so much from her teaching post in Jutland to instil his East-West aesthetic in Denmark’s post-war studio pottery. It is the tradition of Scandinavia, with its even, unshowy surety that the surest way to long-term failure comes from showing off, from being too much the individual: what they call Janteloven.

Yet her tradition is more than the assembly of influences contained within her personality and her pots. To think hard about the effort and insight realized by others’ work in previous times is also to become part of it, and to shed any personal distinction and elevation. The poet T.S. Eliot, writing in 1919 in a journal aptly called The Egoist, suggested that what defines tradition is the accumulation of achievements and values that have broken free from an immediate locale, or a particular person’s work, to persist somehow out of time and beyond personal history. The original poet, he argues, is not a romantic figure breaking under the passionate strain of an intense feeling.

It is precisely because they have felt what it is to have an emotional connection to creativity that they must seek to transcend it. To be original is to cease seeing oneself as the still point of a turning world and to submit to something bigger: the totality of work that has already been accumulated.

This is a conservative and demanding reading of tradition, where the only proper concern of the artist is to channel their curiosity in ways that allow the past to resonate with the present and the future to become a scene of anticipation for the creation of new things. This curiosity is as much forensic and well-ordered as it is wildly expressive. It absorbs what others have done, respectfully, carefully, and aims to refine and explore the potential contained by tradition. Instead of a personality, Eliot writes, the original poet (or potter) becomes a catalyst – like a piece of ‘finely filiated platinum’ in a chamber of oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

Anne Mette is a catalyst in clay: continually and systematically experimenting with feldspars, silicas, iron and alumina minerals, and micas; with processing (or sieving) her many clays and learning their different grain sizes; with drying them in different

Square Press Moulded Bottle, iron/cobalt & rutile slip. Salt glaze, sgrafitto decoration.

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‘It’s her capacity to realize distinction with the meekest and most intimate of moves that defines Anne Mette’s work’

conditions and mixing different blends; with understanding how different forms sinter and vitrify in the kiln, how glazes flux, creep, expand and burst, go opaque. The experiment is based upon decades of attentive learning from what has gone before, and the learning is continual.

If the role is one of catalyst and the learning is continual then fitting in with a market is not easy. Having established a pottery after her apprenticeships she initially found it hard to sell brown, salt-glazed, wood-fired pots for use in Denmark. People wanted to buy glass, and slip casted porcelain, more in keeping with the smooth, even, cool temperament of the prevailing Scandinavian aesthetic. But if the clay was not going to go the way of the market, neither was she. During these early years she was invited to exhibit abroad, not in Denmark, so she took her work to pottery fairs in Britain every summer, selling enough so she could keep working. The original potter does not work so they can sell but sells so they can work: a basic and profound difference between manufacture and craft.

Inquiry into the nature of clay and the curiosity by which this inquiry is pricked are everything. What Anne Mette makes – each pot – adds to the totality of what was made before so that the whole alters, however minutely. It alters because a slightly new way of blending, firing, reducing, or marking the earth has been attempted. Tradition is nothing more than this slowly accreting whole which is under constant transformation as it is fed by successive attempts at making. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the best any human life could amount to was its being nothing more than an attempt, and the trick was to relish the attempt and to involve oneself in the struggle as much as one can. Rather than use pre-made clays, pre-mixed glazes, and infinitely controllable kilns, Anne Mette digs and mixes her own clays and glazes and wood fires using different kilns which she has made (with others) and re-

Opposite: Teapots, various glazes Above right: Medium Oval Dish with Handles, Red slip. Salt glaze

made. She mixes her labour with the whole earthy, watery, fiery process. As a catalyst there is no difference to be found between the thing made and the maker: they become intimate expressions of one another.

Being able to work within the whole of a tradition is as liberating as it is constraining. It allows, for example, a Danish potter to learn about ash glazes used in British studio ceramics, to build kilns in the Japanese style, to experiment with clay from slagheaps left over as industrialized spoil, and to blend this with clays dug from a cliff face where it has lain for 200 million years and been exposed by westerlies. She does not worry whether she is ‘fitting in’, because everything about the potential of clay is a fit subject for her tradition of inquiry. The resulting products may not be made to ideally suit specific markets, they may not elevate the potter to the position of celebrity, but they

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‘Anne Mette is a catalyst in clay: continually and systematically experimenting with feldspars, silicas, iron and alumina minerals, and micas…’

Above: Materials collected around Bornholm for use in glazes Opposite: Oblong Press Moulded Bottle, Dark clay. Red clay & ash glaze over porcelain slip. Sgrafitto decoration, salt glaze.

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take the tradition seriously, and add to it in their small ways, and that is all that matters.

Anne Mette’s pots are calm, and whilst they are functional, their utility is worn lightly. If we were to think of them in a moment of pause, outside the daily rhythms of ascribed purpose and unthinking habit, they would not seem diminished.

Ultimately, they speak of the clay from which they were made, and of how a material that is so common and unassuming can carry the weight of becoming an object unique in its surface scarification, minute cracks, and densities. Beginning amid the earth, with attention and care they have become distinct things.

It is her capacity to realize distinction with the meekest and most intimate of moves that defines Anne Mette’s work, so that it never separates but always contributes to the totality of a tradition that is being made again and again. The interference of the potter’s own design and intellect – what for the Ancient Greeks was called the human or efficient cause, which sat alongside the other three causes of material, form, and purpose – is always restrained.

Anne Mette’s originality is not that of an artist looking to provoke, or of a moralist looking to reform the relations of production and consumption, but of a potter diligently working with clay. Her intelligence, despite its charged intensity, is quiet, patient, self-effacing.

It is present in her obsessive attention to the potential in materials found in the immediate vicinity of Bornholm, the site of Denmark’s only source of kaolin. The parent rock of the kaolin

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is granite, a crystalline rock that has been exposed, buried, uplifted, fractured, eroded, and reburied over millions of years, beginning from the Mesozoic – the middle life, when the land split and drifted into continents and regions. One of these was to become Denmark with its outlier, Bornholm, which sits adrift from the mainland like a moon: arresting, but always at a distance. Generally, Denmark’s soils tend toward a mix of sandy clay or clay-rich sand, caught between these two close, unassuming categories. Bornholm is a bit different. In addition to the kaolin comes feldspar, granite, limestone, quartz, red and white earthenware clay, stoneware clay and basalt, all of which can be dug from the fissures, cliffs, quarries, industrial waste piles, and water courses that pock mark and striate the island. The island replicates the pots, and the pots the island.

Clays are everywhere.

That quiet intelligence is present too in the orchestration of the kiln. Each piece is set against the other in terms of its material composition, size, and shape, as notes on staves, which build into a well prepared and detailed score, but to be performed once only, in a single firing. Over decades, Anne Mette has learnt how different clay mixes, with different concentrations of iron, will bond, with which slips and glazes, and at what temperature in which parts of the kiln different effects emerge.

There is nothing magical here: it is more a case of finding and altering methods for understanding the earth. How to dig differently with different tools in different locations in different seasons; how to wedge, blend, wait and then store clays

view more Anne Mette Hjortshøj at goldmarkart.com

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differently, how to build and fire different kilns. Each piece of hers arises from a grid work of assiduous record keeping and practical calculation. Nothing in the material-form is left unconsidered. Yet chance, accident and risk are as present as they are in any musical performance: the future is held open and unknown.

For some this search for difference might entail reaching out for more exotic, far flung ingredients. For Anne Mette it means working closer and closer to home. Having researched the wild clays of Bornholm for so long she has realized that there is no going back. The results from having worked with a wide range of different local clays have coalesced into an evolving aesthetic, a set of tones, rhythms and colour which harbour and sustain the melody of each piece.

Her pots are not full of ideas; they are impressed with things as they are. The German artist George Baselitz was asked why he so often drew and painted people upside down. He replied

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they were not upside down but the right way up, because human beings were earth-bound creatures, though they too often forgot this, thinking themselves as living in the clouds and pretending to be gods. The sides of Anne Mette’s square flasks do not forget. Like Baselitz’s scratched etchings, with a bare, robust, sinuous swipe etched into a pale gloam, they too remind us we are of the earth.

By combining her intelligence with materials, form, and purpose, rather than asserting it over them, her pots refuse to refer to abstract things like colour, or planes, or prevailing design styles, and instead give priority to the aliveness and liveliness of what gives them life: the clay itself. While the clay demonstrates its willingness to conform to Anne Mette’s established forms and purposes – vases, dishes, bowls that will hold – she also allows it its excess, its capacity to elude and avoid attempts to confine it through classification and use, its subtle vibrancy that arises from its having been fired, formed,

Above: Oval Dish, Dark clay. Stamped decoration, amber ash glaze Opposite: Arch Shaped Bottle, Red slip, sgraffito decoration. Salt glaze

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and wedged in the same vicinity from where it was dug. The vase becomes a thing that is familiar but also uncanny, useable but also inscrutable.

Anne Mette talks of re-wilding the clay. Increasingly she is digging it from waste heaps which would otherwise end up as sub-base for road building. It has already been dug once, processed, and discarded, and now it is being returned to the wild. There is of course a long tradition in studio pottery of keeping the wild in play. Manufacturing using slip casting transforms and fixes what is raw and wild into things that can be exchanged, used, and compartmentalised into acceptable divisions of ‘style’ and ‘taste’. Studio ceramics often plays with the risk of puncturing these agreements, of stalling the exchange.

Anne Mette’s work shares this risk, and indeed pushes it. The clay is exposed, often unglazed, and even where it admits the

Opposite: Oblong Press Moulded Bottle, Nuka glaze over crackle slip. Blue pigment decoration, salt glaze Above: Big Jar, Beach clay. Granite glaze over red slip. Salt glaze

undulating patina and colouration of slip and glaze these too never repress their origins in the earth. Yet in using the waste products that not even the salvage workers bothered to collect when they were clearing up a defunct factory, these pots go further still. They reawaken the clay, put it back into life so it might seed itself in new attempts at living and living differently.

Which takes us back to tradition. To re-admit the wild is to admit that the tradition to which Eliot alludes, the tradition of potting that settles the practice in the past, in the entirety of what has been made before, cannot be limited to a steady, authoritative accumulation of well-understood objects. Anne Mette’s work reveals it to be as much a place of happening as of incorporation. The wild dislocates and fractures the surety of a tradition, refusing to let it settle. The clay, just as much as Anne Mette, keeps it alive.

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EDWARD BAWDEN

Off to market

In the artist’s late linocuts of London’s best-known markets, contrasts of town and country delight.

‘Essex,’ the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner opined, ‘is not as popular a touring and sight-seeing county as it deserves to be. People say that is due to the squalor of Liverpool Street Station. Looking round the suicidal waiting-room on platform 9 and the cavernous left luggage counters behind platforms 9 and 10, I am inclined to agree.’

Writing in 1954, he might have spotted the artist Edward Bawden travelling in the opposite direction, or sitting in that ‘suicidal waiting-room’ gazing up at its iron cobweb of a roof.

Liverpool Street Station, designed by the Great Eastern Railway engineer Edward Wilson in the 1860s, had been the subject of Bawden’s diploma in the Royal College of Art’s design department, at the time thought of as ‘the habitat of the lowest of the low…smaller than the smallest provincial school today’.

The grandeur and grime of London seemed worlds apart from his own provincial background in rural Essex, and Liverpool Street, the station that brought him there, his gateway to the city, became so familiar over the years that it seemed ‘almost to be an extension of my own home’. That home was the tautologous ‘Brick House’ in Great Bardfield – early 18th century, two-and-a-half storeys of brilliant chequered brickwork and large window bays – which he and Eric Ravilious had rented in 1925 and remained his home for a further 45 years. In 1960, as if to illustrate the point, Bawden made two companion linocuts: one of the platforms at Liverpool Street and another of Braintree station, the closest connection to Great Bardfield and, incidentally, his hometown, where a love for art had first flourished sketching with the sweet-faced daughter of the local Congregational minister and copying magazine illustrations – the more stylised and mannered the better.

Town and country; industry and agriculture; labour and folly; these were central, contrasting themes in Bawden’s art, which was shaped inevitably by his satellite relationship with the big city. When London Transport developed its distinct brand aesthetic in the 1920s and ‘30s – almost its own philosophy of design – the young Bawden was as critical to bringing images of the Underground to life as Edward Johnston had been in providing it with its typographic language. Notoriously shy, and capable, as many colleagues remembered, of weaponizing his later deafness, there was a certain irony that so much of Bawden’s work, from transport pamphlets to promotional posters, encouraged people to leave their homes and explore their surroundings when he would rather hole himself up in his own.

Though by the late 1960s work for London Transport had dried up, demand for Bawden’s vision of London’s architectural vistas remained, and in 1967 he was asked to make a suite of linocuts illustrating some of the capital’s most famous ancient

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Roman mosaic of Bacchus found in excavations of the East India Company’s premises on Leadenhall Street. Bacchus’ tiger, rather than a customary leopard, refers to the myth that the god had visited India.

markets. Bawden chose six distinct scenes: the fruit and flower halls at Covent Garden, meat at Smithfield, fish at Billingsgate, the arcade at Leadenhall, and Borough Market, tucked beneath the railway lines on the South Bank of the Thames. They were printed just a year after Editions Alecto had commissioned their own series of nine really rather gloomy views of London monuments, and in a period when Bawden was already experimenting with largescale linocuts.

These he would normally print in his home, shuffling his feet over the paper to transfer the ink from block to page. But the markets were editioned and printed by the Curwen Studio, which involved transferring Bawden’s original lino blocks to lithographic plates. Thankfully, this was a process Curwen were well accustomed to: after the death of Claud Lovat Fraser in 1921, it was Bawden – fresh out of college – who had replaced him as the Curwen Press house designer and illustrator. His preference for linocut and the strong, supple line it made, prompted successful early experiments in transferring between the two mediums, and artist and studio never looked back.

Like his love of Liverpool Street, the market series is at its heart a celebration of Victorian steel (Bawden’s father had been

Leadenhall Market Leadenhall, like much of London, was built on Roman foundations: specifically the ancient Basilica and Forum, remnants of which were discovered during Victorian excavations and now survive in the cellars of the market’s permanent shops. Its most famous local find remains a magnificent John Minton-esque Bacchus mosaic, slouched on the flanks of a glorious tiger – a reminder that trade had flourished in the area for almost 2,000 years, and with it a richly decorative tradition not unlike Bawden’s own.

Dick Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, latterly acquired the market in the early 1400s and gifted it to the City, where it has run ever since (his later mythology, and his apocryphal feline companion, would have made a good subject for Bawden). Once a food, leather and cutlery market, it was later redesigned in 1880 by Sir Horace Jones, City Architect, responsible also for Smithfield, Billingsgate, and Tower Bridge. Jones took as inspiration the Galleria of Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, an extravagant octagonal shopping palace whose architect, Giuseppe Mengoni, laboured for over twelve years on its design

only to fall from the roof to his death during a final inspection of the building, just two days before its royal opening.

Jones inherited a rather more higgledypiggledy layout in Leadenhall’s medieval tenancies, which only contributed to the hall’s robust charms. Pevsner describes the lettering at its several entrances ‘as gloriously commercial as a circus poster’ and drew attention to the ‘dragons cheekily squeezed in’ among swags, heraldic shields and iron cornucopias. But for Bawden it is the soaring height of the dome that dominates, in swanking russet and scarlet tones.

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Borough Market Bawden’s Borough Market is a study of contrasts: of light with dark, old and new, industry and spirit. Workers haul cartons in a glow under the looming shadow of the railway viaduct that sliced through the market in 1862, while Southwark Cathedral (where begins the Canterbury pilgrimage) stands in the distance, once a marker of the distinction between the capital north of the river and the town in the south, the two joined only by London Bridge. The City had no jurisdiction in Southwark, and soon became a haven for escaped criminals

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thumbing their nose at the constables across the water. Capitalising on the huge source of traffic over the bridge, the old market retained this distinctly chaotic and antiauthoritarian character well into the 16th and 17th centuries, when the street positively choked with an anarchy of travelling traders, customers, beggars, actors, pickpockets and every other walk of life.

After decades of wrangling between city bureaucrats and market tellers, a solution was eventually found to the congestion when the market was shut down in the mid-18th century and a new one installed off the high street on land acquired by parishioners of

the Cathedral, then known simply as St Saviour’s Priory. Before long, this new venture had spidered its way into the nearby squares and courtyards Borough Market now occupies. In fact, you can pinpoint Bawden’s perspective here to Cathedral Street, where a rather distinguished racing-green canopy installed in 1897 adjoins the coal-blackened brickwork supporting the railway track that leads to London Bridge station. Curiously, this appears to have been the only image in the series Bawden did not bother to reverse: plant yourself in the same spot on the street, and you’ll find the cathedral to your left, the viaduct your right.

Smithfield Market Like many of London’s oldest markets, Smithfield began life outside the city limits and was gradually swallowed in its sprawling expansion. As its original name suggested, ‘Smoothfield’ was essentially a vast and convenient, multipurpose plot of land located alongside St Bartholomew’s priory, where it became host to the three-day fair of the same name, notoriously the largest and lewdest celebration of the summer season.

Bartholomew fair was eventually banned

in the mid-19th century, quashed by Victorian puritanism. But for some 700 years the fields here had run red: with revellers’ wine and with blood, both from the livestock driven and sold to butchers in London’s nearby Shambles and from human slaughter when, in the 14th century, the site was adopted for public executions. Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, sought an amnesty at Smithfield, when his negotiations with Richard II turned sour. In the ensuing brawl he was stabbed, slashed, and dragged back from the nearby hospital to which he had

managed to escape to be decapitated.

But few, not even the market cattle, endured such violent butchery as William Wallace, who was hanged, emasculated, eviscerated, beheaded, and quartered on the Smithfield plain, his head tarred and rammed atop a spike on London Bridge.

True to its unflinching history, the hero of Bawden’s rendition of Horace Jones’ covered quarters at Farringdon are the serried rows of meat hooks and lamps under which white coats and a sawdust floor are still occasionally stained red.

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Covent Garden Flower Market Covent Garden seems to have interested Bawden more than any other in the series, for he made three different scenes of the market: one of the grocers’ hall, and two of the flower stalls in Jubilee Hall, of which only one was editioned by Curwen. It’s in Covent Garden too that Bawden gives us a sense of the enriching effect of flowers and foliage transplanted in the city, with pink and crimson bouquets and a flourish of leafy ferns.

The flower stalls of Covent Garden are now no longer housed in Charles Fowler’s 1828

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market building, nor anyway else in Inigo Jones’ famous piazza. The entire operation, fruit, veg and all, was moved to Nine Elms in 1974, with the florists consigned to a specially commissioned location with an extraordinary space-frame roof.

It's almost a shame, in fact, that Bawden was not recalled to depict the new space, which vibrated with dizzying diagonals, mezzanines, and hexagonal aluminium crosssection perimeters like some enormous, intricate honeycomb. The roof involved an innovative design system of inverted glass and reinforced-polyester pyramids that

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allowed plants to breathe, photosynthesise and stay warm in the winter months, each one supported by a branching steel tree.

Unlike the original Covent Garden halls, this strange and wonderful design unfortunately has not survived, with no Bawden print to memorialise it. Deemed unsuitable for further use, attempts by the Twentieth Century Society to have the Nine Elms site listed proved futile. The flower market has since moved again – to an even larger complex of nearby warehouses, a stone’s throw from Battersea: a new (New) Covent Garden Market.

an ironmonger): an homage to open-air cathedrals of commerce, just as his portraits of railway stations in the same period were for travel and industry. In the months before his commission, Bawden had travelled to Iran at the behest of British Petroleum, where the extraordinary ornamentation of Islamic architecture made an enormous impact. Shapes, patterns, motifs and tessellations were clearly on his mind, and in the occasional extravagances of London’s Victorian market architects he had yet another model to which his delight in line could be redeployed.

Though peopled, Bawden’s markets appear at a low ebb of activity. Market life is largely nocturnal, with most wholesale trade completed by 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning: the sawdust has been kicked smooth in Smithfield, revealing a chequered stone floor. What clearly delighted Bawden, more than anything, was the essential contradiction of these spaces – of rural delights in the midst of the city, non-descript hunks of meat and boxes of fruit and veg plied against the vast iron tracery that housed them – the repeating patterns and lines that Pevsner had identified, in 1955, with the essential character of English art: its medieval ‘unconcern with the solid body and a watchful interest in the life of line instead – zigzag at first, undulating later; violent at first, tender later – but always line, not body.’

1967 probably marked the beginning of the end for the old ways of the London markets. By the 1970s most had outgrown their premises, and another decade later the existential threat of the supermarket would force all but the hardiest wholesalers to reconsider their trade. Some pivoted to premium goods, others marketed to hospitality. Borough Market is now unrecognisable as a grocers’ market, and news just weeks ago announced the removal of Smithfield, Billingsgate and Spitalfields markets to new facilities at the Dagenham docks.

For centuries they had represented a continuity of medieval life in the modern day, farm muck in the high street – not unlike Bawden’s ‘commercial’ work, his medieval devotion to pattern, decoration, and order, to Pevsner’s ‘decorated and perpendicular’, stubbornly relocated to the realms of so-called ‘fine art’. ‘Fine’ and ‘applied’ was a distinction Bawden always rejected. As far as he was concerned, like any other contradiction he was drawn to – town and country, man and nature – the most interesting stuff happened at the point where they meet.

Left & Above: Photographs of the new 1974 Nine Elms location for Covent Garden Market under construction

view more Edward Bawden at goldmarkart.com

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Reflections on a life in art, in conversation with Emma Mason

C

hloe Cheese is an artist and illustrator who gained recognition early in her career, receiving important commissions soon after graduating from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 1976. Her work is sought out by fans and collectors, many of whom have followed Chloe’s career for a long time. Others are just discovering her work for the first time.

I am fortunate to have known Chloe for quite a long time.

We first met back in 2007 when I took some of her prints for our gallery, and over the years we have held several exhibitions of Chloe’s work. In 2010 we held a joint exhibition featuring both Chloe and her father Bernard, subtly called ‘Cheese & Cheese’ which was a great success.

I am always excited to see new work by Chloe. Drawing is at the core of her work and her keen observations of things, people and places always combine to make the most engaging and sometimes surprising images. Her work often captures a small moment; a jar of plums on a table, or a bunch of thyme in a chipped cup. Each is delicate in style with a palette and colour underlined by a beautiful sense of design and balance.

On a project we did for the Parliamentary Art Collection, I remember watching her sketching in situ at Portcullis House where, unaffected by passers by, Chloe was fully absorbed, observing the life of the place with politicians coming and going, which she captured beautifully in her delicate pencil lines. We enjoyed working together and, for me, it was wonderful to see how Chloe took on the commission so positively, seeing how she found a subject, made drawings and then put it all together in an etching titled The Vote Office. Chloe took time to get to know the office staff themselves and they loved the print.

It was only in later years that I learnt more about Chloe’s life when we were both writing for the book by the V&A on the artists of Great Bardfield. Since then we have talked a lot about parents, children, art, what works and what doesn’t, and Chloe, always with a youthful outlook, quietly independent, is a very special artist and friend.

Chloe grew up in an environment where art and design were part of her daily life. Her parents, Sheila Robinson and Bernard Cheese, were both artists who had met, just after the second world war, when they were students at the RCA. They married in 1951 and in 1954 set up home near Great Bardfield, Essex, with their children: Chloe, born in 1952, and Ben, who was born in 1954.The story of Great Bardfield and the artists who lived there has become well known over the years, with recent books and exhibitions celebrating the artists of the village and their work. Even in their day it was recognised as something special, described in 1958 by the Tatler and Bystander magazine

Opposite Left: Red Plums in a Jar, lithograph Opposite right: Nectarines, lithograph Above: Vote Office, pencil sketch

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as ‘The Montmartre Village’: ‘Great Bardfield in Essex is the home of a thriving colony of artists.’

Two of the first artists to move to Great Bardfield were Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, who first visited the village in 1931.

Subsequent neighbours included John Aldridge, Michael Rothenstein, Walter Hoyle, Kenneth Rowntree, Audrey Cruddas, George Chapman, and Marian Straub.

Chloe’s mother Sheila Robinson was particularly involved in the artistic community of Great Bardfield, as she was a good friend of Edward Bawden. He had taught Sheila at the RCA and she had worked with Bawden on painting murals and editioning prints. She worked with Bawden on the mural he designed for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Chloe’s parents divorced when she was quite young and so Bernard was less involved in Chloe’s early life and that of Great Bardfield. Chloe lived with her mother, and this, along with the experience of living with so many artists, was to influence many of Chloe’s choices and her work as an artist.

Chloe and her family left Great Bardfield to live in Saffron

Walden when she was fifteen and not long afterwards, aged sixteen, she left school to start a foundation course at Cambridge Art School. After her time in Cambridge Chloe studied for an MA at the RCA in London (1973 -1976).

Chloe now works from her studio in London and has recently been thinking about the influences of her parents and her childhood as she is researching information for a book and exhibition on the life and work of her mother, Sheila Robinson.

An exhibition including some relevant work by Chloe will be held at The Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex, opening in April 2024.

It has taken a while for Chloe to fully recognise what an unusual childhood she had. It is perhaps only with the distance of time that one can see things with greater clarity.

Chloe shares her thoughts, following an interview I made with her over the summer: Below: Publicity photograph for the 1958 Great Bardfield Open House Art Summer Exhibition.

From left: Edward Bawden, George Chapman, Laurence Scarfe, Chloe Cheese, Sheila Robinson, Michael Rothenstein, Stanley Clifford-Smith and Walter Hoyle.

Opposite: My Mother’s House, lithograph

Emma Mason

Both your parents were artists. Do you think this influenced your choice to study art and become an artist?

Chloe Cheese

I can only guess looking back what the influence of growing up in Great Bardfield and having parents who were both artists and who made the kind of work they made might have had or still have on me. I took my background for granted and it took me years to realise how very much I had absorbed from it during my childhood.

I expect that I felt more confident than some about going to art school although that can never last long as the art school world is full of many conflicting factions and opinions and although one person might be pleased by your personal history another person might dislike you for it.

Luckily for me no one had much interest in Great Bardfield when I first went to Cambridge Art School in 1969 and as a teenager in the ‘60s and ‘70s the youth centered art and culture of the time was more engaging.

What do you remember about your parents work when you were growing up and how did where you lived and the artists around you influence your interest in art?

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Below top: Sheila Robinson, painting of Chloe and Ben in the garden at Great Bardfield Below bottom: Bernard Cheese, Aldeburgh Beach, lithograph, c1990 Opposite: French Cheese, lithograph

My work is not like my mother’s; hers is more careful and considered. My work is more intuitive, more like Bernard’s...

My mother Sheila worked at home so my brother and I could always see her drawing her illustrations or cutting her blocks from lino and cardboard then mixing colours, applying the ink and printing each layer. I would also see the work of the other Great Bardfield artists in progress when I visited their studios with my mother. I think that seeing work being made rather than complete was very important because I could begin to understand how different forms of art were made. I did not see my father’s work very much until I was older as my parents divorced when I was quite young.

What do you remember about the other artists in Great Bardfield?

Edward Bawden was a very close friend of my Mum’s so we saw him a lot. He had a fantastic studio, which seemed enormous, with an Albion printing press. There would be these huge sections of murals leaning against the walls, which he’d be painting; and an atmosphere of calm and order. He was very kind, very encouraging. I remember doing some marbling and rather excited as a small girl to be making something of my own in Edward’s studio.

My mother also knew Michael Rothenstein well and he included one of my childhood prints in his book on printmaking. The weaver Marian Straub also lived near and was another good friend. She had a tiny colourful cottage with a huge loom in it. Everyone lived in interesting houses and I remember when they had exhibitions where people came to the village.

Do you think nature or nurture led you to study art and follow in your parent’s footsteps?

My mother must have influenced my decision to become an artist as it seemed a natural progression, but I think also

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having seen Edward Bawden painting huge murals in his studio or Michael Rothenstein’s vibrant prints from bits of old wood and metal hanging in drying racks in his studio, made many versions of becoming an artist seem possible.

Do you see any similarities in your work and that by your parents, Bernard or Sheila?

My work is not like my mother’s as hers is more careful and considered. My work is more intuitive, more like Bernard’s and in the 1990s we exhibited together at his local gallery in Ipswich. I do not however have the sense of humour that my father conveyed through his observation of people and even in such things as a plate of little fish. Bernard did like my work and had a few examples hanging in his house in Nayland. My own work often contains no figures at all focusing on the almost abstract qualities in a still life and trying to capture the moment and time when the image was made.

It is hard to say if I appreciate my parents work in the same way that other people do - I have some of their prints on the wall and find the colour, light touch and lithography skills of Bernard especially in his early work very appealing.

My mother’s work I have grown to admire seeing it now as a body of work rather than as part of my family history entwined with personal memories - this is a nice thing which has come about while I have been writing about her standing back from the purely personal to communicate with others.

critic. I think she’s the person who taught me the most, simply because she knew me very well.

For my RCA graduation show I printed wallpaper, which was pasted onto the boards behind my framed work of a series of illustrations for George Orwell’s book 1984. I read widely as a student and made illustrations for books which rarely come up as actual commissions. In my show there was also a book about cake, printed as flat colour lithographs and a poster of patisserie and related objects.

This was influenced by a term I had spent drawing in Paris staying at the Cite Internationale des Arts. In those days communication was more rudimentary so it was an immersive and very influential experience for me both in the days drawing in the streets and in looking at the work in the famous French art museums. In particular I sought out the work of Pierre Bonnard, which in its density of colour can never be accurately reproduced on a postcard.

You studied at Cambridge School of Art and the RCA. What do you remember about this?

At Cambridge Art School some of the best times were spent in the St Barnabas Print Workshop run by Walter Hoyle learning to etch quite well and make bad lithographs.

I can vividly recall the sun slanting through the high windows as we polished the ink from our plates with newspaper and hands. Some of my prints were illustrations to poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

My mother taught at the RCA on the illustration MA so would often show me the work of her current students and describe her own student days there so I imagined myself there too and wanted very much to get in.

At the RCA I was taught by my mother, Quentin Blake and Dan Fern. Brian Robb was head of illustration. I think though, that my mother taught me the most about drawing and how to look at things because she was a really good

view more Chloe Cheese at goldmarkart.com

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Can you tell us a little about your early work and career?

My work was seen as unusual in the context of illustration at the time so it was only the brave and forward looking who would take me on - the first of those being Clive Crook at The Sunday Times where I made illustrations about food for Caroline Conran’s articles.

My other significant illustration commission was for Terence Conran making a calendar of fifty-two recipe illustrations for Habitat. I had a free hand and could draw anything I liked. I sometimes still hear from people who saved that calendar.

I became very busy as an illustrator - my commercial success was a surprise to me. I feel that I was lucky - a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Alongside my illustration work I started making prints at Curwen and the Coriander silkscreen studios and having

exhibitions at The Thumb and Curwen galleries. I also made etchings with Terry Wilson at Palm Tree Editions including some miniature etchings called ‘Eggs and Shells’ which were partly published and for sale in Japan.

Both you and your father worked with Stanley Jones at Curwen Studio at various times. What can you tell us about this?

Stanley Jones took an interest in my prints when I began to make work on a regular basis at the Curwen Studio in Tottenham Court Road in the 1970s. I made a lot of lithographs there mainly of still life subjects. Fortunately, my first print (made for Business Art Galleries) Pink Carnations 1978 was well received and has been used again recently as a card and in diaries by The Tate.

Working in the Curwen studio was a great pleasure - it was a working environment where presses clattered and the artists had to squeeze in between the racks of paper and plates but it was a sociable place where I learnt a lot about printmaking. Other artists I knew like Glynn Boyle Harte

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Left: Pink Carnations, lithograph, 1978 Opposite: Curwen Studio, lithograph

would also be working there and William Scott, John Piper, David Gentleman and many others would drop by.

In those days the image was drawn directly onto the rough grey metal plate for printing and I still prefer this technique rather than transferring the image onto a photo plate. I learned to draw with greasy pencils and paint with litho ink in a way I had not been able to do at art school where re-using plates meant that the very sensitive reproduction of some marks had not been possible. I also experimented with overprinting and colour as I could be present at all stages of making each print so that it was exactly as I wanted it to be and beautifully printed by skilled craftsmen. These prints are in quite large editions but represent a point when the drawing, printing and processing of plates had a lot of individuality.

Stanley himself took great care with every artist to help

them feel that their work was carefully considered and tended to. When the Curwen Studio moved out of London to Chilford Hall in Cambridgeshire in 1989 I made, Curwen Studio a lithograph on a huge stone which Stanley printed himself as a last memento of the place.

I later made a series of images on stone based on toys and an antique straw hat and gloves, images to evoke memories of past lives at Curwen Chilford in 1993 at Stanley’s invitation.

Stanley knew my father Bernard from their meetings as founder members of The Printmakers Council going back to the 1960s. Thy both taught printmaking at London art schools. In later years when Bernard found printing his own lithographs physically exhausting, he would enjoy driving over from Nayland with his plates to have his prints editioned and have a chat with Stanley at Chilford.

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Working in the Curwen studio was a great pleasure ... artists I knew like Glynn Boyle Harte would also be working there and William Scott, John Piper, David Gentleman and many others would drop by.

I made a few more prints at Chilford, which were still life images from time spent in Dieppe. I published these myself so Bernard helped out by giving me a cheap printing slot and I printed some colours with stencils initially to cut down the cost but also using the distinctive quality that areas of stenciled colour bring.

I became involved as a trustee and supporter of The Curwen Print Study Centre for many years so got to know Stanley well as we made many journeys from London to Chilford together. I found his anecdotes of printmaking in Paris and London in the 1950s were something to look forward to.

Opposite: My House, lithograph Above left: Two Figs and Black Coffee, lithograph Above right: September Leaves, lithograph

You are still busy working; can you tell us about your current work?

Nowadays I am an etcher again coming full circle back to those first art school years in Cambridge but with this complex technique there is always something new to learn.

I print my own editions so the number of each edition does not exceed 30. I also recently became a member of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) as a way of letting my paintings have their own creative space, although each technique and experience will, in the end, become part of all the work.

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On Solid

Ground?

Christopher P Wood’s alterations to anonymous photographs unsettle and question more than they answer, as Kerry Harker investigates

Previous page: Portable Chimera No 6, photocollage Above: Figurative Subjects No 3, photo-collage, etching & gesso Opposite top: Maritime Subjects No 4, photocollage, etching and gesso Opposite bottom: Liminal No 14, oil on hand worked inlaid photographs

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Chris Wood has been working with found photography for almost a decade now. The inciting incident in this narrative was the discovery of a cache of abandoned images left behind by previous residents in the attic of his home in Leeds, from where he works.

Fascinated by this serendipitous discovery, Wood has continued to work back directly into these and other discarded treasures – with paint, print and scalpel – to create ‘photo collages’ and subsequently sourcing decades-old monochrome prints from online auction sites to keep the material flowing.

This mode of enquiry forms as integral a part of the Artist’s oeuvre as the paintings for which he is better known, alongside the ceramics, prints, and experimental film and sound works that constitute the full richness of his practice. The photo collages occupy a special place within this, as they synthesise concerns at play elsewhere and create new forms that hover tantalisingly between

photography, painting and collage. Whatever the nature of Wood’s intervention within this found material – variations in colour, opacity, scale or proliferation of the overpainted or altered sections – Wood’s disruption of the surface of the original image, and therefore its possible meanings, leaves traces of the Artist’s hand which serve, as he puts it, ‘to alert the viewer to the fact that something’s going on.’ An attempt to unpick what that something might be is the subject of this essay.

Unfolding through an iterative process over the years, this enquiry spans multiple different series numbering several hundred individual works. The imagery has shifted from the family album fare of the original find, to a variety of other idioms, times and places. A series of black and white shots depicting a nude life model and dating from the 1960s or 1970s, are unusual entries in a body of work which leans heavily towards landscapes - rural and maritime. In one series of tiny images, their surfaces treated with the sticky darkness of carborundum etching, the unknown photographer is in North Africa and Spain. In another series of maritime images, the photographer’s eye is drawn to the details and textures of timber hulls, ropes and rigging. In still another we are rooted firmly in the English countryside, wandering country lanes and sleepy villages.

Architectural details drawn from the anatomy of churches and country houses, timber frames and thatched roofs are visual clues suggesting we are in Devon or Cornwall.

Cars are notably almost absent, but when they do appear they recall an earlier era, possibly the 1940s or even the 1930s. The design of a road sign bearing the legend ‘TRY YOUR BRAKES’ supports this, as does the costume of the occasional human figure.

People are strictly incidental, however. It is the country lanes and village streets, views of woodlands, or fields with distant hills and clouds, that really dominate.

Two recent bodies of work centre circular forms: the Portable Chimera series takes a

trove of large format, sepia-tinted images of Whitby as a starting point. To anyone familiar with the North Yorkshire coastal town’s singular topography, the clues are all here: the bustling harbour with its twin piers and fishing vessels to-ing and fro-ing or undergoing maintenance, the jigsaw of surrounding red tiled roofs, and the distinctive Church of Saint Mary peering down on the scene below from atop the east cliff.

Unsurprisingly, circles also proliferate in the series titled Circulations, a collection of monochrome landscape scenes. Their surfaces are overlaid and obscured to varying degree by unique heavily textured veils of monotype and marble dust, leaving small circular windows through which we glimpse here and there a horizon, trees, water, or a stone balustrade suggesting the features of a formal garden. Subsequent layers of overprinting obscure yet more information, or result in overlapping and adjoining circles, which come to resemble full and crescent moons, or entire planetary systems.

In the early stages of this enquiry, the Artist layered different printmaking techniques,

including drypoint and aquatint, along with shapes and washes of oil paint, directly onto the photographic surface. Some of these hand-painted additions were opaque and brightly coloured (shades of crimson, turquoise, ultramarine and lemon) in trapezoid or pointed elliptical shapes, elongated lozenges, slabs and lines. They ranged across a spectrum from white to black and all the greys between or took the form of thin milky veils that ran across the image before collecting in luminous pools. This trademark palette and lexicon of irregular geometries will have been familiar to anyone accustomed with Wood’s work, providing a continuum particularly with the paintings on paper he has produced in recent years. In a subsequent twist, Wood has taken a scalpel to the found images, creating ‘conjoined photographs’ by painstakingly extracting geometric shapes or straight-edged slabs from one image and supplanting them into voids of identical dim ensions carefully

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prepared within the surface of another. To achieve this effect, the Artist tapes the selected photographs together and draws irregular shapes on their reverse before cutting precisely around them with a scalpel.

The shapes are then displaced from their original location and swapped into the same position within the sibling image. This deceptively simple act deftly and intriguingly brings specific architectural details, textures

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of sky or land, viewpoints and perspectives, into new dialogues with one another. In the most successful of these works, this is not a jarring clash of pictorial elements that have nothing to say to one another, but rather a far more subtle, unfolding sense that something is not quite right.

In one pair of images that depict distant landscapes and expansive, cloudy skies, a collaged triangle at the picture’s centre sits

within a trapezoid, which in turn sits within the rectangular frame of the original photograph. The migration of the cut-out sections from one image to another brings clouds into dialogue with clouds, but they are just perceptibly not quite the right clouds.

Distant hills, fields and trees abut textures and perspectives that are almost, but subtly not quite, the same. There is something uncanny about some of these pairings. For

example, two views of a house in the woods, once collaged together, become surreal and suggestive of something slightly disturbing, recalling the creepiness of an old black and white horror film and suggesting an alternative interior life beyond what the surface allows us to see. These dislocations disrupt any familiar sense of a single viewpoint associated with earlier traditions of landscape photography, and the effect is to wrong foot the viewer. We are suddenly uncertain where we stand in relation to the scene before us. Is our viewpoint low or high, near or far? Are we in 2023 or 1933?

We jump between multiple viewpoints and temporalities and can’t seem to find solid ground beneath our feet.

This process and the effects produced by swapping visual elements from one place to another are akin to the delicate intricacies of marquetry. In the Whitby scenes, the circular inlays come across as apertures in

the specific sense of lenses, suggesting the magnified details of a scene glimpsed through a telescope on the pier. Through some of these apertures we gain new perspectives as the horizon suddenly relocates itself, or we zoom in on a cluster of tiny figures glimpsed on the quayside, so distant they remain faceless. We are further prompted, aided by the addition of overpainted circles in registers of warm grey that insist on there being a human hand at work, to consider why and with whom the source photograph originated.

Wood is particularly drawn to imagery that hails broadly from the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, when the widespread availability of affordable film cameras fomented the golden age of pre-digital amateur photography. In the material that he selects, the photographer is generally unknown and the images unsigned. They appear to function as travel souvenirs, developed and printed at home by keen amateurs, rather than as ‘art’ with a named author: that only comes later with Wood’s intervention. The original photographer’s intentions, along with details of their age,

Opposite: Liminal No 14, oil on hand worked inlaid photographs Left: Copenhagen No 4, photo-collage, etching and gesso Above: Maritime Subjects No 11, photo-collage, etching and gesso

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class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, neurosensory diversity and other markers of identity upon which debates on contemporary art rest, remain hidden. Can we separate the art from the individual who produced it?

Regardless, Wood considers his collages as a collaboration with the unseen and forever unknowable photographers who composed, made and printed the original images. It is the photographic objects themselves that convey a sense of character, age and place through their tactile materiality. The irregular borders tell us that they are hand-printed.

Here or there, edges are a little worn. Their rich colouration, ranging across warm tones of sepia, silver and gold, speak of darkroom chemicals rather than the cold, mechanical grey of mass reproduction. Only an occasional note scribbled on the reverse helps to anchor us in time and place.

While we can only speculate on the identity of our amateur photographer, we encounter these images now through the contemporary artist Chris Wood. This is an interesting historical layering that reanimates the images in our own time frame, giving them new life and meanings in a different context and at the hand of a known and situated individual.

Reactivating the found images in the here and now, these new works travel back and forth across time and space. What is going on in this repositioning? Far from coming across as a potentially aggressive act of appropriation, Wood’s reworking lands rather as a sensitive act of enquiry, a very close paying attention to that is the proper work of the artist. He notices things, signposting them for us with paintbrush and scalpel. Representing them is therefore a way for the artist to insist that they matter in some way, as part of a vast forgotten and melancholy archive of such images once held dear and thought important but now discarded amid the relentless avalanche of scrolling digital imagery that mirrors back to us our contemporary condition – although that ‘us’ is of course qualified. He repeatedly draws

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attention to the surface, insisting again and again on its materiality and status as a flat plane, denying any illusory depth associated with the photographic image and with it, anything we think we might know about these specific moments in time and space.

In Wood’s hands we zoom simultaneously in and out from micro to macro, or switch to a new perspective on the same scene in an instant. The more we look, the less we know.

Perhaps that is where these works make their specific contribution, as a polemic on the virtues of not knowing. We are, after all, in the post-truth age.

How are we to locate these works arthistorically? By bringing both collage and painting into the fray, Wood here creates deeply complex images that hover between art-historical disciplines. It is difficult to locate them within the recent resurgence of interest in found images and photo-collage that is characterised by the work of artists such as John Stezaker, although Wood’s share the unsettling quality that differentiates both artist’s works from more decorative aspects of this genre. Wood’s works are reminiscent neither of the precise and hard-edged yet lyrical geometries of circles and ovals that Gabriel Orozco choreographs over found newspaper photographs of sports men and women in motion, nor the muscular riots of swirling liquid colour that Gerhard Richter squeegees over photographs that he himself has taken. With Wood, we are in a still and quieter, more philosophical or otherworldly realm. As a gesture of neither denial nor affirmation, the artist’s process is one of making and unmaking simultaneously.

Perhaps we can only really make sense of these intriguing works if we accept that while they certainly nod to art-historical traditions (in landscape painting, surrealism and collage) they also speak directly to more conceptual concerns with the entanglements of identity and the production of knowledge that allow us to situate them within the discourse of contemporary art. They certainly have agency within contemporary debates

on place as we strive to rewrite the frame of reference for our relationship with the land, and with our identity as a nation in postBrexit times. The singularity of Wood’s vision, and the way these works shift endlessly between associations, never settling, leaves them (and us) caught forever between one reality and another. They are all the more compelling for it.

view more Christopher P Wood at goldmarkart.com

Opposite top:Figurative Subjects No 5 photo-collage, etching & gesso Opposite bottom:Figurative Subjects No 11, photocollage, etching & gesso Bottom centre: Liminal No 16, oil on hand worked inlaid photographs

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A Retrospect of Churches Tradition and modernity converge in mysterious ways in Piper’s greatest work in print

Inglesham, Wiltshire, lithograph

A

n alarmingly stark photograph introduces us to John Piper in his slim 1944 Penguin Modern Painters volume. Though Piper was 40 by the time it was published, in the photograph he must only be in his mid-20s, his hair already greying, his gaunt features so pronounced that his eyes have disappeared in pools of black into a profile sharp as a knife. Piper was photographed many times in the nearly 50 more years he lived and worked, but he always retained that almost archaic, Gothic narrowness. Like the architecture he loved, there was a sense of fixed character about him, that no amount of aging or weathering, of fat or thin, could mask or obliterate.

Piper was fascinated, all his life, by the presence of the past in all things, whether they had been made by man or nature, and by the mechanism of decay. It is perhaps what fascinated him about the camera, and the reason for his own discomfort at being photographed, when his theme came rather

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close to home. Certainly it is an attitude that lies at the heart of the Retrospect of Churches, his greatest work in print: 24 lithographic portraits of English and Welsh churches, commissioned in the autumn of 1963 and printed a year later.

Piper’s title assures us that we are looking back, and though these prints were made nearly 20 years after the war, an eerie wartime smoke is still in the air in Piper’s black wash.

The war, of course, had brought Piper’s central theme to prominence: the easy destruction of hundred-year buildings, the collapse, architecturally and spiritually, of European civilisation. St Nicholas’ church in Liverpool had been one such bombing victim: stained by dockland pollutants, it rises here like a vast and charry obelisk into the sky. In this ‘retrospect’ – neither country tour nor greatest hits, but memory consecrated in observation – I’m reminded of Charles Ryder’s return to the Flyte family home in Brideshead Revisited as a wartime

captain, the former played by Jeremy Irons, the latter by Castle Howard in the 1981 Granada adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel that has assumed classic status of its own.

Brideshead has fallen to the soldiery, but in the chapel, the peculiarly gaudy creation built by Lord Marchmain for his wife, the interior that had once seemed ludicrous to Ryder’s artistic sensibilities shines as bright as ever, the lamp in the sanctuary lit once more in preparation for a midnight mass.

When Waugh was petitioned by Hollywood execs at MGM for permission to produce a film of the book, he replied stressing the importance of Brideshead’s symbolic architecture, and its importance to Ryder’s unspoken conversion at the story’s end, his affair with Lord Marchmain’s daughter, Julia, dissolved at her request. ‘He has realised that the way they were going was not the way ordained for them,’ Waugh writes, ‘and that the physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’ Physical dissolution as spiritual regeneration: that sounds like Piper to me.

John Piper and Charles Ryder are of course starkly contrasting characters, exact contemporaries yet two sides almost of the same coin. Charles, a stand in for Waugh who began his own career as an art critic, relents to Catholicism after a life of agnostic cynicism. Piper, it seemed, experienced the opposite, and by the end of his life had virtually renounced the Anglican Church, if not his private faith. ‘I know nothing will redeem me’, he said, ambiguously, to the critic Peter Fuller in his last years: redemption from believing, or from abandoning, we’re left unsure.

Ryder’s description of his student rooms at Oxford covers the sort of influences an aspiring artist of the 1920s might have been nourished by: an Omega Workshops screen

by Roger Fry, purchased after the Bloomsbury outfit had closed down in 1919; a McKnightKauffer poster; Rhyme Sheets from the Poetry Bookshop; and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s tortured sunflowers. But it's not long before

Charles denounces modern art as ‘Great Bosh’, his changing tastes symbolising a spiritual awakening that will eventually eclipse aesthetic concerns. The Omega screen is soon consigned to the cupboard under the stairs.

Volumes of Highway and Byways, with architectural illustrations by F.L Griggs, were for Piper what Georgian poetry and Bloomsbury theory were for Ryder, before Piper’s own embrace of ‘Great Bosh’ in the 1930s when he turned to tempered European abstraction. Unlike Ryder, he never abandoned his student enthusiasms, nor regretted his flirtations with modernism. But the urgency of Picasso’s Guernica, as Piper’s wife Myfanwy recalled, ‘acted upon us like rape just when we had settled for the Mondrian cloister’. Piper was soon looking for a way that might bridge the two worlds of tradition and modernity he now fell between. ‘It will be a good thing’ he wrote, ‘to get back to the tree in the field that everybody is working for.’

There is an echo here of Ryder, his room drowning in a jungle of daffodils, Sebastian’s apology for drunkenly spoiling his room, finding even the Van Gogh on the wall paling in comparison to the real thing. But as far as Ben Nicholson and other fellow abstract artists were concerned, Piper’s return to tradition, to musty architecture and ‘the tree in the field’, was a kind of apostasy.

Ryder too turns to painting buildings. His search for something more profound, spiritual, earnest in abandoned and decaying Christian missionary outposts in Latin America remarkably parallels this suite of prints.

Ryder’s muscly new pictures shock his public, but the perceptive Anthony Blanche knows his heart is not in it: he sees only ‘charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.’

John Piper would receive similar criticism as he turned his attentions to the crumbling faces of English churches and stately homes.

But in the Retrospect, he would prove that a contemporary sensibility and vivid sense

Above: St Nicholas, Liverpool: smoke black dockland church, lithograph

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of form and colour could reveal life at the heart of the must unlikely of relics.

Printmaking, John Piper often said, should look easy, but it rarely is. The studio quickly accumulates detritus as iterations of prints are worked and reworked and the process threatens to take over itself, becoming almost self-generating. The feathered, deckled edges of the finished product, on thick, clean paper, gives little hint of the ink, sweat and toil that produced it. So we are fortunate that two archives – one of Piper’s home photographs, close on 6,000 of them held at the Tate, and the other comprising original studies Piper brought to his lithographer Stanley Jones, now at the Goldmark Gallery – let us go beyond those margins to see how many of these prints were made.

‘My ambition’, Piper said of the Retrospect, ‘was to make the prints look frightfully casual…This is very difficult, as printing is a very deliberate and calculated thing and you have to wait days or even weeks and be very ingenious to appear spontaneous.’ It’s an odd phrase, because in spite of the bravura of brushed, scratched and mottled ink on these plates, there is a precise, haunting spareness to the series that seems anything but casual. You feel it in the ghostly elevation of the church at Redenhall or St Anne’s in Limehouse, in Lewknor in Oxfordshire, pieced out in a slim black line and cool blue mantle, with textures from rubbed wood and stone, grasses and brickwork picked out in white with gum arabic. The series represents an unusual choice of churches, as David Fraser Jenkins points out: not Piper’s favourites, but a selection from Norman to Victorian marking a geographical shift to the midlands and the fens, to Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, and our own Rutland, all newly accessible via the M1 motorway that had opened in 1959.

Piper’s perspectives vary too from external views to interior oddities, sometimes so particular that their surroundings have shimmered and dissolved away, or are cloaked in darkness. Vangelder’s monument

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to Mary, Duchess of Montagu, in Warkton, Northamptonshire is virtually illegible compared to the 1775 white marble carving, cast here by Piper in a strange, piercing jigsaw of shadow and light. St Kew, in Cornwall, is lost amid a fiery orange flourish of overgrowth. And with Piper’s original beside it, the beakhead carvings on the extraordinary Norman archway in Tickencote that were ornamented in pale grey and delicate peach in the gouache have been literally electrified by a suspended lamp, illuminating the lemon-yellow background of the lithograph. Few of the churches and their features are shown in context, but are self-contained, falling somewhere between enigmatic portraits and characterless set designs. Exceptions include the city churches – Nicholas Hawksmoor’s spire in Spitalfields, G.E. Street’s churches at Paddington and Westminster, and the 18th-century church in Easton, on the Dorset peninsula of Portland. The area was a favourite of Thomas Hardy’s, carved, as he described it, ‘by Time

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Above: Warkton, Northamptonshire: monument by Vangelder, 1775, lithograph Below: Lewknor, Oxfordshire (detail), lithograph

Tickencote, Rutland: the Norman chancel arch, lithograph

out of a single stone’. Piper’s research photographs show the church and the ornate gravestones in the cemetery drowning in a sea of cow parsley and errant grasses, like abandoned boulders in the nearby quarry.

The overwhelming effect of turning from one print to another is of abiding impressions that have survived the forgetting fog of a dream: memories of the past, as Piper’s wife Myfanwy beautifully put it, that ‘like wasp stings accumulating in the blood, accumulate in the mind and the imagination.’

‘He came like he was going to battle,’ Fernand Mourlot remembered of Picasso, arriving at his Paris workshop to make prints.

Though less commandeering, John Piper came prepared to the process of lithography

when he began working with Stanley Jones.

He had already seen and worked on the other side of the business with the traditional Curwen Press, who had editioned the collaborative series of Contemporary Lithographs Ltd in the late 1930s. The print market was then in a catastrophic slump, with a collapsed American market and war looming on the horizon. By the time of the Retrospect, 30 years later and half a lifetime on for Piper, everything had changed. The gallerist Robert Erskine had helped reignite interest in original artists’ prints with his publishing venture at St George’s gallery in the second half of the 1950s. It was Erskine who had found Stanley Jones and proffered his services to Curwen, keen on establishing

their own dedicated lithography studio. Piper and Stanley had even already met, as respective tutor and star student at the Slade.

In our age of creative liberation and multidisciplinary art, it is almost impossible to imagine the landscape for printmaking back then, when age-old assumptions and rules still remained stiffly in place. Only a year after the Retrospect was printed these would come to a head, with the brouhaha that followed the exhibition of screenprints printed by Chris and Rose Prater at Kelpra Studio at the Paris Biennale. The French officials bluntly refused to catalogue any print incorporating photographic materials or processes as ‘original’ – even when that material was the artist’s own. Kelpra had the

view more John Piper at goldmarkart.com

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last laugh in the end, when, in spite of the controversy caused by the upstart Brits, Patrick Caulfield’s Ruins, printed by Kelpra, won the unofficial Prix des Jeunes Artistes.

Piper might have smiled to see that he was not the only artist combining contemporary technique with antiquated subject matter.

Far from being mired in the past, Piper’s Retrospect represented an early attempt at weaponizing modern methods. Though it seems rather quaint today, his use of photography in the façade-like portrait of the church at Llangloffan was particularly daring at the time, and raised eyebrows even at Curwen, then still firmly divided between the established church of the Press and Stanley’s nascent, nonconforming Studio.

But the layering of photography, stone rubbings and subtle colour, and the collaged relocation of the tree in the upper righthand corner, seemed quite appropriate for this Victorian Baptist chapel, set in the spartan

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North Welsh countryside and inscribed with dates alerting us to its own history of architectural amendments: 1706, 1749, 1791, 1862. The chapel lay not far from the remote coastal stretch at Garn Fawr where, in the autumn of 1962, the Pipers had purchased a small cottage of the same name. The combined severity and majesty of the place, its isolation, its bleakness and its colour in the margins – wild flowers, pebbles and coastal scree – were surely a direct influence on the Retrospect, where churches loom like rocky peaks, or like spiritual lighthouses in rough seas.

Across its 24 images, Piper’s Retrospect became almost an alphabet of techniques and approaches, with Mourlot’s recent book reproducing Picasso’s lithographs his guide.

Together with Stanley Jones, they would pore over the Mourlot illustrations and try to reverse engineer the Spaniard’s virtuoso methods. More than just a challenge of

matching all that Picasso could do, however, there was an opportunity also to find an equivalent use for the substantial arsenal of techniques Piper himself had developed and leant on in his abstract paintings, and the ephemeral material he gathered about him: collage, wax-resist washes, incising through gouache; photographs, sketches, endpapers.

Failures – marbling transfer paper in the bath produced only slop – were outnumbered by often unexpected successes. Some of the very first prints Piper trialled with Jones at Curwen were interpretations of abstract seascape collages, the normal process reversed by the backwards logic of printmaking. Instead of laying down his wash first, and moving gouached discs around the page, this time shapes were glued to the stone with gum Arabic and lithographic washes laid on top, leaving the collaged patches unscathed.

Similar approaches produced the highly abstracted vision of S.S. Teulon’s unusually patterned brick columns in Leckhampstead, a study in black and white contrasts fortified with stripes of blood red.

The revisionary nature of printmaking, in which prints are made by an accumulation of errors, edits and ‘happy accidents’, suited the character of the churches themselves, many of which had suffered damage through the years and been rebuilt in part, so that Norman and Early English carvings often shouldered 17th and 18th century additions.

In the medium of lithography, Piper even had at hand the materials that church masons had worked with themselves: stone blocks and metal plates on which he could enact a kind of weathering such as the churches had survived over centuries of abuse, scraping through the thick, oily ‘tusche’ with which a lithographer draws or paints and occasionally deliberately ‘mishandling’ colour blocks and their registery. Reproducing the intricate Norman carvings at the south porch of Malmesbury, Piper scored through thick gouache studies with a biro before taking rubbings from this first study and repeating

Above: Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire: Medieval Stone (detail), lithograph Opposite: Llangloffan, Pembrokeshire: the Baptist chapel (detail), lithograph

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the process, like a medieval sculptor chipping away at the stone. At least four original sketches exist for this image, each in the sumptuously alive terracotta red in which the print was finally printed.

Piper’s camera, held low and pointed high, remains the unsung collaborator of this series.

Piper was a practiced photographer, from his days illustrating Shell Guides and working for the Architect’s Journal. There is something Hitchcockian in the way he has isolated these buildings, and made them stick up from the landscape like overlarge headstones, as if marking their own demise. You only have to imagine Piper in a dark room, handling negatives, to see how the tenebrous quality of photographic film might have affected his art, especially the reversed, spectral white on black of Gedney in Lincolnshire or Christ Church in Spitalfields. Photography, Piper told the art historian Pat Gilmour, ‘allows the gloom of the atmosphere’: ‘I photograph from paintings’, he said, meaning that he would photograph from trialled ideas or from something he had already discovered in the place, hoping that the camera might return a ‘back reading’ which he could develop.

But the real fascination of seeing Piper’s photographs next to his prints is in seeing how he capitalised on what must have been the fortuitous effects of photography, as well as those he had intended. In views of Norman archways, shadows in doorways that would otherwise have been easily penetrable are turned, through overexposure, to blackened maws. The deep porches at Gaddesby, Kilpeck, and Malmesbury at first seem an artistic decision to enforce the draw of the entrance way; but when you see Piper’s photographs, the parallels are unmistakable.

In his photographs of the church interior at Inglesham (built in the 13th century, and long a favourite of John Betjeman), white lines and light leaks have added to the material

contrasts of wood and stone, suggestions of pattern that Piper might have adopted when he chose to use rubbings of wood grain in the print. The camera seems always to be anticipating, suggesting, inventing details and motivating decisions: the deliberate underexposure at St Mary and All Saints in Fotheringhay, for example, that has turned it into Hammer Horror nightmare

backdrop. And in Piper’s portrait of Grinling Gibbon’s monument at Exton, just a few miles from the Goldmark Gallery, the otherwise milkwhite marble of Gibbon’s 1683 carving is suffocated in shadow. Visiting the church, you find it so chock full of stone carvings dating back some 700 years to the parish’s foundation that it appears rather like a sculptor’s garret. But Piper’s photography, and the Retrospect print, swaddled in black

Opposite: Malmesbury, Wiltshire: the south porch, lithograph Above: Christ Church, Spitalfields, London by Nicholas Hawksmoor, lithograph

and cooled with blue overprinting, remind us of the intimacy of the monument, designed for the Viscount Campden who tragically outlived three of his four wives and several of his nineteen children.

Retrospection and revisitation: both Waugh’s book and Piper’s portfolio deal with our two-way relationship with time, forever journeying back into history and memory and finding ourselves shaped by what has been. Piper’s Retrospect is not just a trip down memory lane, ‘the distillation of half a century’s looking at churches’, as John Betjeman’s foreword described it, nor a memoir of techniques, processes, methods, moods. Like the photographs he took, with their illusion of timelessness, Piper knew he was making objects that, from the moment of their creation, must be relinquished to the past. That the churches he had chosen to memorialise would change again, and these images, years from now, might become unintelligible as frost and ivy reclaimed stonework, or as human idiocy blew it to bits. It is the past’s capacity to reach into the present and haunt us that motivates this series of prints. The same capacity rests at the heart of the Christian faith: when Julia puts an end to their sinful relationship, Charles Ryder learns that in Catholic doctrine, Christ’s death on the cross is both an historical event and a moment out of time, eternally felt. John Piper’s faith was of another denomination, felt with a different kind of uncertainty. But something of this essential, painful beauty in death remains in the work. In the corner of a collage study of Llan-y-Blodwell’s interior, a patchwork of floral ornament and eccentric geometry, Piper pencilled three lines from the litany of the Common Book of Prayer: ‘From lightning and tempest From earthquake and fire Good Lord deliver us’

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C O L O U R S

B Y

N U M B E R

ANDREI’S GOLD Russian rivers and gilded icons glow as Oliver Bancroft’s latest paintings meet Tarkovsky’s epic Andrei Rublev 50 |

In his 1913 autobiography, titled ‘Rückblicke’ – Retrospects – the artist Wassily Kandinsky describes a pivotal episode in his career, before he ever harboured thoughts of becoming a professional artist. The year was 1889; Kandinsky was 23 years old, a student at the University of Moscow, and a keen amateur painter with no sense of the extraordinary career ahead of him. Instead, he had recently been made a member of the Russian Imperial Society of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography and bestowed with a special task. His assignment was two-fold, he writes: to study primitive law among Russia’s peasants and ‘to collect remnants of the pagan religion among the fishermen and hunters of the slowly disappearing Zyrians.’

The journey he describes, first by train, then by steamer along the Suchona River, ‘deeply submerged in itself’, was like travelling to a different planet. Disembarking, he continued by coach wagon ‘through endless forests, between brightly coloured hills, over marshland and through sandy deserts…burning hot days and frosty nights’.

He came to villages of people with yellowgreen faces, grey-clothed or in vibrantly coloured costumes, flitting about ‘like bright, living pictures on two legs.’ But the unforgettable experience, that seared itself into his soul, was on entering their tall, wooden houses, covered in carvings. ‘In these wonderful houses, I experienced something that has never repeated itself since.’ Tables, benches, wardrobes, every object in the room was decorated in bright pattern. And in a red corner (‘Red is old Russian for beautiful’), holy icons of the saints hung in a crowning halo of gold under a redburning, hanging lamp which ‘glowed and flourished like a knowing, gently-speaking, modest star, proudly living in and for itself.

Art surrounded me, and I entered into it.’

The Zyrians, now known as the Komi, had a conflicting relationship with iconography.

In the 14th century, St Stephen of Perm baptised the pagans by force, destroyed

their own icons and gave them their alphabet; those that refused fled into the forest, burying their idols in the ground and their religion with them. Distrust and animism still clung to the place when kandinsky arrived, in part to unveil more about one of these forgotten mythic idols: Zlata Baba, the ‘Golden Woman’. Today Komi women uphold a tradition of carrying the family icons in a grand procession to the riverbank. These icons are believed to soak up the sins of their owners. In the clean running water of the river, purified by a recent thunder storm, the icons are washed of their sins, and the water runs with flecks of paint and gold.

Opposite: Oliver Bancroft, Estuary Birds, oil and gold leaf Above: St Stephen, bishop of Perm, Zyrian Trinity, C.14

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Above: The Nebra Disc, patinated bronze and gold, c. 1800 BCE Below left: Still from Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966); Andrei stalks a pagan reveller in the distance Below right: Andrei Rublev, The Trinity, c.1411-1427

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I imagine it was in such circumstances, with fingers combing the shallows of a river, or tearing at the earth in search of other treasures, that humans first discovered gold.

In its natural state, powdered like saffron, or in tiny, misshapen lumps bound to rock and quartz, they could hardly have known its purity, its resistance to tarnishing, its malleability, nor even its fabled scarcity. All they knew was its colour: that they held starlight in their hands. From then on, and for thousands of years, gold represented the immaterial in corporeal form: the sun in one’s palm, the kingdom of heaven on earth. The anonymous artists of the Nebra disc used gold set in bronze to make the earliest map of the stars, believing the radiance of gold and of sunlight were one and the same.

Wherever it was found, gold became sacred: a touchstone to the celestial sphere.

Even early Christianity, with its distaste for opulence and splendour, and whose God who was a lowly carpenter, was eventually seduced by its alluring qualities. It saw the birth of orthodox iconography: worshipful

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pictures, as much a piece of God as a symbol of his divinity, lit only by candlelight, where they would have gleamed in a high polish in the black recesses of church or home.

Andrei Rublev, the subject of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second film, was one such icon painter; perhaps Russia’s greatest, a contemporary of St Stephen’s and a pupil of the esteemed Theophanes the Greek, a Byzantine Hellene who brought the colours of Constantinople to Novgorod and Moscow.

Almost nothing is known about Rublev, and barely any of his work has survived: only the Trinity, his most famous icon, is thought to have been painted solely by his hand. In Tarkovsky’s film, the greatest of any to depict an artist’s life, we never see Andrei paint at all. For much of the film he is simply there, the camera slowly lurking around and about him as he endures the extreme cruelty of pre-Renaissance rural life in Russia.

Like Kandinsky’s Retrospect, Andrei Rublev is episodic, chronologically flexible, wandering and widening like the great rivers of Russia. It is a story of the old Russia that

Kandinsky found still alive in the Vologda region, where faith and humanism are pitted against self-interest and action is still directed by the seasons. Cathedral frescos must be painted by Autumn, when the rains will return, turning the vast expanse of the countryside into a hellish quagmire of slick earth. The founding of a huge, magnificent bronze bell, a task of impossible complexity in the early 15th century, is threatened by the arrival of the snow that will snuff out the fires of impromptu furnaces.

On his journey to his waterside London studio, Oliver Bancroft passes a gangster pub with a gold tower top, like a miniature Russian cathedral. From his window, he sees the river Thames below, fat and gold in the morning sun, like a water snake seeking warmth in the city.

He too has begun gilding paintings with gold leaf, inspired by the National Gallery’s 2011 exhibition ‘Devotion by Design’.

Curated by Jennifer Sliwka, the purpose of

Above: Oliver Bancroft, Red Trees I, oil and gold leaf Below: Oliver Bancroft, Red Trees II, oil and gold leaf

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the show was to make clear that the many Italian altarpieces in their collection – ‘spaceships in wood and gold’, Bancroft calls them, by the likes of Duccio, Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico – were never intended for gallery display. They lived for hundreds of years in a sacred context of candlelit nooks and grand vaulting architecture, near cold stone in warm, dark light. The word ‘altar’, associated with the Latin ‘altus’ (meaning high, and by extension deep or profound) derives from the verb ‘adolere’, to burn an offering: as fundamental a ritual as there is.

Bancroft’s latest paintings are small and offering-like, on boards scarcely bigger than a postcard. Almost all are landscapes, where he has used the dividing line between landscape, horizon, and sky, as in Byzantine icons, to paint earth and light with gold. Like Tarkovsky’s film, there is a sense in these pictures of a world beyond the frame, as if you could walk down river, following the bank, or disappear through the trees into the golden screen beyond.

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Top: Paint flows into the river in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev Bottom: Oliver Bancroft, Octopus, oil and gold leaf

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Opposite: Top left: Oliver Bancroft, River Trees, oil and gold leaf Top right: Oliver Bancroft, Island, oil and gold leaf Bottom: The courageous young Boriska nervously watches the casting of his new bell

Tarkovsky said of Andrei Rublev that ‘We worked at drowning our idea in the atmosphere.’ Bancroft’s paintings drown in atmosphere too, and the great river, that seems always present in Tarkovsky, has reappeared here. In a tiny, snowlit scene, I can see the banks where Rublev walked with his brother monks, Danil and the jealous Kirill, trudging their way to Moscow, horsemen silhouetted against the water. I see the river where Foma, Andrei’s assistant, washes the caked tips of his brushes; where Pagans run naked in the water in a nocturnal summer festival, and where Rublev watches on with curiosity; the camp fire that catches the hem of his coat; the river where the pagan straw doll, the Kostroma, floats down stream, and a worshipper evades capture at the hands of Russian knights; downstream Foma will fall too at the hands of the Tatar horde, pouring blood into the water where once he dripped paint. Bancroft’s octopus, scrunched and bubbling on the river bank, could as well be the dead and disarranged swan Foma finds in the forest, banished by his elders to remove the glue from the fire: ‘The boy likes the azure’, they grumble.

a process that removes a little of the gold as it is done, transforming the colour from a deep, reddish yellow to something greener, fresher, brighter, as the old icons of the past would have been made, brushed to a gleam.

Bancroft has felt the allure of the Midas touch: so far he has gilded one of his own shirts on a board, and he says the temptation, as you look around the studio, to lavish everything in gold is almost an animal instinct.

‘But Gold’, he says ‘is loaded’: a weight of violent history sits behind it. When in Andrei Rublev the Tatars raid Vladimir and the Dormition Catheral, Andrei’s iconostasis is set alight. The bishop’s messenger refuses to disclose the location of the church’s treasures, and his golden crucifix is melted down and poured into his cursing mouth.

And the jealous duke, who has sided with the Tatars against his absent brother and

‘A good gilder,’ Bancroft tells me, ‘is efficient in using gold leaf and covering the largest area with the fewest leaves. I’m a terrible gilder, but I don’t mind so much. My clay bole cracks, the gold crinkles and forms strange shapes and sharp, thin hairlines.

Sometimes my hair gets caught between the clay and gold, and I get these whipping lines in the surface of the painting.’ In the manual one of our framers has shared with me, I’m told that ‘calm, draught–free areas’ are best suited to gilding, like the empty churches where gilt work would often have taken place. Typical of Bancroft, he gilds with the studio door open, paintings strewn about him, lost in the addictive process. Gold itself, after all, is not perfect: never restful and always full of its own shadows. Contrary to its reputation, it does not shine with a uniform light, like the sun, but radiates and glitters, absorbing and scattering light across its surface. A trio of boards Bancroft has had gilded by Luke, Goldmark Framing’s in-house gilder, painting naïve black trees, spaceships and rising ladders on their surface. These are more highly burnished to a bright shine,

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sold out the town, stands bewildered as the gold plate on the cathedral roof is stripped, sheet by sheet. Durochka, a Holy fool, is the only survivor with Andrei; and months later, she too is smitten by the sheen of a Tatar horseman’s breastplate. She joins his band, abducted as his wife, and escapes the famine and poverty of the monastery.

This new age of wealth and power Tarkovsky hints at by the arrival of Italian emissaries at the court of the treacherous duke. They have come to see the ringing of the new bell, cast under the direction of the young orphaned Boriska whose father knew the secrets of the foundry. The seconds draw by agonisingly as the clapper is eased closer

Gold ‘riza’ or ‘oklad’ for Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, first commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1575 and ornamented subsequently

by Boris Godunov (1600) and Michael I (1626)

With the birth of the Renaissance, gold, long a symbol of triumphalism, was increasingly a tool of individual vanity, a different kind of power, status, and identity.

It was at the behest of Ivan the Terrible that a golden ‘oklad’ cover was made to protect Rublev’s famous Trinity. Subsequent rulers added their own ornamentation, so that the surface is now garishly bejewelled; the painting itself remained obscured beneath its surface, under the weight of their egos.

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and closer to the edge of the bell. The unimpressed Italians chatter while Boriska squirms on the ground, despairing at his failure, when suddenly the clapper hits and the sound of metal reverberates through the gathered crowd. Boris collapses in tears of exhaustion: in fact his father had never disclosed his trade secrets. He has succeeded through blind faith. Andrei, who has taken a vow of silence and ceased to paint, suddenly sees a reflection of himself. Moved

to take up his art once more, he rushes to comfort the boy and speaks his first words in years: ‘You shall cast bells, and I shall paint icons!’

It is here that Tarkovsky achieves the crowning success of the film, as black and white smouldering logs fade to a dim, orange glow. Suddenly we are in colour, and as the camera pans up, we see Andrei’s paintings for the first time. The light does not so much shimmer as wave before their beauty, as if the camera were unable to capture the living colour of the gold, the reds, the blues of his paintings. Gilt surfaces flicker from green to red, from light to dark, bright to warm. We are here to lap it up – colour, texture, holy light in all its magnificence, after our eyes have been parched by hours of black and white, and our hopes dashed by the meanness and the misery Andrei and his companions have endured. But Tarkovsky has made us ready for this epiphany: we have witnessed gold already in the roaring fires when the bell was cast, the immense heat of the gurgling clay mould into which silver and bronze was poured, the white hot light that flares out of the ground as if an angel had been buried in the soil. Like Bancroft’s red trees, bursting from the red ground of the clay bole into a shining sky, for a moment the gold is returned to the seat of the earth, and heaven and earth are one. It must rank among the most moving closing episodes in all of cinema.

Rublev’s Trinity, relocated this summer from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was itself hidden away for centuries. By tradition, icons were often overpainted when the drying oil that was applied to them turned to a slow and tarry black. Successive iconographers reinterpreted the scene, but it is only in the last 100 years that the original, in all its delicate splendour, was properly revealed by conservators. Gold, it seems, always yearns to return to darkness, and human life, enraptured by its beauty, is always looking to find it again.

HIGHLIGHTS

John Allen’s new woven carpets and an enigmatic collage by Prunella Clough take design and décor in very different directions.

Oliver Bancroft, Ladders, oil and gold leaf

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New To The Gallery Our latest art and ceramics arrivals

Michael Rothenstein Running Cockerel Michael Rothenstein (still underrated in this country, but increasingly finding an audience) was always something of a standout in the loose artists commune at Great Bardfield. A recent Goldmark exhibition at the Minories in Colchester reconfirmed that his vibrant and often severely modern work in print seems almost out of place in sleepy Essex. But as an artist of intense obsessions, Rothenstein’s power lay in his ability to take rural themes and motifs – in this case, the strident machismo of the cockerel in the yard – and invest them with contemporary urgency and feeling.

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Mark Hearld Bramble and Apple Allotment The medieval delight in florid decoration that so inspired the likes of Edward Bawden is alive and well in Mark Hearld, whose tremendously ornamented collages and wallpaper designs have assured him a career of successes.

Bramble and Apple Allotment, printed by the Curwen Studio in 2007, is typical of his gentle excesses: ripe fruit fit to burst, iconographic birds flung to the sky, and a range of graphic patterns from herringbone to cross-hatch.

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Most of the items featured in this magazine are available for purchase.

Phone us for a chat on 01572 821424 or see more and buy online at goldmarkart.com

Marino Marini Rite of Spring Sculptor, painter and printmaker, Marino Marini worked successfully in a number of spheres. But in subject matter, he tended to a narrow range of universal themes: Pomonas, earthly female nudes that invoked the Roman goddess of fruit and fertility; apocalyptic riders; and acrobatic dancers and jugglers. These two riotous lithographs, printed by Mourlot in Paris, depict balletic performers cavorting to Stravinsky’s infamous Rite of Spring.

Ken Matsuzaki Tōkaiseki vase

Sid Burnard Spring Time on the Farm More often known as a conjurer of driftwood birds, Sid’s scrap tray occasionally prompts human subjects. This farmyard vignette he reckons was plucked straight out of the ‘The Woodentops’.

Developed over a number of years, Ken Matsuzaki’s sculptural Tōkaiseki vases are not thrown but hewn, carved and torn from hollowed blocks of clay on a potter’s wheel using a variety of tools – from knives and wooden scrapers to wire, fingers, thumbs and even fistfuls of clay itself. The results, when fired with wood in Matsuzaki’s many chambered kiln, are pots that seem almost like they have been exhumed from earth or stone itself – examples of Matsuzaki’s enigmatic approach to his medium.

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John Allen: Woven England An exhibition preview John Allen’s last carpet collection, Spirit of Place, culminated in a hit collaboration with fashion brand Loewe. Now working entirely for himself, and with an upcoming show at Goldmark this autumn, his love of the English countryside remains undiminished.

It was in a hospital bed several years ago, in the midst of a health crisis, that John Allen found himself ready to let go. He closed his eyes, and as he lay imagining he might die, he thought of his last carpet designs. A single phrase came to mind: I can do better than that. Within two months he was sitting in the Goldmark Gallery, presenting plans for his latest exhibition.

That was 2018; Allen will be 90 in January, and though medical miracles (‘They say I’ve got cat’s lives’) and age have tried to force a change in perspective (‘I feel every carpet is a bonus. Because I’m on borrowed time.’) he seems unchanged five years on, still fired with the excitable energy of an unstoppable clockwork toy that, when sufficiently wound with ideas, shoots off with the alarming speed of a tightly looped spring.

There is no shortage of such inspiration in Allen’s Victorian home in London, which has

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become a sort of analogue of his creative process. From the unassuming front you enter a dark hallway, illuminated by rich wallpapers and banks of picture frames hanging like icons to mid-century modern British. Allen has spent a lifetime collecting, honing his eye on pictures at auction salesrooms and small dealerships across the country. Cecil Collins hangs with Christopher Wood, Julian Trevelyan with Anne Redpath.

His taste, like his art, runs colourful – Harvey Daniels, Albert Irvin, Terry Frost, Craigie Aitchison, Alan Davie – and largely coastal – Alfred Wallace, Paul Feiler, Bryan Pearce, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, all bought on a shoestring. ‘It’s worth having a pee in this house,’ he says: the bathroom is a tabernacle housing jewels by Patrick Heron, his favourite artist besides Elisabeth Frink and Gillian Ayres (a large abstract overlooks Allen’s studio space). The very particular quality of

Heron’s greens, paired judiciously with purples, oranges and saffron yellow, is a palette Allen has happily inherited and enlarged. Curiously only one foreign painter hangs in the house – the Italian sculptor Marino Marini, known for his archaic figures.

Like his most recent carpets, his collection is a celebration of the best of British.

But it’s in the North East-facing windows of his studio room, where natural light and colour flood in from the garden beyond, that Allen comes into his own, the influence of the pictures in the house, and of the world beyond, channelled into the sketchbooks, photographs and squared papers that cover every working surface.

This October Allen’s latest collection of 20 new carpets will be shown at the Goldmark Gallery, two years in the making: from siteseeing to gouache studies and finally translation to technical weaver’s graphs.

Woven England is in many ways an extension of Allen’s last project, Spirit of Place: an homage to favourite land and seascapes across the country, from the recognisable white faces of the Seven Sisters and the chalk figures of the south coast to Matlock, Derby, where Allen was born in 1934, and where the romantic severity of the peak district instilled an early love of the countryside.

Though the range of places represented are quintessentially British, it is in a tiny settlement in Nepal that Allen’s designs are brought to life by teams of specialists working to his directions. Muktinath stands at 15,500 ft, near the site of an ancient monastery, the last town before the snow line, where the elevation begins to shorten your breath and tents become the only form of accommodation: ‘It makes the Alps look like Disney.’

It is through his own understanding and experience in weaving that Allen has been

‘I'm not interested in either the realism or the abstraction.

What I'm really interested in is portraying what I feel when I stand there.’

able to adapt the various skills of the workers in Nepal to escape the ultimate contradiction in carpetry: that the ‘flat’ surface of the ‘canvas’ before you is in fact three dimensional and full of exploitable depth.

Key to this is the art of ‘cutting’ into the ground of the carpet with huge and unwieldy weaver’s shears, normally reserved only for sharpening the divide between one colour area and another. At Allen’s instigation, cuts of twice or even three times the usual depth are layered through his designs, ‘like it’s had a mower down it.’ The effect has been crucial in this latest collection. Cutting away the pile cheats two colours out of one wool, as the dye is invariably deeper and darker below the surface, and lends much needed texture to larger expanses. More than that, however, it mimics beautifully the patchwork nature of England’s countryside, so evident from the window of a plane, where the land is cut with its own plough lines, telegraph wires, hedgerows and delineations.

This combination of flatness and fullness makes several of Allen’s designs successors to the British Rail posters of the 1930s and ‘50s, or the commercial work commissioned by the likes of Shell, encouraging travel at a time when motorways were opening up the possibility of cross-country travel.

Nowadays, I suspect, this way of travelling, of exploring our own backyard, is largely lost. Our railways are underrun, and our urban centres sprawled into suburbs that see people more often driving into town, rather than out of it. But while Allen’s carpets hark back to Neo-Romantic paintings of the British countryside as mirror to the soul, their beauty is today’s. You only need John Allen’s joy of life, his magnanimity and openness to colour and texture, to find splendour in the world immediately about us.

Wilmington Man, wool & silk hanging carpet

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Prunella Clough: A Grammar of Ornament Victorian splendour floats adrift in this enigmatic collage

Prunella Clough was something of a walking contradiction – a secret aristocrat who sought meaning in the mundane grime and muck of the everyday. She did so not with outsider artist naivety but acute art historical observation behind her, in the manner of Sickert in search of ‘gross material facts’ or of Leger’s ‘dead surfaces that will acquire movement’ with the gift of painting.

Underneath the quiet strangeness of her work, there is something of Ricky Fitts about her, the soulful aspiring filmmaker of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty whose heart bursts at the essential beauty of the world.

His film of a white plastic bag caught in the wind, dancing through air like a jellyfish in an overground sea, would have made a good Clough picture. ‘That’s the day,’ he professes to his teenage crush, as they watch the home video tape in his bedroom, ‘when I realised there was this…entire life behind things.’

The life behind, within, among things: that was Clough’s concern, too.

In 1949 she said of her mission that it was to ‘say a small thing edgily’, a phrase that was somewhat prophetic, better describing her small abstract paintings than the semisocial realist work she was making in the post-war years. It’s certainly how she might have described this unusual collage, which

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served as a preliminary study for a very late lithograph printed at the Curwen Studio in the 1990s. Titled ‘A Grammar of Ornament’, after the design bible for which the Victorian architect Owen Jones is best known, it is an oddly specific arrangement. The swirling monoprinted background over tan newspaper allows glimmers of type and dot matrix to peer through in an indecipherable haze. A black sugar paper stage then lifts a pale blue hand-painted fragment – perhaps a quote from Jones’ decorative volume – as if Clough were making an offering, like a pearl sitting in a dark, cool oyster, or a diamond ring in a velvet box.

Born in 1809, Jones was one of the bestknown designers of his generation – an architect, an Orientalist, and an aesthetician, at a time when a wealthy young man with sufficiently horizon-expanding education could be all three. He propounded a bolder use of colour, geometry and pattern in British design by looking first to the East, and then to international and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. His influence in the world of tile design, for example, led to his commission to decorate the interior of the 1851 Great Exhibition building in primary red, blue and yellow, and to reimagine elaborate foreign interiors in the courts at Crystal Palace.

After a Grand Tour at 23, Jones’ eyes were first properly opened to Oriental aesthetics at the Alhambra Palace, working with an older French colleague, Jules Goury.

Together they documented, in lavish detail, the exquisite efflorescence of ceramic patterns and rich gilding that adorned virtually every expansive wall and ceiling.

When Goury suddenly died from cholera half-way through their 6-month stay, Jones was left to finish the studies on his own.

It was his attempts to bring his findings to a public audience, and recognising the

Above:: Owen Jones, Alhambra scheme for arcade decoration for V&A Oriental Courts, watercolour, 1863 Opposite: Prunella Clough, The Grammar of Ornament, painted collage on newspaper

‘Anything that the eye or the mind's eye sees with intensity and excitement will do for a start: a gasometer is as good as a garden, probably better; one paints what one knows.’

paucity of most commercial printers in handling colour, that sent Jones down the rabbithole of chromolithography, then still in early development. This new medium eventually enabled him to produce (out of pocket) his survey of Alhambra, which won him instant recognition among his peers, and a decade later his bestseller, still in print today: The Grammar of Ornament.

The Grammar was Jones’ grand, unifying document: a visually exhaustive tome that examined both the great variety in decorative character across nations and, crucially, the shared fundamental desire for pattern that seemed to transcend national, cultural, and spiritual borders. For the most part, he let the designs he had collected from around the world speak for themselves, reproduced in glorious colour and divided into 19 geographical and historical sections – Primitive Polynesian, Greek, Byzantine, Arabian, Celtic. However academically dated some of his commentary has now become, the collection itself, Jones’ curation, and their sumptuous reproduction have cemented its reputation as a masterpiece of design theory.

What is less certain is what value Prunella Clough might have found in the opulence of Jones’ book, its elegant richness. Her work was devoid of motifs, pattern, decoration; it excited instead in quiet and coarse surfaces, often muted colour, in scattered light. Though she studied graphic design at Chelsea Art School, where her tutors included Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan, Henry Moore, and Graham Sutherland, the closest she ever came to providing commercial or design work was during the war, drafting graphs and cartography. Her gradual drift into abstraction was rooted in the material feel of things and the shadows they cast, the space and shade they absorbed.

Patrick Heron wrote, perceptively, that ‘Her paintings are machines for seeing with. It is impossible, after contemplation of them, to be aware of the street, the yard, the facade, as existing in any formal patterns other than those one's eyes have just enjoyed savouring, as one's gaze crossed and recrossed the endlessly subtle surfaces of her canvases.’

I’m not sure Clough ever thought much about ‘beauty’; or, if she did, like Ricky Fitts, that it conformed in any way to qualities of elegance, refinement, taste, pleasure, abundance or civilisation – in short, everything Jones treasured. In discreet works like this, she instituted her own grammar of mood and feeling for life in the 20th century.

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Calendar Autumn - Winter 4 November Henry Moore Sculptors, the master printmaker Stanley Jones reckoned, had a special affinity for lithography and its tactile secrets. Having exhibited lithographs by two of this country’s best loved sculptors earlier this year, Elisabeth Frink and Barbara Hepworth, this winter we turn the spotlight on the printed work of Henry Moore, perhaps the most celebrated British artist of the last century. Moore’s printmaking drew, inevitably, on his three-dimensional work – reclining figures, the mother and child theme, and, poignantly, the artist’s own hand, each sensitively exploring the profound parallels he found between landscape and the human figure.

14 October John Allen There is no other way to describe John Allen than to say he is a true force of nature. For much of his career he has juggled a textiles professorship at the Royal College of Art with freelance commissions for some of the fashion world’s biggest names. Now furiously making up for lost time, he has since launched himself full-throttle into a solo career with sell-out shows of his magnificent Nepalese woven carpets. This latest collection, Woven England, has been designed and woven over the last two years. An extension of his last show, Spirit of Place, it showcases vistas across some of Allen’s favourite land and seascapes, from his native Peak District to the Seven Sisters cliffs.

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Early 2024 Olive Wootton The duality we find in the animal world – their simultaneous separateness and their closeness – lies at the heart of Olive Wootton’s sculpture. As a young sculptor with an interest in animal form, she could not have hoped for a better instructor than John Skeaping, one of the great animal sculptors of the 20th century. Now in her 90s – and still working daily in her studio – this exhibition will feature a whole host of her favourite subjects: greyhounds, pigs, hares, bulls, and the eternal theme of the Minotaur: archetypal representation of the beast within man.

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