Rigby Graham - a celebration

Rigby Graham

Andrew Lambirth

Rigby Graham 1931-2015

a celebration

goldmark 2016

1. Somerton Castle ink, 1992, signed, 20.5 x 35.5

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Rigby Graham View and Viewpoint Rigby Graham was a man of remarkable energy, prolific and driven, for whom art was the whole of existence. He worked long hours at great speed, pitting himself against the elements and continuing to work in the open air in front of a subject, despite rain and winds that frequently blew his spectacles off.

He was essentially a topographical artist, but brought to his subject (mapping the world) a highly individual viewpoint, which sought out the unexpected facade or facet, never the obvious angle. This ability to recognise the lesser-known aspects of a thing or place was emphasised by his pictorial habit of presenting his subjects frontally, straight on, as if in confrontation. (Horse, Connemara is a typically uncompromising example.) So the unnoticed becomes clearly visible. His preference for painting the overlooked meant that he was more likely to depict earthmovers, waste ground and cranes than the picturesque vista, but his lust for the particular paid dividends in recording the environment afresh.

He was a draughtsman first and a painter second, whose best work was done in watercolour and ink. Colour was of supreme importance to him - rich, vivid, refulgent colour, dramatic and emotional. (The German Expressionists, such as Nolde and Kirchner, were an important influence.)

He was also an inventive printmaker, working in woodcuts (perhaps his most innovative printed work), lithography, monotypes, etching and linocuts. He was, above all, a master of line: an assured encompassing line, that quested around and drew what was pertinent, ignoring the irrelevant. Graham said once that he travelled the world looking for his paintings in reality, and when he saw one he sat down and copied it - in effect, putting a line around it, like a lasso.

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He was a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad: flamboyant, sardonic, passionate, irascible, pedantic, intolerant, wonderfully opinionated. (Mike Goldmark: ‘The phrase about not suffering fools might have been invented for him.’) Graham was an auto-didact, a master of abstruse and recondite knowledge, and as difficult to please as he was to place as an artist. He has been called a latter-day Neo-Romantic because of his affiliations with that war-time and post-war movement, and because of his friendships with such artists as Michael Ayrton and John Piper. But in truth he is more accurately categorised as a Modern Romantic, a sturdy exemplar of the great English Romantic tradition, and very much of his own time rather than self-consciously retrospective.

Graham told the truth (as he saw it) about the landscape and people he observed.

His way of observing was utterly individual. A painting is a reflection not just of the subject, but of what the artist brings to it - his own particular way of looking and responding, his own distilled experience. The selectivity of the individual eye is always personal, and in Graham’s case, peculiarly compelling. ‘Practice heightens this ability,’ he said, ‘and memory contributes a great deal to it as does imagination and a sense of humour.’ His work is tough, not sentimental, with a wiry linear tension that holds the often furious colour in check.

As a student at Leicester College of Art Graham specialised in mural painting, which meant he also had to study architecture and interior design, disciplines he found interesting and useful at the time, and which later were to inform his practice as a mature artist. (He painted more than 20 murals in Leicester and elsewhere, but very little remains.)

Accuracy and attention to detail were watchwords of his approach, though literalness was never his aim. He wrote in 1979: ‘One of the most attractive qualities about the painting of images is the ambiguity which accrues, develops or ensues. Within this uncertainty there is considerable scope

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2. Horse, Connemara aquatint, 1985, ed 9, signed, 27.5 x 40.5 cm

3. Barracuda, Balluta Bay (detail) watercolour, 1994, signed, 40.5 x 50 cm

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for movement, for re-adjustment. The image is of one thing but suggests others, reflects aspects and implications.’

A great independent spirit, Graham disregarded fashion and continued for years to exhibit without much financial reward. To earn a living, he taught, returning to Leicester College of Art and lecturing in education, a subject that interested him very little. He only wanted to teach art but was never given the chance; the nearest he came was to lecture in graphic design, printing and book-binding. He was deeply involved with books, and was responsible for more than 300, as writer as well as illustrator, sometimes even making the paper himself and the binding. He was extraordinarily widely read. Among the poets, favourites were Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins. His illustrations are always worth studying, for the lyrical vignettes as much as the gold-blocked drawings on the covers of booklets produced for small private presses.

Early on he recognised the extraordinary level of interest to be found in ordinary things. He began to read the landscape like an ancient document, and found it packed with information: historical, geographical, social, religious, industrial. He took time to stand and stare, and then to commit his findings to paper. His principal subject became man’s effect upon the landscape, and the subsequent counter-effect of nature hitting back (over time) at man’s achievements. Not for nothing was Graham a painter of dereliction and co-author of a book on ruins.

He was very aware of the long tradition of excellence behind him, reaching back into the history of Western Art. He cited a roster of British painters he particularly admired: Francis Towne, Turner, Cotman, Girtin, de Wint and de Loutherbourg among them. He wrote: ‘Whatever small offering I may have to make is made from a springboard of earlier traditions in just the same way that a bowler walks backwards in order to make a run

4. Mycenae, Greece (detail) oil on canvas, 1988, signed, 44 x 49 cm

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before he bowls at the wicket…’ His trademark landscapes are pleated, segmented, divvied up with black lines. They have a tensity that is rare in art, and owes something to the tradition of Northern linearity. (Graham liked Cranach, Altdorfer and Grunewald.) The angularity can be harsh, just as his colour harmonies can be discordant.

His watercolour style is deliberately ‘rough’ (a word he himself used to describe it). He employed washes of colour that mixed and curdled on the paper, that ran and rippled, applied freely but with fine judgement.

This is unbuttoned rude colour, sometimes strident or brooding, not the nice delicacies of so much watercolour painting. His is thoughtful reflective work, but chock-full of emotion: anger, despair, humour, and an overriding compassion that makes his work a prime human document.

Not simply watercolour, but watercolour and ink (painting and drawing), are at the heart of Graham’s art. And ink is perhaps the key. As the sculptor Michael Sandle - himself a master of ink drawing - recently observed: ‘If you don’t love ink you can’t do it because ink has a life of its own. You can only control it up to a point.’ Graham balanced intellectual control of the painterly impulses with what might be called instinctual lucidity.

His paintings are opulent and sometimes sinister in colour, often a touch morbid, the steely lines imprisoning the framing foliage like chain-link.

Fluent in many media, from oils to lithographs, acrylics to stained glass, he claimed he didn’t really distinguish between them, but matched medium to subject. People tend to be scarce in his landscapes, though he drew portraits of individuals (especially in his prints). He was a restless traveller (Cornwall, Ireland, Wales, Greece, Venice, Germany, Switzerland, Malta), drawing wherever he went. He would discuss process but never meaning. Again and again, he stressed the importance of looking properly, and his own paintings are hymns to intense concentration. We are the richer for them.

Andrew Lambirth Andrew Lambirth (born 1959) is a writer, critic and curator. He has written on art for a number of publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Sunday Times, Modern Painters and the Royal Academy magazine. Among his many books are monographs on Craigie Aitchison, Roger Hilton, Maggi Hambling, John Hoyland, Margaret Mellis, Allen Jones, LS Lowry, RB Kitaj and Francis Davison. His reviews for The Spectator 2002-2014 have been collected in a paperback entitled A is a Critic.

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5. Donegal Pillar Stones pen, ink & wash, signed, 33 x 44.4 cm

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6. Military Road, Glendalough pen & ink, 1968, signed, 19.5 x 23.5 cm

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7. Dun an Oir pen, ink & wash, 1976, signed, 21.5 x 26 cm

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8. Sandycove oil on board, 1971, signed, 30 x 45 cm

9. Mountain Village, Corsica (detail) oil on board, 1996, signed, 64 x 77 cm

10. The Burren oil on board, 1999, signed, 61 x 91.3 cm