Against The Grain - The Life and Art of Rigby Graham by Goldmark Gallery

AGAINST THE GRAIN The Life and Art of Rigby Graham

AGAINST THE GRAIN

The Life and Art of Rigby Graham

MALCOLM YORKE

goldmark MMXV

First published in 2015 by Goldmark, Uppingham, Rutland 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com

Text copyright ÂŠ2015 Malcolm Yorke The moral right of Malcolm Yorke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted. Illustrations ÂŠRigby Graham

ISBN 978-1-909167-19-3 [standard edition] ISBN 978-1-909167-20-9 [special edition]

Design by Roger Porter Art photographed by Christian Soro Set in Georgia Printed and bound in England

CONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Nettle 7 Whisky 11 Water 27 Rooster 47 Bricks 65 Chalk 81 Turpentine 99 Stones 119 Argon 141 Sky 155 Grease 171 Muesli 189 Fishpaste 209 Paper 243 Wood 259 Coffee 289 Bubble 299 Glass 319

Acknowledgements 332

NETTLE

In the middle of a damp clump of nettles near an undistinguished village in the Midlands the artist sits on a folding chair. The November sky is like a heavy grey lid, the air is distinctly chilly, and it will certainly rain within the next hour, but being here is Rigby Graham’s idea of having a good time.

If you are not frozen off by the glare in his pale blue eyes (he hates spectators) and dare to look over his shoulder you will see that he has a sheet of Two Rivers handmade, acid-free watercolour paper held to a sheet of plywood by bulldog clips. It is Half Imperial, about 15 x 22 inches. He has a box of artists’-grade colour pans in his left hand and back-up brushes, oil pastels, rags, pens, a tube of opaque white, flask of soup, nip of whisky and packet of biscuits in a bag at his feet. The view he has chosen is of a mediaeval church and includes a number of telegraph poles, No Parking signs and a foreground of head-high thistles, keck, hogweed and nettles.

Using waterproof black ink and a brass pen he begins to draw the outlines of the scene using a broken, often dotted, line. Next he wets the paper and splashes in the sky using a number 20 brush (‘If it feels too big it’s probably about right,’ he claims). Over the next hour or so he uses the same brush to work back and forth across the page, dabbing in greens and yellows for the trees, ochres and blue-greys for the church and surprisingly vivid lemons and oranges for the nearby weeds. He keys up the dull red of a brick wall to vermilion. A white candle is rubbed on the paper then washed over with paint to give the church walls a textured effect – this is a favourite stratagem. The whole process goes on at speed with no time for second thoughts or that urge to ‘tickle’ which so chronically afflicts amateur watercolourists.

Whilst there are still many chinks of white paper left Graham reverts to the pen to sharpen up some selected details of leaves, window traceries, overhead wires and so on. A few rapid touches of acrylic white mixed with green or yellow amongst the foliage

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LYNDON , RUTLAND , AUTUMN , watercolour, 2005

MTAHLEB , MALTA , watercolour, 1994

1 NETTLE

and the picture is developed as far as he can take it now that raindrops are spattering onto the paper. He dates it, writes the name of the church and village, perhaps records the state of the weather, signs it, and puts it in the boot of his car. By now he is frozen to the bone, his glasses are streaming, and the circulation in his legs has been cut off by the aluminium chair, but it’s been a good morning because he has created something which did not exist before. After a pub lunch he’ll drive on for another tough bout with a different location in the afternoon.

Much the same mixture of discomfort and creativity would be relished by Graham in some corner of a foreign field – say Malta, or Sicily, or Croatia. There he is prepared to endure insect bites, cactus spines, dust from the hot Meltemi wind, the stench of dead dogs or rubbish bags, and ‘sitting on a pile of pottery shards which indent and emboss your behind’ in order to paint. Instead of waiting for a wash to dry in the drizzle he might there have to ‘douse the watercolour box with lukewarm beer to prevent the pans of paint desiccating.’ Nosy children and adult idlers are other hazards and after one episode in Tenerife he wrote: ‘the practice of any art requires a particular kind of quiet concentration, as free as possible from distractions and irritations, yet one is pestered by people who should know better, tormented endlessly by crass questions, forced by politeness to listen to their jokes devoid of any semblance of wit or humour.’ They behave no better when they track him down in his studio (a bedroom in a Leicester semi). ‘They not only want to come to your home but they start to bring their friends and acquaintances. I can only suppose it is because they have to pay to go to the pictures. I am always grateful that the lavatory door still has a bolt on it.’ 1 It seems the artist might turn out to be as prickly as some of his painted foregrounds. NOTE

1. Graham, R. Kippers and Sawdust, Old Stile Press, Llandogo, 1992, page 30.

WHISKY

Rigby Graham’s father, Richard, was a Customs and Excise officer who was posted to various remote areas of the British Isles as part of his duties. Richard’s wife Ellen was born in Tobermory, Isle of Mull, but spent much of her childhood in Stornoway on Lewis and at Mallaig, Inverness. It was at Mallaig they met when Richard was inspecting whisky distilleries and he lodged at the guest house run by Ellen and her mother. They had married and been posted to Manchester by the time Rigby was born in Stretford in 1931 and named after Justice Rigby Swift, a man his father admired. Then came another transfer to Barkingside, Essex, where Rigby began to sit up and take notice: ‘My earliest memories are of being pedalled in a carrier on the crossbar of his push bike along the roads of London’s East End, and out to Chigwell, Epping and Buckhurst Hill.’ 1

Just before the war Rigby was evacuated to Ipswich with his brother Conrad (two and a half years younger and named after the novelist) where they suffered several miserable billets and a variety of schools before being reunited with their mother and new sister Corisande (six years Rigby’s junior and named after a Disraeli character). They returned to Seven Kings and then Graham senior was transferred to Leicester in 1942. After a year with his maternal grandmother Rigby finally joined the rest of the family there, by which time he was thirteen years old. However, his Home Counties accent was so established that he never lost it, in spite of spending the rest of his days in Leicester.

Graham Senior was an educated man, very smart in appearance, a former professional clarinettist, well read in politics, economics, Fabianism, Russian novels, Greek legends, and the major English poets so that he was always ready with an apt quotation. One of his postings had been in Ireland and he aroused an interest in Irish literature and music in his son. Graham recalls that there were always plenty of books and bottles around, if not much food. His father could sing opera and introduced all the children to classical

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music and so began a life-long obsession for his eldest offspring. Though there was music a-plenty (the mother was musical too and played the piano and violin) and literature on every shelf, there seems to have been no great family interest in art.

Rigby picked up many of his father’s cultural enthusiasms, though he never learned to read music and his ambition to study English at college came to nothing when painting took over. Politics were discussed, but even-handedly since Graham Senior always voted Labour but was the Secretary of the local Conservative Club on the grounds that ‘the beer was better and the conversation more intelligent.’ In local elections both parents voted for those who were not in power, it being the father’s policy ‘to get the buggers out whoever they are.’ He was also an ardent Royalist who admired Cromwell and revered Churchill and Attlee equally. The mother was a devout ‘Wee Free’ and Rigby was sent to Sunday School and to a junior school run along religious lines. Perhaps his Scottish mother gave him a certain puritanical streak so that in later life he felt guilty when not working and distrustful of anything that was too pretty or too easy. Later he was temperamentally drawn towards the austere Expressionism of Germany and Scandinavia rather than the guilt-free indulgence of French Impressionism.

The family had a peculiar communication system which must have baffled outsiders. The father rarely used their names but had a whistle code to summon each offspring – so Rigby answered to a high note followed by a low, his brother to the reverse and his sister to three short blasts plus a long. The parents were known as Nell and Dick amongst the children and then Rigby explains, ‘I called my brother Bill, he called me Bill, my sister called my brother Bill and called me Scruff. I called her Scruff, my brother called her Scruff. It didn’t seem at all odd or complicated.’ If the father was in a good mood Rigby became Rigadong, Mr Pecksniff, Horatio, Dick Sniveller and so on. When he had his own family Rigby set up a similar network of nicknames for his wife, daughter, pets,

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motorbikes, and invariably signed letters to friends with a madeup name. What all this signifies, if anything, I have no idea.

The father’s work took him into breweries and whisky distilleries where he sampled too many of the products. His violence and overstrictness with his offspring eventually began to have an adverse effect on the family’s stability. Outside the home he was a charmer with the ladies and later on this also caused tensions so the parents split up in 1953 when both were in their fifties – at the very time Rigby was himself getting married.

Graham does not complain about his turbulent childhood now, and at the time seems to have accepted it as quite normal since he knew no other. He admits he might have inherited traces of his father’s temper and his taste, though in a more restrained form, for good malt whisky.

Mrs Graham kept up her connections with her relatives on the Isle of Mull which meant that the brothers could have an exotic island holiday each summer. The two boys would separately hitchhike to Scotland. By their teens they were talented swimmers, both racing and playing for the school at water polo, and in the Hebridean regattas they cleaned up on the swimming and diving prizes, to the resentment of the locals. Rigby became the Western Isles Long Distance Champion (half a mile) and won an enormous silver bowl, though as few of the islanders swam the opposition wasn’t too testing. After a time Conrad became the superior competitor whilst Rigby claimed ‘I just regarded myself as an overgrown newt, and much preferred swimming alone in the rivers and filthy canals.’ They explored the island and went by boat to Iona, so Graham’s later love of islands may have begun in Scotland. They also had a maternal grandmother still living in Seven Kings London and the two boys, again separately, would cycle the 100 miles or so to stay a weekend with her. They also hitch-hiked to Dorset so evidently Graham’s restlessness and tolerance for long and

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FROG ISLAND , oil, 1989

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uncomfortable journeys was developed early.

Graham entered Wyggeston Grammar School in 1943. It was a good school academically and the famous Attenborough brothers, Richard and David, had gone through slightly ahead of him. However, every day of his school life, he said later, he entered the place with a sinking heart because of ‘the sit up! speak up! shut up!’ ethos of the place and the smell of boys, the clanging noises, and the tedious cricket games.He claims not to have been particularly good at art, or above middling at anything else apart from swimming, and learned early that if he was going to get anywhere it was going to be by hard slog, not natural talent.

Geometry in particular seemed a chore: ‘ I learned to hate straight lines and angles, and the measurement of things by degrees, and sentences which began ‘given’, ‘to prove’, ‘if’ and ‘let’, and I hated the reasoning which was neatly tied up with the nasty little knot – quod erat demonstrandum. I loved loose ends, and intersections which could not be measured.’ 2 He was already instinctively finding his own themes: ‘I liked the geometry of the branches of the trees, for they were living lines and real dimensions, they moved in the wind and dripped in the rain.’ And he was evolving his own ways of thinking about them: ‘I have always been interested in the Sublime – since I became aware of it at school and being introduced to Wordsworth’s Prelude, by which I was much stimulated. Like a sponge I read whatever I could for I felt I wanted to do this rather than play rugger and cricket.’ 3 Shakespeare, however, was taught so aridly that he would never read or see the plays again for the rest of his life – ‘I’m ashamed of it but I can’t overcome it.’ On the other hand Milton, Spenser and Browning would remain favourites and he came later to enjoy illustrating all manner of obscure poets and authors for the small printing presses. On his trips to and from school, dragging his feet and trailing a stick along the railings, he noticed how fence posts sliced up the

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view beyond and how their cast shadows varied according to the angle of the sun or the lights from passing traffic. These are not the observations we might expect from a typical school boy. After his Scottish grandmother had given him a £2 bike he could explore further and sniff out the differences between hay, silage, slaughterhouses, slurry, the coke in railway sidings and the iron and dust from foundry furnaces. Once, distracted by this surfeit of sensory input, he cycled into the canal and learned that ‘sight, sound and smell are inseparable.’ Other escapades, such as stealing explosives from army nissen huts and nearly blinding himself with the flash, or picking dead fish out of the canal and feeding them to his father for tea showed he had his episodes of adolescent rebellion.

Machines of all kind attracted his attention too, whether in town or country; ‘any crane, or earth mover or crusher or plant of any kind, I was up, in or over.’ His visual obsessions were evidently taking shape. Graham’s informal self-education convinced him that ‘There seemed to be an enormous potential in almost everything.’ Subconsciously he was training himself to see and feel so that, ‘when I became an art student, my attention was focussed on particular things, lamp posts, chimney stacks, doorways and windows, brickwork and bonding, the colours of things, the effect of light and the perspective of cast shadows, and I found that in learning of these things I was rediscovering all those elements in Leicester which I had already known and experienced.’ 4

By the sixth form he thought he wanted to go to Kings College Newcastle to read Art History, but the art teacher, Roy Porter, said why not go to the local Art College and learn to draw – ‘and that’s exactly what I did.’ Since all the grammar schools in the city were single sex, Sixth Form clubs were set up to allow boys and girls to meet and learn a few social graces. One of Rigby’s friends had written an opera and he painted the scenery, in spite of having his foot in plaster after a hammer-toe operation. He tried to trip up one of the girl singers with his stick, and so met his future wife,

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BRUNTINGTHORPE , oil, 1952

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BARN , oil, 1950

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KINGS NORTON , LEICESTERSHIRE , oil, c1956

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Patricia Green. They would stay in touch when she went on to study Domestic Science in a local college and he enrolled in Leicester College of Art and Design. He was always very tender hearted about animals and at some time in this period, after seeing a French film, Le Sang des Bêtes, about a Paris abattoir, he decided he would not eat meat and later Pat, rather than cook twice, would follow him.

National Service was still compulsory for those school-leavers aged eighteen and Graham turned up for his medical as instructed. There was a queue and since his father had forbidden his children ever to waste their time queuing Graham went away again. After another summons he turned up and was roundly and rudely bawled out by the recruiting sergeant for being months late. He was asked why he had left the local Cadet Corps and answered to the effect that they were a bunch of boneheads. More shouting followed. Graham Senior didn’t like his children being shouted at either so once more Rigby turned and walked away. For several years he expected to be hauled off to jail or barracks, but he somehow slipped through the system and never went. There would be many more confrontations with authority and bureaucracy in the years to come, and he usually came out the winner, or at least with the last word.

Before leaving school Graham took off for the continent and hitch-hiked through France, Switzerland and Germany. Alone in France he contacted a drastic dose of amoebic dysentery from drinking bad water and it took him some years to shake off its effects. Michael Bown, a fellow sixth former at Wyggeston, accompanied him on one of the trips to France and Switzerland, as well as to London to trawl the second-hand record shops for classical music to play on Graham’s wind-up machine with the papier mache horn and the thorn needles. In spite of the discomforts, ‘travelling was an adventure and its own justification,’ Bown recalls.

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MOUNTAIN VALLEY , CORSICA , oil, 1966

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SCRAPER , oil, 1966

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He also remembers that he saw an oil painting of Le Lavandou in the South of France by Graham done in 1947 (presumably from sketches), quite large on a canvas taken from a deck chair ‘with several coats of matt decorator’s paint onto which he drew in pencil the house, the palm trees, and the curve of sea and shore, which then he painted in brilliant blues and greens and yellows. There were shrubs and flowers in the foreground, quite detailed. I never knew whether it was an actual scene, or a composition of memories and impressions. His art teachers of the time, at the grammar school, were pleased to see such work of promise from a pupil, but more than a little put out that it clearly owed little or nothing to anything they might have taught. The painting was damned by faint praise.’ 5 If Bown’s memories are correct then the main characteristics of Graham’s work were already in place before he left school: not just the independent spirit, but the choice of mixed and demanding media, the exotic landscape subject, the shrubby foreground, the linear base, the brilliant colours – even its indifferent reception by people who ought to have known better. In the winter vacation of 1948 he took himself off to paint in Ireland, fell in love with the place and would return there time and time again.

Bown also remembers the Philistine atmosphere of their school where ‘art was not regarded as a serious subject, merely an activity for the non-academic on a level with woodwork.’ How often one has read that in the biographies of English artists! Graham’s strategy was to persist with his drawing and to neglect other subjects at which he could have been perfectly competent, with the result that he left with few academic qualifications. But at least he knew what he wanted to do with his life, and that was to paint full-time. NOTES

1 Graham, R. Graham’s Leicestershire, Gadsby Gallery, 1980, page 26. 2 Graham, R. ibid, page 14.

3 Letter to author, 10/2/1998.

4 Graham, R. Graham’s Leicestershire, Gadsby Gallery, 1980, page 20.

5 Bown, M. Introduction to Woodcuts and Words: Some Thoughts on Cutting by Rigby Graham, Previous Parrot Press, 1993.

GLASS

The previous seventeen chapters were ready for publication to mark Graham’s 70th birthday in 2001. Because he has continued as prolific as ever, our story now needs updating.

Graham has made few concessions to his advancing years except that on his relentless travels he now likes to have a companion and co-driver along because ‘with my mental state, most of my memory gone, it is unsafe to be on my own.’ It is not always safe with a companion either: Hans van Eijk managed to drive Graham’s Opel car into a boulder at 11pm in County Donegal and they were stranded for a week whilst it was being repaired. They returned in 2004 in spite of the Dutchman’s ‘knowing it was almost deserted, uninteresting, without decent food, and probably had the wettest climate in the country.’ He has noticed that in their four recent trips to the Scottish Isles and rural Ireland the days settled into a pattern: ‘I leave the painter with his kit in an uncomfortable position near a ruined castle, ditto monastery, broken wall, disused factory, and go off for a long walk. When I return after 2-3 hours the artist is grumbling, tired and especially wet as it has been raining as usual. On one occasion in County Down Rigby was painting a small castle on the shore when the tide was coming in. Eventually I had to rescue his paints, sketchbook and chair which were about to float away.’

Over the past five years Derek Deadman, a retired economics lecturer at Leicester University, has accompanied Graham to the Isle of Man, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Shropshire and Wales, while Peter Long has shared adventures in Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Sicily still attracts Graham and his brother-in-law Ron Gordon and they have also been three times to the spectacular scenery of Dubrovnik, Korcula, Trogir and Split in the Balkans. There Graham finds the natives a surly lot even though the yoke of Communism has lifted since his first visit fifteen years ago. Mishaps are still part of the perverse pleasure of travel, whether it’s being scalded in the shower or spilling Indian ink down his trousers (‘birth and death are messy

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and so is what I chose to do in between’).

One of Graham’s five recent visits to Ireland, north and south, was a little different: he was there to star in an hour long road movie. Mike Goldmark commissioned Charles Mapleston to take Graham back to some of his favourite painting locations and to record the trip in Rigby Graham’s Irish Voyage. In this we watch the artist, spruce in his polished shoes, blazer and tie, hump his painting gear, umbrella and chair over the clints and grykes of the Burren plateau, across a bouldery beach to paint a rusty wreck (‘I’m too bloody old for this malarky’) and then pant up the 700 stone steps of Skellig Michael ‘in wonder, fear and humility.’ He found the place much tidied up since his last visit thirty years before. ‘Even though I’m not a spiritual bloke’ he could see the attraction of the ancient anchorites’ life there and how living in a stone igloo might ‘get the cobwebs and anger’ out of one’s head. When not painting he is seen trying to look inconspicuous in pubs where Irish pipe music is being played, or enduring rough ferry crossings or jolting horse and cart rides between sites. He writes post cards home about his adventures, not to Pat his wife, but to Murphy his Irish wolfhound.

Soon after his return he took Murphy for his daily five mile walk and the dog dropped dead. Graham then had the problem of getting a fifteen stone corpse home and disposing of it. Murphy’s successor is called Malachi and is a stone heavier than Murphy which makes him an ideal subject for ‘Guess My Weight’ competitions at charity fairs, and he is also a blood donor. On their daily walks Graham claims ‘He and I discuss all sorts of things. He is an intelligent and perceptive listener and rarely argues – what more should one want?’ However, when Graham and his daughter Eleonora were savagely attacked by a deranged man whilst walking their dogs Malachi offered no help whatsoever. The film was first shown to the public at Leicester University

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accompanied by a large exhibition of Graham’s works. After two hours this was taken down on the grounds that the University security people couldn’t guarantee its safety overnight – ‘the shortest exhibition I have ever experienced’ said the artist ruefully. Another exhibition of his works on paper at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2002 was allowed to run its full course.

On his painting expeditions Graham now largely confines himself to watercolours, oils being too bulky and sticky to transport. Recently he has used toned paper, as Turner did, and the colours are consequently more subdued, though no less dramatic. He also embarked on a series of very big lithographs for which he lugged the kit around County Antrim and Arran and did many of the key drawings in situ. Though five of these lithos have been editioned they are proving to be uncommercially large. Whilst in Ireland he also completed five woodcuts for a little book, Dive for Cover, printed by the Bonnefant Press in 2005. This is a volume of poetry by the Dutch writer Henk van Kerkwijk with the nom de plume of David Winwood who put Graham and van Eijk up in his Georgian rectory near Carrick-on-Shannon. Van Eijk recalls: ‘Outside the gates there was an iron frying pan on top of the stone wall, tied to a bit of orange string. When we asked the owner of the house about it it appeared he had never noticed it. The gate posts and frying pan appear as the frontispiece.’ Another book of Irish poems, Fifty O’Clock (Happy Dragons Press), also had woodcuts of Irish landscapes in Donegal, Kerry and Waterford by Graham and received such a rave, or raving, review in Books Ireland (October 2005) that it quickly sold out. (‘Not bad for poetry eh?’) For Matthew Sweeney’s poems in Where Fishermen Can’t Swim screen prints were made from the drawings he’d done in Donegal and it too found a ready audience.

One poignant production of 2005 was an appraisal by Graham, Derek Deadman and others of his old friend Toni Savage’s contribution to the boom in Leicester private presses from the 1960s

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IRISH SOLDIERY ,

13TH CENTURY

CLARE ' S COCKEREL

STRAW FIGURE

ROCK OF DUNAMASE

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KILLING THE BIRDS IN MALTA

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onwards. This is called A Paper Snowstorm (Incline Press) and the edition of 200 is richly illustrated with facsimiles and original broadsheets, many of which show work by Graham in a variety of media. It is printed with metal Bembo type on mould-made paper on a Victoria platen press and hand bound to demonstrate these skills are not yet dead.

Published in 2006 is one of the most sumptuous and prestigious volumes Graham has worked on. This is Pennant and His Welsh Landscapes (Gwasg Gregynog Press). The edition is limited to 165 copies of which fifteen are specials, both copies with bindings designed by Graham. Thomas Pennant (1726-98) was a naturalist, antiquarian, traveller and writer much admired by his contemporaries, including Samuel Johnson. Graham has supplied 27 colour woodcuts made from 80 blocks. One shows Pennant soaking in a downpour, his nag stumbling under the burden of the author, his easel, palette, bottle and other supplies. Graham knows all about this kind of suffering for oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art. Other prints mix contemporary motifs (jets, air balloons, straw men) with the ageless wildlife and Welsh landscape. Graham believes it will be one of the finest things he has worked on.

In the year 2000 Graham rose to a new challenge in an old medium. Goldmark commissioned him to produce a series of secular, non-site specific stained glass windows on any subjects of his choice. Of course the artist had been studying church windows all his life and was learned in their symbolism and narrative conventions, so had something to start from and also to subvert. He set about making full-scale drawings (36 x 21 inches) and then presented them to the glass maker Nicholas Bechgaard in his Stroud workshop. By means of etching, sandblasting, painting with metal oxides, fusing layers of glass together and judicious use of leadlines Bechgaard was able to reproduce the cartoons with astonishing fidelity. Each colour had to be fired separately at progressively lower temperatures in order not to melt the one

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before. There have been seven panels so far each in an edition of three, with Graham Brant of Cuddington, Buckinghamshire, taking over from Bechgaard for the last two.

As one might expect the subject matter is highly unconventional and draws upon motifs and symbols that Graham had made his own in the past. His daughter appears in one, standing in front of the Red Fort in Malta with a naked Icarus about to crash amongst the prickly pears behind her back (‘he must have missed Crete’). In another a pretty but anonymous blonde girl in a puce dress and flimsy shoes squats on a rock in front of piled stones topped with decoy birds in cages and the watch tower at Sileas on the horizon. Over her head a squadron of slate headstones comes winging in from Leicestershire. Owls, herons, rooks and helicopters haunt the other panels and a straw-stuffed scarecrow, a folk-dancer cockerel and an Irish axeman provide the figures. The Irish grotesque is blown up from a tiny 13th century manuscript figure in the Bodleian Library. He and his ineptly marching clones appear to have only two toes on each foot. These works would be amusing though slightly menacing to live with, but given a light source behind them their glowing colours would enrich any setting.

Graham is not only producing art works at a tremendous rate he is still reaching his audience with prose. Dennis Hall’s Artists’ Choice Editions published A Lifetime in Drawing in 2004 with an essay by Malcolm Yorke and Graham’s own ‘Thoughts on Sketchbooks’. This explains his fascination with other artists’ deliberations and techniques as they develop in their private drawings. He also detects a shift in his own practice:

‘The ways in which my own use of sketchbooks have evolved and changed over the years were almost imperceptible at the time but are obvious now on looking back. It is now also evident in the resulting paintings and prints based upon these selfsame drawings. What has changed is the philosophy behind the work, the early

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exercises of fifty-five years ago, valuable then as forming patterns of looking, analysing and recording are no longer as important as they were. The emphasis has changed to one of using sketchbooks to develop ideas and images which can be put to later use in the long continuum of developing work in other and different media.’ 1 As we have seen, one of the most important outlets for these developed sketches is in images to accompany print. A forthcoming 2006 question and answer article in the magazine Illustration should introduce his work and views to a younger audience of publishers and practitioners. One message he is keen to get across is that illustrations do not have to supply mere paraphrases of the already established text.

‘The drawings for John Mason’s Papermaking as an Artistic Craft (Fabers) were done before the text was written; the lithographs for Rilke’s Die Sonnetze an Orpheus were done before I saw the typesettings, and the silkscreens for Where Fishermen Can’t Swim by Matthew Sweeney were done by making a journey to Donegal with Hans van Eijk and doing large drawings in ink, wax and gouache of the landscapes which the poet would have known during his early life. In almost all my work for van Eijk (over 10 volumes to date) the illustrations and the text only come together at the point of production.Why should the illustrator be in a subservient position? As a hack he or she is expected to read Jane Eyre and do what . . . interpret it? represent it? explain it? It seems pretentious and unnecessary.’

The Goldmark Gallery continues to sell his work to a growing band of collectors. The bookshop has now gone and the gallery space doubled so there will be even more exposure. One suspects that all this attention and the late surge in his reputation gratifies but ultimately makes little difference to Graham: he is driven by his creative demons to make art whether people appreciate it or not. He says of his works: ‘I hope some people might see them and

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get from them some of the excitement and pleasure I experienced in sitting in these places. If it does then I’ve achieved something. If it doesn’t then I suppose it doesn’t matter at all.’ Not only is he impelled to produce work, he has to find a hard way to do so – in a cramped bedroom, with makeshift equipment, by a painfully laborious method, using a woody medium which resists him all the way, or painting in the damp field where we first encountered him at the beginning of this book. It can truly be said of Rigby Graham, both the man and the artist, that he has always gone against the grain.

NOTE

1 Yorke, M. and Graham, R. A Lifetime of Drawing: Rigby Graham Sketchbook Drawings, Artists’ Choice Editions, Oxford, 2004.

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RIGBY GRAHAM , MBE

Born 2 February, 1931 Son of Richard Alfred Graham (d. 1971) of Leicester and Helen Sutherland Downey (d. 1967)

Married 1953, Patricia, daughter of Horace Dormer Green Daughter, Eleonora (b.1968)

Education Wyggeston School, Leicester Leicester College of Art and Design (Sir Jonathan North bronze and silver medals)

Career Principal lecturer, Associate Fellow, De Montfort University (formerly Leicester Polytechnic), 1983 Hon DLitt, University of Leicester, 2008 MBE for services to art, November 2010

Solo Exhibitions Gadsby Gallery, Leicester, 1963, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1974, 1978, 1980 and 1981 Great Yarmouth Art Gallery, 1964 Mowbray Gallery, Sunderland, 1965 Compendium Gallery, Birmingham, 1966 Crescent Theatre Gallery, Birmingham, 1967 Kings Lynn Festival, 1967 Griffin Garnett Galleries, Shrewsbury, 1969 St Peter Port, Guernsey, 1970 Pacifica Library, Sharp Park, California, 1976 Menlo Park Civic Centre, California, 1976 Victoria Galleries, Harrogate, 1977 Retrospective, Hemel Hempstead Pavilion, 1977 Rawlins Art College, Quorn, 1978 Bosworth Gallery, Desford, 1979 and 1981 Wymondham Art Gallery, 1978 and 1984

Coach House Gallery, Guernsey, 1981 Drew Edwards Keene Gallery, 1983 Woodquay Gallery, Galway, 1984 Phoenix Gallery, Amsterdam, 1985 Artifact Gallery, Leicester, 1986 Bottle Kiln Gallery, W. Hallam, 1986 David Holmes Art Gallery, Peterborough, 1988-94 Warwick Museum and Art Gallery, 1992 Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1997, and 2000 Navenby, 1992 Bleddfa Tst Gallery, Powys, 1990 Manchester Polytechnic, 1990 University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1989 Carnegie Museum, Melton Mowbray, 1999 Snibston Discovery Park, Coalville, 1999 Retrospective Exhibition, New Walk Museum, Leicester, 1999 Manchester Metropolitan University, 2001 Yarrow Gallery, Oundle, 2005 Gascoigne Gallery, Harrogate, 2006

Film John Clare - A Painter in Search of A Poet (Channel 4), 1991 Rigby Graham's Irish Voyage, 2003 (video/DVD) John Piper, 2010 (contribution, DVD)

Books - Selected The Pickworth Fragment, 1966 Slieve Bingian, 1968 The Casquets, 1972 Ruins (with Michael Felmingham), 1972 John Piper, 1973 Deserted Cornish Tin Mines, 1975 String & Walnuts, 1978 Seriatim, 1978

MINES AT BOTALLACK , oil, 1969

Graham's Leicestershire, 1980 A Broken String of Beads, 1980 Sketchbook Drawings, 1989 Kippers and Sawdust, 1992 Cyril on the Grand Tour, 1999 A Paper Snowstorm (jointly), 2005 Pennant and his Welsh Landscapes, 2006 Epistola Caledoniensa (jointly), 2009 Outposts Theater (jointly), 2010 Enthusiasm and Laughter (jointly), 2008 Christmas Cards of Rigby Graham (jointly), 2011 Rigby Graham in Print, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the help of these people this book would have been impossible to write:

The late Professor Brian Allison, Iain Bain, Hal Bishop, Michael Bown, David Chambers, the late Pauline Clark, Richard Coenen, Sally Coenen, the late John Cotton, Hugh Collinson, Professor Alistair Crawford, Bill Denning, Hans van Eijk, Julie Emary, Doris Erni, Hans Erni, Michael Felmingham, Victor Fenech, Charles Flores, the late Bill Gadsby, Ronald Gordon, Conrad Graham, Eleonora Graham, Dennis Hall, Trevor Hickman, Terry Hollick, Don Hutson, Peter Long, Charles Mapleston, Douglas Martin, Nicolas McDowall, Frances McDowall, Robert Meyrick, the late Joyce Park-Hutson, Marion Roberts, David Rogers, Professor Ian Rogerson, Cynthia Savage, Carole Shaw, John Sidey, the late Henry Soden, Terry Sole, The Squire de Lisle, Alan Tucker, Shaun Tordoff-Gibson, Roger Watkins, John Wayle, Grahame Wheatley, Rita Williams, Neil Willis and my wife Mavis Yorke. Mike Goldmark for the idea and commission for this book.

I should also like to thank Patricia Graham for her hospitality and unfailing good humour, and Rigby for continuing my education and correcting my spellings. Malcolm Yorke

PORTRAIT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Frontispiece, Jay Goldmark, 2010; Page 6, Ronald Gordon, 1994; Page 10, Theo Bergstrรถm, 1966; Page 46, John Robertson; Page 64, Alexei Slupczynska, 1953; Page 80, Bruce Tippett, 1953;

Page 288, portrait by Grahame Wheatley, 1990; Page 298, Bruce Tippett, 1953.

SELF PORTRAIT , oil, 1950

BIG FOOT , MALTA , linocut, 1994

425 STANDARD COPIES HAVE BEEN PRODUCED IN HARDBACK.

A SPECIAL EDITION OF 75 NUMBERED COPIES HAS BEEN PRODUCED. EACH IS HOUSED IN A SLIPCASE AND INCLUDES

FOUR SIGNED AND NUMBERED ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPHS AND

TWO DVDS, ALL PRESENTED IN A HARDBACK FOLDER.

Compared with some of his better-known

contemporaries he has ten times as much to say. It is Graham... to whom historians will turn in future years to find out the look of the late twentieth-century landscape. Frances Spalding