Goldmark 05

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SUMMER 2017

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g sUMMER 2017 NUMBER 05

Contents 2

Neo-Romantics

10 Alan Davie - Lover’s Dreamboat 12 Marc Chagall - Fables of La Fontaine 16 Clay College, Stoke 20 Frank Dobson - Lady Dorothea Ashley Cooper 22 George Chapman - A Romantic Spirit 30 Vanessa Bell - The Schoolroom

In our Summer 2017 publication the spirit of Neo-Romanticism has been revived, from an exquisite Graham Sutherland sketch and one of John Piper’s best loved churches to George Chapman’s extraordinary record of the mining communities of west Wales.

And in the world of ceramics, we celebrate Nic Collins’ third Goldmark exhibition, the irresistible joy of Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s slipware pottery, and Lisa Hammond’s exciting new Clay College venture. We hope you find something to enjoy.

32 Nic Collins - Playing with Fire 38 John Piper - Dorchester Abbey 40 Joan Miró 46 Lee Kang-hyo - Onggi Pots 48 Graham Sutherland - Study for Folded Hills 50 Elisabeth Frink - Canterbury Tales 56 Ken Kiff - Moonlight 58 Jean-Nicolas Gérard

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Orange Street Uppingham

Words: Max Waterhouse

Rutland

except page 33 © Nic Collins

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Photographs: Jay Goldmark & Christian Soro

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except page 16: © Matthew Blakely

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an expression of an identification with nature

Neo-Romantics Neo-Romanticism represented not a union of artists nor an art theory but an intense, intimate, spiritual way of seeing the world The writer and editor Raymond Mortimer first coined the term ‘Neo-Romantic’ in 1942, defining it, somewhat succinctly, as an ‘expression of an identification with nature’ that he saw common to a number of British artists of the 1930s and early ‘40s. The term is, as it was then, as nebulous as the artistic style it described, for the Neo-Romantics were no organised band or militant collective driven by a single course. The catalogue of artists to whom the label has since been applied reads like a jumbled dictionary of pre-Pop British greats: Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Paul Nash, Keith Vaughan, Michael Rothenstein – the list goes on. Though they certainly shared an affinity with landscape and the natural world, through which they described the swirling emotional storm of the interwar period, the sheer breadth of styles and technical approaches between them could hardly make a coherent movement. If anything, Neo-Romanticism represented not a union of artists nor an art theory but an intense, intimate, spiritual way of seeing the world, developed from their visionary forebears and amalgamating disparate elements from the 20th century’s great Modernist movements.

The continuity of that vision across so many diverse artists

demonstrates just how deeply the Neo-Romantic influence penetrated British art, and the lasting impact it had on those who continued to paint in the tradition even throughout the politicised years of the 1960s and beyond.

In the dazed aftermath of the First World War, the British art world remained unsure how to react. On the continent, it had led to an explosion of artistic developments, perhaps most prominently the rise of Dada and Surrealism, whose deconstruction of the human psyche came as a clear reaction to the fragmentary effect the war had inflicted both physically on the landscape and metaphorically on society. But in Britain, there was no distinct parallel or alternative. Surrealism failed to capture British artists, perhaps – as Brian Catling has suggested – because there is enough eccentricism innate to the British character, from our idiomatic language to our ironic and absurdist sense of humour. Instead, as their name suggests, the early Neo-Romantics – namely Sutherland and Nash – began by looking back to the original Romantics themselves – to the ‘Ancients’ William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert. In mythic images of Arcadian shepherds strolling through woods and camping at moonlight, Blake

Graham Sutherland

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Robert Colquhoun

Paul Nash

and his cohort had emphasised the sublimity of Mother Nature, her all-encompassing awesomeness in contrast to flawed man. The metaphor must have seemed terribly apt amid the mechanised and industrialised carnage of the war, and so the Neo-Romantics once more turned to the landscape for answers.

In relocating Romanticism to the very changed world of the 20th century, there was undoubtedly an element of selfdelusion to the early Neo-Romantic ideal. Before the print market fell through with the Wall Street Crash and the economic depression of the early 1930s, Sutherland and Nash were making etchings and engravings of the provincial English countryside – idyllic rustic barns, ramshackle sheds and kissing gates, farmers picking wheat in the fields. Envisioning a rural life that traced its roots back to Palmer's etchings of bucolic

sheep fields under moonlight, or Blake's illustrations to Virgil's Georgics, there was little concern here for social realism, for depicting the reality of post-war rural existence. The pastoral world they were reimagining no longer existed, and had not for quite some time. Gone was the local farmhand, his face framed by a floppy hat and sweat-sodden calico shirt, ploughing the fields with oxen or shire horse. By the early 1920s he had been replaced by the tractor and, sure enough, these new machines were soon assimilated as powerful symbols within the Neo-Romantic vernacular, with artists like Rothenstein and Kenneth Rowntree celebrating the colliding of natural and mechanical worlds in rust-red tractors scraping through soil or dragging hunks of felled timber.

In their early pastiches of Blake and Palmer’s work, the NeoRomantics had sought out an idealised version of landscape into which they could escape, denying the awful events and consequences of the Great War. But as these artists began to develop their own, individual styles, they revitalised their Romanticism, reflecting in images of rolling Welsh mountains and scattered patchwork fields the ominous portents of the coming Second World War and the economic and political unease that anticipated it.

Though its proponents were by no means merely landscapists – indeed, artists such as Michael Ayrton and the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde put forward a powerful Neo-Romantic statement in their sinewy, elongated figures – it was in landscapes, more than anything, that the NeoRomantics developed their vision. Their aesthetic centred around introspection, delving into rich, rural tableaux in an attempt to find something deeper, something indicative, perhaps, of the human condition. Dr Peter Wakelin, in his introductory essay on the McDowall collection of NeoRomantic art, writes of how its artists, ‘looked two ways – across the Channel to Picasso, Ernst, Dix and others, and back to Turner, Blake, Palmer and the life and landscapes of the British Isles.’ Just as the Neo-Romantics were looking forward as well as back, from the Ancients to the avant-garde, they looked inwardly as well as outwardly, reconciling the physical, visual reality of landscape – its earthiness, its greenery, geology, and topography, and its hot, sprawling urban spaces too – with the artist’s emotional, imaginative response. ‘The unknown is just as real as the known’, remarked Sutherland, ‘and must be made to look so.’

Their approach was not faithful in the sense of strict, realistic

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Michael Rothenstein

John Piper

representation. Rather, it centred on the idea of the genius loci – the 'spirit of place' – that imbued any given range of peaks, or fields, woodlands and coastal stretches. Like the Expressionists before them, they sought in the landscape a mirror to reflect their own emotional experience of place.

Their images of pastures, hedgerows, hilltops and copses are pregnant with anthropomorphic emotions and pathetic fallacy: dark clouds roll angrily about bulging hills, fields melt or burn in refulgent Fauvist oranges, reds and virulent greens.

Frequently they played with scale, such that it became impossible to tell whether the writhing, biomorphic forms one could see were details of plants, roots and undergrowth blown up for the naked eye or vast swathes of countryside churned and twisted through deliberate distortions of form.

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This animism of landscape, in which even dead trees, withered shrubs and unmoving stones seem to possess a living, breathing spirit, naturally brought out deeper, more personal resonances from its artists: the contorted thorn formations of Sutherland’s later work, for example, that show a pained attempt to understand the suffering of his Christ; or John Minton’s half-moons, full of youthful mystery and a hint of tortured madness.

The personal element of Neo-Romanticism is worth stressing. Though it may seem obvious to say that an artist’s work is one of self-expression, this was especially and consciously the case with these artists, for whom individuality and identity were more important than stylistic creed or code.

There was no Neo-Romantic manifesto, no one collective

Rigby Graham

identity to which artists found themselves drawn nor which they fought to defend in print. By comparison, a great many of the early 20th century’s ‘isms’, its most vociferous movements, were predicated on some form of intellectualism.

Surrealists turned to Freud and Jung, to automatic poetry, psychology, a kind of cryptic and macabre surgery of the mind. Abstraction in its many reincarnations – from Vorticism and Futurism to Mondrian’s grids, Malevitch’s black square, and the much later ‘action painting’ of 1950s New York – was inextricably connected to theory, be it the spiritual purism of geometry or the idea of constructing images from outside our immediate visual realm. There was no such theory to NeoRomanticism, no doctrine to which its artists adhered. It was a movement – insomuch as it could be called a movement –

as easily defined by what it wasn’t as what it was: never strictly abstract, though abstraction of form was key to Keith Vaughan’s quilt-like townscapes and Sutherland’s bristling sketches of Pembrokeshire; neither silly nor sexualised enough for Surrealism, and yet greatly informed by its sense of poetic strangeness, as in the musical work of Ceri Richards.

In truth, there has been little else like it in the modern history of British art – and Neo-Romanticism was an overwhelmingly British response, finding little favour in Europe or America during the post-war years when Abstract Expressionism reigned king. It remains perhaps the least celebrated and yet most pervasive influence of 20th century art in this country.

Even a momentary glance at the work it produced reveals a treasure trove of extraordinary, undiscovered gems.

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Alan Davie

Lover's Dreamboat In his day, Alan Davie was Scotland’s most celebrated modern painter. His work was unashamedly abstract and shamanistic, animated with numinous symbols from aboriginal cultures. To many, he was the only British equal to match the Abstract Expressionists that were taking America by storm in the 1950s.

They shared a patron in the great Peggy Guggenheim, whose collection of masterpieces by Braque, Klee, and Kandinsky had first inspired the young Davie to paint. His output was prodigious and profuse from the very start: within months of witnessing Guggenheim’s collection exhibited at the 1948 Venice Biennale, Davie had produced enough work to fill two solo shows. An encounter with the collector herself saw two of his canvases join works by his American contemporaries – Pollock, Rothko, Klein, and de Kooning – in the legendary Guggenheim estate.

Unlike the New York school, Davie was never tied to the dogma of pure abstraction, nor did he limit himself to any one stylistic approach. In his early career, much like the Americans, he painted with gestural abandon; by the late 1960s and ‘70s, his brushwork was more defined and deliberate. Explosive colour remained a constant, as did the need to work spontaneously. He painted with exceptional speed, attempting to escape any notion of preconceived composition and allow a subconscious, Zen-like state to direct his

hand. To stimulate the creative process he often used liquid paint, removing canvases from their easels and attacking them on the floor – a style of ‘action painting’ that Pollock was exploring at the same time but which Davie arrived at quite independently.

By the early 1970s, when Lover’s Dreamboat was produced, Davie had developed a powerful symbolic vocabulary.

His fascination with symbols derived from their universality, the idea that pictograms and iconographies had been shared between different peoples over many thousands of years. Relocated in Davie’s work, these same icons found new personal resonances. Dreamboat’s coloured flags – bold geometric forms in their own right – invoke semaphore signs and Tibetan prayer flags (Davie was both a sailor and a Buddhist). To their left stand two sculptural totems, inspired perhaps by the carvings from Davie’s own collection of African and Oceanic art. Other elements seem almost psychoanalytic: a crescent moon floats above, a key visual figure within the Surrealist idiom; behind lie the open window and door, suggestions of a room that leads only to otherworldly blackness.

To Davie, the power of the symbol was not that it represented a certain something, but that it could represent anything, and more than one thing at a time. His own art is much like mankind’s greatest symbols: potent, mysterious, instantly recognisable, and offering a multiplicity of meanings.

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marc chagall

Fables of La Fontaine Though the story goes that Chagall first met the legendary publisher Ambroise Vollard at his luxurious salon in 1923, they had in fact crossed paths more than a decade before. Intent on discovering himself on a virginal trip to Paris in 1911, the young artist had sought out the paintings of Cézanne and found them behind the dusty windows of Vollard’s Rue Laffitte gallery: ‘They are on the wall at the back, unframed. I press against the glass, flattening my nose, and suddenly I come across Vollard himself. He is alone in the middle of the shop...

I hesitate to go in. He looks bad-tempered. I don’t dare...’

Little could Chagall know that some ten years later he and Vollard would begin work on some of the 20th century’s greatest print suites, among them the extraordinary Fables of La Fontaine.

By the early 1920s, Vollard – dealer, collector, publisher, and defender of French avant-garde artists – had become one of the most famous figures in the contemporary art world. In 1895 he had helped organize the first major solo exhibition of Cézanne’s work, propelling the Post-Impressionist to new heights of celebrity and establishing his own considerable reputation. Few other patrons had their portrait painted by so many masters (his forehead seemed to Picasso to resemble a giant ‘slice of tongue’) and having supported the likes of Rouault, Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gogh, artists whose work pushed against the conservative values of their time, his opinion was deemed both significant and controversial by French arbiters of taste.

In 1922 Chagall was living and working in Berlin. Vollard had thought him killed in the First World War, but discovered that the painter was alive and well in Germany and demanded to see him on the strength of his work. Chagall received word that he was to return to France to speak with the Parisian dealer and less than a year later they met to discuss his first

commission. Vollard’s particular penchant was for livres d’artistes, classical and contemporary texts published with accompanying artists’ illustrations. Chagall proposed he begin with etchings for Gogol’s unfinished masterpiece Dead Souls and the pair quickly developed a working rapport that saw multiple projects undertaken over the subsequent years.

After Dead Souls’ completion in 1925, Vollard suggested a new series of etchings, this time illustrating La Fontaine’s Fables. Chagall – being both a ‘romantic’ and a Jew – seemed to his detractors an inappropriate choice to illustrate this comparatively ‘classical’ seventeenth century work. Vollard’s personal advocacy for the artist came under intense fire from traditionalists in an ongoing debate that ended up in the Chamber of Deputies. When asked, ‘Why Chagall?’, Vollard’s response was direct: ‘Simply because his aesthetic seems to me in a certain sense akin to La Fontaine’s, at once sound and delicate, realistic and fantastic…’

Chagall began work on the suite by painting preparatory gouaches which were to be translated to the etching plates for printing. Upon realising that even the master printers charged with the task could not match the gradations of tone he desired, Chagall elected to prepare the plates himself, using a drypoint technique to scratch his designs directly onto the metal sheets.

Work continued on the etchings from 1928-31, more than twenty years before they were issued. Vollard was often difficult to deal with, juggling multiple commissions and their associated finances at once, and through correspondence with friends Chagall betrayed his frustration with the delay in publication: ‘I finished the books, Dead Souls and La Fontaine long ago, but Vollard, of course, procrastinates; such is his nature ... He’s very trying, Vollard. But nevertheless I hope.’

The variety of images in the Fables illustrations is astonishing,

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as is the depth of tones brought out by Chagall’s etching needle. Scenes rarely share direct parallels with La Fontaine’s text, a blend of classical French cautionary tales and the ancient stories of the Greek fabulist Aesop. It was the allegorical aspect of each poem that appealed to Chagall, more so than their moral consequences; the human cunning and resolve of La Fontaine’s beasts, the familiarity between man and animal. Chagall’s creatures are depicted with human smiles. His lions and wolves rear up on their hindquarters while man becomes ever more bestial, hulking like bears or hairy apes. In his emotional range he revealed the cruelty, melancholy, and irony as much as the joy at the heart of the poetry: the same tender rays of yellow sunlight that illuminate the face of The Young Widow and the dying body of The Sick Stag dance over the fat, golden catch of The Little Fish and the Fisherman, its comical protagonist clutching his rod just out of frame.

France offered a cosmopolitan grandeur that Chagall had yearned for from his native Vitebsk. He spoke in a 1927 interview of how ‘Paris has been a living school, with its air, its light, its atmosphere . . . it is in France that I have been reborn.’ By the time of the Fables, he had taken confidence in Dead Souls’ achievement, by far his largest venture in what was then a maturing career. His illustrations here are darker, with more self-assured use of textural hatching across the plate. The addition of colour, though sparse, enlivens and gains luminous strength in its restraint. Chagall brings a painterly touch to the medium of print while revelling in its processes: from the naturalistic use of the engraver’s scribe to the delicacy of daubed gouache patches, each etching feels intimately connected to the artist’s hand.

Despite their obvious commercial viability, the etchings were not issued as published sets until some twenty years later.

Though he could procure his artists’ work and offer financial security, Vollard’s constant desire to move on to the next commission left many projects half finished. After his sudden death in a car accident in 1939, a large number of his ventures remained incomplete. The advent of the Second World War delayed further attempts to print until in 1952 they were picked up and produced by the Greek publisher Tériade.

Alongside a monotone edition of just 200, 85 special sets were printed with hand-colouring by Chagall himself, as illustrated here.

The great success of Chagall’s Fables was not just that it modernised La Fontaine’s text, reconciling its three-hundredyear history with a contemporary audience, but that it made it timeless. As with all of Chagall’s work, it is the human element that shines brightest, man’s universal nature made allegory in the forms of the ass and the fox, the proud stag, the shadow of death, the handmaiden and the woodsman. In the immediate post-war years, Europe’s artists argued how one could return to the world of image making in the aftermath of the holocaust. For a great many, the answer lay in retreating into unconscious abstraction and intellectual theory, but Chagall was resolute in his faith in figurative art and its power to bolster the human spirit. It must have been of some comfort in the light of the recent machine-driven destruction to revisit a series that so encapsulated the humanity and humility of his art, its irrepressible, rustic warmth.

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clay college, stoke An exciting new chapter in ceramics education

ceramic artist, BBC’s Great Pottery Throwdown judge, and fellow trustee of the college – is just one of many ceramists to lament their demise: ‘When I did my degree, back in the early eighties, there were more than fifty three-year degree courses specialising in ceramics. Now we believe there are less than ten.’ That number is surely dwindling further as cuts to university departments see technical teaching squeezed to breaking point. Kilns and wheels are deemed too expensive for colleges that don’t already possess them, and the imposition of Health and Safety on higher education art departments has left pre-university ceramics teaching virtually non-existent: there is no place for clay in our sterile school system.

These difficulties are compounded by a waning supply of good teachers – many of the most skilled working potters today who benefitted from a ‘golden age’ of post-war ceramics teaching are now approaching their seventies – and a major change of emphasis within courses across the board.

In a move to align ceramics with the world of fine art, the focus has shifted from craft and technique to so-called ‘design’, and from functional studio pottery to sculptural work ‘We’re at crisis point’, says Lisa Hammond. Widely regarded as Britain’s busiest potter, she is no stranger to the pressures of public work. Over the last two decades, in addition to producing pots at the very forefront of modern studio ceramics, she has found time to run pottery courses from her Maze Hill studio in Greenwich, personally taken on twelve apprentices, and, after founding her highly successful charity programme ‘Adopt a Potter’, has overseen thirteen funded apprenticeships with working potters across the country.

Twelve months ago she was awarded an MBE for services to ceramics and the preservation of craft skills, and this September plans to launch her most ambitious enterprise yet: Clay College Stoke, set to be the UK’s leading, dedicated technical college for studio ceramics. The words ‘slow down’ have no place in Hammond’s go-getting vocabulary; but even so, the task she has set herself seems colossal.

Her latest venture, to be based at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-On-Trent, addresses the crisis in question: the neartotal closure of graduate ceramics courses across Britain, and the substandard teaching and facilities at those that have managed to cling on and survive. Kate Malone – celebrated

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at the expense of structured practical teaching. Master potter Phil Rogers discusses the broader issue: ‘We now see a kind of two tier segregation in ceramics. Magazines, exhibitions and conferences tend to concentrate on the conceptual while relegating other work to a small percentage of content; pots are now very much in the minority. All of this reflects the way that the potter’s wheel and the fundamentals of process have been side-lined in our colleges and the skills and techniques required to make anything in ceramics, never mind a good pot, are neglected to the point where students leave college unable to fire a kiln, or without knowing how to mix a glaze or even how glazes work.’

Clay College’s prospective programme looks to be taking teaching back to these essential basics. Over a two-year, fulltime course starting for the first time in September later this year, fourteen students will learn the fundamentals of hand-thrown ceramics, from throwing to firing and building kilns from scratch. Supplementing this core teaching will be lectures and masterclasses from well-established visiting potters, as well as a planned artist-in-residence scheme and overseas exchanges. Significantly, students will also be taught the basics of running a workshop, from marketing and selling their own work to the subsidiary tasks of studio management and financial organisation – something lacking not just from current ceramics courses but university art departments more generally.

When deciding where to house the college, Hammond put the question to the ceramic community and received a resounding response of ‘Stoke-on-Trent’. Home to the Wedgwood and Royal Doulton industrial potteries, the Staffordshire town is steeped in the history of British ceramics, its familiar kilns funnelling into the sky like giant milk bottles.

In Middleport Pottery, the great red brick complex where Clay College’s facilities will be held, Hammond and her fellow trustees have found a functioning space where clay and glaze supplies and the surrounding infrastructure are perfectly placed to make sourcing materials and gaining practical experience as easy as possible for future students. ‘We share the same ethos’, Hammond says. ‘There couldn’t be a better place to set this up.’

As with any project of such scope, funding remains the greatest impediment. Of the £200,000 required to set up the

college for its first year, over £154,000 has been raised so far through a number of innovative charitable events, many of them utilising the international reach of social media to seek help from ceramics enthusiasts and collectors overseas. The number of donations and contributions flooding in from abroad reiterates that the mission Hammond has undertaken here is not just about the immediate future of ceramics teaching in the UK; it has broader implications of supporting an increasingly interconnected and intergenerational community, from enthusiastic amateurs to highly skilled professionals across the globe. ‘I want young people snapping at my heels’, says Malone excitedly, ‘doing what I do and doing more than I do. Really, it’s that mix between older generations and younger ones that is going to give to our field.’

Clay College will open for its first intake this September.

Application numbers were reassuringly high – a welcome sign that the appetite is there among young creative minds for real technical expertise. Here’s to their deserved success, and to an exciting new chapter in ceramics education.

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FRANK DOBSON

Lady Dorothea Ashley Cooper The more one learns of Frank Dobson’s story, the more one feels life conspired against him.

Born in 1887, as a self-taught sculptor he found his early development cut short by the First World War, enlisting in 1915 only to be invalided two years later. Though in the intervening years he enjoyed better fortunes as one of British sculpture’s outstanding young prospects, war struck at Dobson’s career yet again. Nominated to represent his country at the 1940 Venice Biennale, the festival was cancelled because of the growing conflict on the continent. By the next Biennale in 1948, Dobson had taken up a professorship at the Royal College of Art and was passed over for selection.

He found his place taken by Henry Moore, the very man who had recommended him for the post – whether through goodwill or sabotage, we may never know – and whose stratospheric rise in the world of sculpture would eclipse Dobson’s own major contributions until the latter’s death in 1963.

Even the making of Dobson’s portrait of Lady Dorothea Cooper, one of the sculptor’s most successful commissions and which was selected for the 1940 Biennale, saw its fair share of bad luck. The modelling was completed in 1933, the same year Dobson suffered a serious fracture to his left arm.

After an initial scare that it might require amputation, Dobson was given a cast by a liver specialist who had waived his service fee for a free portrait. The plaster was incorrectly set, leaving Dobson unable to lift his arm beyond his shoulder.

With later, large-scale projects he would have to use a wooden ladder to work from above, his arm supported by a makeshift sling suspended from the ceiling.

Nevertheless, Dobson persisted. Photographs show him modelling Lady Cooper’s slender frame in his studio. Though he achieved a remarkable likeness through the graceful pose of the hand below the chin and his sitter’s youthful, almost seductive gaze, the finished work bears every hallmark of Dobson’s more self-directed sculpture. There is a monumentality of form to the softened, rounded shoulders and arms that recalls the voluptuous nymphs of Maillol. The preference for human curve to mechanical hardness and geometry sets Dobson apart from his modernist counterparts, though there is simplification of form and surface here too across the chest, back, hands, and neck. Most importantly, the final bust is supremely tactile. Dobson favoured tools to thumbs, slowly and carefully excavating, plying, pushing and pulling his material about with sticks, hammers and spatulas.

The resulting surface is flecked and variegated, revealing through the cold immovability of bronze the natural, malleable quality of the clay.

During the second World War, as the Blitz rained down over London, Dobson left his Chelsea studio for the safety of Bristol and the countryside. Upon his return, he found his workshop had been hit in a bombing raid. Debris had crushed many of the works he had been forced to leave there, while others had been plundered and sold or melted for scrap. In a photograph of the ruined studio room the sole bronze cast of the portrait of Lady Cooper stands upright and undamaged, a miraculous survivor amidst less fortunate victims. For once, it seems, luck had been on Dobson’s side.

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GEORGE CHAPMAN

A Romantic Spirit George Chapman liked to work alone. Parked up in a residential road – ‘I don’t get out unless it is absolutely necessary’ – he would paint and even etch from the confines of his car, canvas or steel plate propped up against the steering wheel.

On occasion, inquisitive children tapping on the window or persistent old dears with trays of over-stewed tea – strong enough, he once remarked, to use as etcher’s acid – would force the artist to reluctantly roll down the window. Some even made it into the paintings themselves: ghostly figures caught on the fringes of Chapman’s vision, their hazy faces and huddled coats trudging by on the pavement as the painter looks out through the centre of the road to the industrial estates beyond. But at heart, he was a recluse: ‘I remember the story about Turner who, when out painting with friends, disappeared into a ditch so that no one could see what he was doing. I am exactly the same and want, if possible, total detachment.’

The invocation of Turner is an intriguing one. Like Turner, Chapman was primarily a landscape painter, with a Romantic spirit and a touch of the antifashionable about him. As painters, both focused their eye outwards to the middle distance – for Turner, to ships caught in churning vortexes, for Chapman, to the intersecting lines of houses and streets, telegraph poles and coalmine smokestacks: ‘In looking at the houses directly in line with the eye, I deliberately lose the substantiality of the people and objects closest to me; clarity is accorded only to the material which particularly interests me; the remainder is allowed to lose itself in a kind of mist.’

But unlike Turner, for whom nature was sublime, pastoral and picturesque, Chapman’s world was one of post-industrialisation, of pit-heads and coal trains. If Turner was the painter of light – brilliant, shimmering, incandescent light – Chapman’s work is as matter-of-factly filthy as it gets. His beautifully

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...his output stands as an indispensable record of Welsh industrial history...

honest paintings and prints of the Rhondda reveal a hearty Welsh community in the grips of a smoggy chokehold. The black soot of smoke and coke, coal, colliery and bitumen spreads across his canvases and hard-ground etchings. When he arrived in Wales in 1953, he was just one of a small number of British artists – including L. S. Lowry and the ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters Derrick Greaves and Edward Middleditch – who found solace not in rolling hills or sweeping coastlines but industrial landscapes and the working classes. Over a period of almost forty years painting the south Wales valleys and their mining towns he produced what is perhaps the single most complete record of Welsh coalmining communities of any artist. He was as alone in his choice of subject and his enduring dedication to it as he was in his self-imposed, car-bound solitude.

In truth, Chapman had not sought out the Rhondda, but rather stumbled upon it almost by accident. He began his art career as a commercial designer in 1928, producing posters for London Transport and Shell alongside John Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Barnett Freedman. Though it paid well, he found the world of graphics tedious and by 1937 had enrolled at the Slade School of Art, only to transfer after a year to the Royal College of Art under Freedman’s advice.

His early heroes were Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, then the social realism of the Euston Road painters of the late 1930s. After the Second World War, he found work as a teacher in a number of London art schools, having moved his young family to Great Bardfield in Essex where he joined the artists Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Michael Rothenstein and Kenneth Rowntree, who made the village their own artistic commune.

Though Bardfield soon became a collaborative hotspot for its local artists, he found himself drawn away before he could cement a reputation there. In 1953, on a return journey from a trip to the family holiday cottage in Cardiganshire, he decided to drive back via the Welsh mining valley towns. The

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experience was to change his life forever: ‘I got a fantastic shock . . . I realised that here I could find the material that would perhaps make me a painter at last.’ Aside from an interruption in the 1970s, Chapman would return every year to the Rhondda and its outlying districts to paint the lives of its inhabitants, either renting temporary rooms for prolonged periods of painting or making sketches to be brought back to his studio in Great Bardfield. By 1964, he had moved to Wales permanently, living in the small cottage in Aberaeron he had purchased over a decade before.

Stylistically, as with his subject matter, he was much his own man. Early etched portraits of his pregnant wife – thickly bitten, with a strong sense of texture and classical chiaroscuro – bear in their heavy lines and expressive quality a resemblance to Rouault. Rothenstein, who had offered access to his own press, acted as informal tutor, teaching him much about the medium and its many processes. Like Rothenstein, Chapman relished the range of textures and surfaces the acid could bring out of the zinc plates and he soon established a distinctive etching style. He produced two major etching series – The Rhondda Suite and The Camberwell Set – in addition to numerous individual prints of dilapidated collieries and dusty street views.

The paintings have been much lauded for their account of the social injustices suffered by the Welsh mining communities and their subsequent decline when coal ceased to be a profitable venture. While Chapman himself claimed there was no deliberate political undercurrent to his work – ‘I have no social comment to make... My job as an artist is to take things as they are ... the social comment [comes] over by itself. ..’ – he was certainly sympathetic to the often perilous conditions the miners faced day in and day out. One written recollection, entitled ‘First and Last Trip Below’, recounts Chapman’s only experience down a mining shaft: ‘I am not really interested in the hell below ground – I shall be buried soon enough. It

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Though the human element fascinated

Chapman, he was as much driven by a formal view of the world around him, seeking out

compositional elements in the streets and skies. is the humans above and how they live I want to see…The whole place was in an appalling state... Men work down there to earn a living. I thought it disgusting. Coal is cheap at any price.’

Though the human element fascinated Chapman, he was as much driven by a formal view of the world around him, seeking out compositional elements in the streets and skies.

He often deliberately chose scenes in which the zig-zag patterns of telephone wires, sloping rooftops, television aerials and trees stretch across the skyline. Another favourite technique was to reflect in the paint the peripheral blur one experiences looking down a road: curbs and pavements curve outwards, passers-by have their faces stretched and distorted or are brushed out until unrecognisable. Though Chapman was an atheist, religion played a large part in these street scenes too, as described by the writer Robert Meyrick: ‘He has often introduced striking symbolism in the cruciform shapes of the telegraph poles and railway signs of the present day. They pierce the sky to dwarf the nearby church spires and Non-Conformist chapels, symbolic of a community not only constrained by geography but also by the church.’ In the enormous eight-foot canvas Work and Pleasure all three interests appear together: the gridded metal frames of pitheads, chimneys and antennae in the distance; the figure walking by in the bottom right-hand corner, whose face fades into a swirling mass of brown paint; and the telegraph mast shaped like a giant cross that rises high into the soot-tinged air, dominating its surroundings.

Chapman had come to Wales to paint its mining industry

and the sunken landscapes in which it sat; but he stayed for its people, for the countless local characters who would squint through the car window at a half-finished canvas or peer over a shoulder as he sat painting in a deserted street: ‘I suddenly realised that these old mines had nothing more to say to me, that it was the present, what was going on today that was really the subject I ought to work on ...’ Disillusioned with his own work and the art market’s obsession with Pop in the 1970s, he gave up painting for ten years only to return in 1980 and find the communities he had left behind changed almost beyond recognition. Gone were the collieries, their equipment dismantled; gone too were the stacks of masts and wires, replaced by more efficient receivers along the nearby hilltops. More families could now afford cars themselves, parked in garage extensions and along cul-desac pavements, preventing kids from playing in the previously empty roads outside their houses.

Despite its many transformations, Chapman found in his return to the Rhondda fresh new stories to tell. He remained in his little cottage, painting the panorama of everyday Welsh rurality until his death in 1993. Unlike his earlier contemporaries, his work never found a mass audience – though this is unsurprising, given he was an artist who sought not shock, nor awe, but a quiet, slow, hidden corner of the world that would have remained otherwise forgotten. Today, his output stands as an indispensable record of Welsh industrial history, one made all the more poignant for the obvious affinity between the artist and his shifting surroundings.

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Vanessa Bell The Schoolroom

In Vanessa Bell’s The Schoolroom, all is pattern: from the looping wallpaper to the tablecloth, the striped drapes and lampshade, the softly mottled armchair and the chequered effect of the net curtain, decoration and design abounds. Even the vase of scarlet flowers and their plump, feather-like leaves suggests a fleur de lis or a Tudor rose; a still life made motif.

Style epitomised Bell’s life and art. A student of the Royal Academy in the early 1900s, like other female artists of her time she has become better known for her relations than her exceptional work: she was the sister of Virginia Woolf, whose books she illustrated; her marriage to the critic Clive Bell was mutually polygamous, leading to fiery affairs with the artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. A key figure within the Bloomsbury Group and Fry’s legendary Omega Workshops, she was central to some of the 20th century’s most important commercial artistic ventures.

Above all, Bell had an eye for design. The larger part of her early career was spent taking ‘decorative’ commissions: haute couture fashion, textiles and graphics for Omega, theatre costumes, dinner services and dust jackets. Like fellow artist-cumdesigner Sonia Delaunay, she saw her commercial work and her ‘fine’ art not as distinct disciplines, but as ways of working that fed into and cross-fertilised one another. In designs for scarves, dresses, and

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home furnishings she experimented with abstract form and colour then applied the results to her own original work.

The Schoolroom saw both practices come together. Approached by the Contemporary Lithographs founders in the mid-1930s, Bell obliged with an intimate vignette of domestic life. A woman – no doubt a selfportrait – sits in her study; to the left a second figure writes, her sister, perhaps, with the copper hair, while a third plays an out-of-sight piano. Though the scene is quiet, Bell injects visual interest through her juxtaposition of rich colours: deep purple carpet, peppermint walls and mustard furniture. Her use of perspective is no less bold, placing the viewer right at the table as if seated in the foreground. The effect is at once busied and cosy: an image of urban leisure that buzzes with pattern and texture.

Vanessa Bell’s reputation has seen something of a renaissance in the last twelve months. A major reappraisal at the Dulwich Picture Gallery has asserted her place as a modernist who lived and worked at the heart of the British art world. Her outlook was multifaceted, positioned uniquely between salon, studio, workshop and showroom. Few other Post-Impressionists of her time could lay claim to so particular and colourful a view of London life – a view delightfully embodied in the Schoolroom lithograph.

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Exhibition During July

Perhaps you could describe in a nutshell what your work is about.

INTERVIEW

I find perfection very boring; I’m looking for something slightly different. That’s why, when you look at my pots, they’re not perfectly round, they’ll have scars from the fire, but that’s everything I’m looking for in wood firing. I remember when I was training at college there was a girl I fell in love with, not because she was conventionally beautiful – she had this great scar down her face – but because she was different. She was amazing. And if my pots can carry that kind of power, then I’m happy with that.

nic collins

Where did your life as a potter begin?

I grew up just outside Stratford-upon-Avon and ended up at Derby College of Higher Education, where I was pretty much given free rein. I had a big pile of firebricks and could sit up all night building and firing kilns, and gradually it became an obsession. Clay was everything.

When I came out of Derby, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I got a little Mini pickup and went to work in a pottery in the South of Italy, coming back up through Germany where I worked for a wood firer. That’s where I first saw the old kick wheel that I use today, which I built from a photograph. When I came back to England, I had a thousand pounds in my pocket, my pickup, my wheel, and a thousand bricks from a company in Sheffield which I’d swapped for a teapot.

My first firing, we hadn’t got enough wood and had to burn all my ware boards just to reach cone 9 [~1280˚C].

They’re probably the worst pots I’ve ever made and I’m sure they’ll turn up and haunt me someday, but they were our saviour, because we had a kiln load of work and managed to sell it.

Playing With Fire

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I think the firing is one of the most

important things for me, as a potter.

Having spent time in Europe, a number of your assistants have also come from abroad. Do you find similarities in the way these potters work with what you’re doing here in Devon?

We get a lot of German potters here, but their way of making pots is so different to what I do. They seem more about the head than the heart. They would take a lump of clay, and are taught to throw it as thinly as possible, as wide as possible, to squeeze as much out of that lump as you can and fast, which I feel may be missing the point.

With that kind of throwing, the pots become very mean and very sharp, not something you want to pick up.

I went through that process of throwing as thinly as I could myself, and as evenly, and as many as possible off the wheel in a day, and there comes a time when you have to undo that. It’s not just about being able to throw a pot well: it’s about bringing something extra, something special.

A good pot might not necessarily jump out at you at eye level, but there’s something that makes you want to pick it up, and I truly believe that those pots have a little of the potter’s soul in them. There’s something a little extra that’s injected to make a person want to touch and feel and explore a pot. I think that’s what I mean by from the heart and not the head.

Have you been inspired by any of the foreign potters you’ve worked with?

One Japanese potter who was extremely influential for me was a guy called Shiro Tsujimura. He came to Devon and stayed with some friends of mine, working for an exhibition for the Galerie Besson in London. Now, this guy was not your usual Japanese potter. He was the son of a dairy

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farmer who went on to become a Buddhist monk and then got into pots looking at antique Japanese ceramics. But he approached it in the manner that a child would: he’d seen a pot, he’d made up in his mind how it was made, and he’d just do it. This guy broke all the rules and made beautiful pots. They had that soul in them, that feeling, that primeval, deep down something that grabs you. He was firing this little kiln with oil and throwing wood ash on the pots, and just as he was finishing the firing I went to see him. He climbed up the kiln and threw this big wodge of clay on the hole where the oil burner was. There were holes everywhere. It was like a cathedral, with all the light shining out, and everything that I’d been taught told me that those pots would be dunted, they’d all be cruds, there’d be nothing left. I went along the next day when he opened this kiln and pulled out his first pot – man my heart! – it was a stunner, a real stunner. That was a valuable lesson for me. It taught me that rules are there to break; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when you take those risks, you will get some reward.

You mention risk; there are few more risky ways of making pots than the kind of anagama wood firing that you do. Do you enjoy this process, and all the perils it brings?

I think the firing is one of the most important things for me, as a potter. There’s a kind of grey area between studio ceramics and fine art – a very positive and strong area – and I think it’s only really wood firing that can reach into that space. It’s very much like painting, and when I pack the kiln that’s exactly what I’m doing: I’m imagining where the fire is going to hit, what clay and glazes and therefore what colour palette I’m using, where’s the ash going to run, how the flame is going to hit this pot and then weave around and hit another.

My pots are made to try and capture what will happen in

my kiln. I do a four-day firing, and I do a lot with the fire; it’s not just about getting it up to temperature. I like to stack pots on their sides, surround pots with embers when I’m stoking, and I play around with the path of the flame.

Sometimes pots get knocked over, and although I try to right them it’s very difficult when the kiln is at 1300˚C. Pots at the front are often stuck together, and I like to stack pots on top of pots which can work really well but is a big gamble. Some firings are almost perfect, others almost everything is damaged. To get one nice pot, you may have to sacrifice three or four. Usually there’s one obvious piece to smash and we can get them apart, but when you have two beautiful pots stuck together it becomes a bit of a dilemma. Doesn’t that make the survivor twice as special though?

A lot of people say these results are accidental, which makes me a little bit angry because they’re not. It’s all very controlled. It’s out-of-control control, if that makes any sense: you have an idea and you push for that, but always there comes something unexpected. I think that’s probably the drive for a wood firer: that most of the time it’s not what you expect.

There seems to be an element of masochism with wood firing, that idea of the artist who suffers for their work.

This kiln has had me in tears. I don’t think a woman has ever done that to me, but that’s probably a lie!

It’s a relationship. It’s a battle all the time, but you have to work on good relationships. I’m getting there; we’re getting there together, me and this clay stuff, and fire. It’s about understanding, working with, being at ease with, and accepting what you think might be faults and appreciating those differences.

With wood firing there’s always going to be that question, where does the personality come from: the maker, or the fire? Well it’s got to be both, hasn’t it? There’s this relationship, this battle, this big fight: it takes and it gives.

And who’s winning the fight?

I would say, at the moment, the fire is winning. I like my input; but the fire has the big say.

see more of Nic Collins’ work at goldmarkart.com

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JOHN PIPER Dorchester Abbey For John Piper, to paint a house, or a church, or a street was not simply a matter of representation; it was to open oneself to the potential of the place. ‘[My] titles’, he once wrote, ‘are the names of places, meaning that there was an involvement there, at a special time: an experience affected by the weather, the season and the country, but above all concerned with the exact location and its spirit for me. The spread of moss on a wall, a pattern of vineyards or a perspective of hop-fields may be the peg, but it is not hop-poles or vineyards or church towers that these pictures are meant to be about, but the emotion generated by them at one moment in one special plane. ..’

Over an active career of upwards of sixty years, Piper returned time and again to clerical buildings across the British Isles. Of the many he supported both artistically and financially, Dorchester Abbey was a favourite. A founding member of the abbey’s Friends, in 1973 he donated a watercolour of the church from which lithographic prints could be produced to raise funds for its upkeep. With its tempestuous setting, a thunderstorm closing in around the abbey’s pale sandstone walls, it remains one of Piper’s most striking ecclesiastical portraits.

Though the 12th century architecture is impressive, it is the place, the moment of the scene, that Piper has so dramatically

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captured. The overgrown churchyard is as Gothic as the abbey itself, its chalky-white blades of grass criss-crossing over one another like the stone tracery of the rose window and the stained-glass panels below.

The atmosphere is one of quintessential English downpour: the sky pressing heavy round the roof, overcast and laden with black wash rainclouds; dark watercolour running to those shades of flannel grey so familiar to anyone caught in an April shower.

With the deluge comes freshness and vitality: the brush strokes are lively and expressive, with textures ranging from blotches to droplets and delicate mists.

Bright, verdant green paint scatters from the surrounding grass to the buttresses overhead. As the bell tower splits the sky in two with the promise of more clement weather, one can almost smell the petrichor – that invigorating fragrance left by fresh rain on stone pavements – emanating from the abbey walls.

If what Piper sought to illustrate was not merely churches and chapels but ‘the emotion generated by them’, in Dorchester he gives us light and life from darkness, a site of fertile greenery and growth emerging from the surrounding gloom. It is an aptly Christian vision, deeply personal, and evidence of the lifelong passion Piper felt to see such places protected and celebrated.

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Staff Pick

One of the very first fine art prints I ever owned was a little lithograph by Joan Miró. It hung on my bedroom wall from an early age – perhaps six or seven years old – and quickly became my favourite picture in the house. As I sit writing now, some two decades on, it hangs in front of me again, caught in a sliver of yellow light from an adjacent window. At its centre is what looks like a kneeling figure, two short, truncated legs folded below a swirling, circular body shaped like a Catherine wheel, spikes of black ink jutting out like spines across its back. In the background fireworks of colour pop in the distance – orange, deep green and purple. For years, I took the two, squinting ovals conjoined above the circle to be its eyes. He became my Miró monster, greeting me as I woke in the morning and again as I returned from school. Then one day, as I walked back into my room, I glanced over at this ludicrous little creature of brushstrokes and colour and saw something entirely new. The eyes were not above now but within its body, two staring black dots that I had seemingly never noticed before. There were in fact now two creatures: the round, squat, kneeling character and a strange spider-like insect perched atop his head who took up the eyes above for himself. Try as I might, like an optical illusion that suddenly reveals itself I could not ‘unsee’ this change in my monster, and from that day on he gained a new companion.

It seems an entirely ordinary experience to look back on with such vivid memory, but that moment in which an image I had seen countless times changed before me taught me two important lessons. The first, that in great art you can never

stop seeing new things – and this is especially the case with an artist like Miró, who blended figurative, symbolic and abstract worlds with such ease. His work delights in constant reappraisal, revealing in his kaleidoscopic prints and paintings forms that seem to metamorphose and merge between one another. It also taught me something of our fundamental need when presented with abstract images to find something familiar, discernible, and of the world we recognise. It can be almost guaranteed that the first thing any pair of people presented with a work of abstract art will do is compare what they see in its forms: a house, perhaps, with a little roof; no, a sea, surely? It is an instinctive reaction that is so deeply ingrained in our minds that it can be difficult to ignore. The near-universal popularity of Miró compared, for example, to the controversy that still surrounds the splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock or Rothko’s coloured squares, is no doubt due to the fact that there are precisely such observable things in his work: stars, red suns and moons, women and birds, planetary constellations and bug-eyed creatures of the night.

‘Everything comes from the visible’, he once told the art historian Walter Erben: ‘There is nothing abstract in my pictures.’

What then of the artist himself? Born in Barcelona in 1893, he was a friend and contemporary of Picasso, a one-time Surrealist, Magic Realist, dreamer, and, above all, a Catalan.

Though he spent much of his early career in Paris, the landscape of Cataluña, in particular the sun-baked mountain ranges of Tarragona and the family summer home in Montroig,

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permeates his work from early, part-Fauvist part-Cubist paintings of Catalonian farmhouses to the electric abstract compositions of the 1950s and ‘60s. His flirtation with Surrealism never fully consumed him, despite André Breton’s remark that he was ‘perhaps the most ‘Surrealist’ of us all’, and though it provided a strong poetic grounding that reveals itself most clearly in suites like his illustrations for Alfred Jarry’s bizarre comic play Ubu Roi, Miró sought a more personal artistic path. Over a long career he developed a rich, complex symbolism that was quite his own, a visual language made up of recurring shapes and figures and a calligraphic touch that really has no equal. He liked primary colours best – black, cadmium red and yellow, and cobalt blue – yet, despite his limited palette, produced a phenomenally prolific output of work that never feels tired or repetitive, but which sings with boundless energy.

As I continue to look and to write, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, the jazz trumpeter’s inspired rearrangement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, begins to play in the background. I find myself drawn to the parallels between Miró and Davis, whose exquisite tonal range, from muted, silver whispers to full-blown, brassy blasts of colour, seems to resonate with Miró’s work. Davis’ strength, like Miró’s, lies in an ability to do so very much with so little. Short, repeated refrains are spun one after the other, often trilling around just a single note.

Miró’s repertoire of forms was likewise comparatively small – star maps, small, spirit-like, primitive people, wandering lines and pure blocks of colour – and yet the essence of each composition is much its own, the harmonies and dissonances between individual elements delicately balanced with a different rhythm in each new arrangement. Like Miró too, Davis was unafraid of empty space, of the palpable silence that gave power to the re-emergence of each new string of notes. Miró’s dancing figures and symbols are frequently given free rein to float and vibrate on their own, suspended on paper and canvas like the sonorous blots of paint that fell when he cleaned his brushes in his studio and which endlessly fascinated him.

The more I listen, the more I look, the more tempting it is to push the connection – to see in the Odyssean, dreamscape tracks of Davis’ Bitches Brew echoes of the vibrant, voodoo colour of Miró’s last paintings, or to apply the clever wordplay of Kind of Blue to the artist’s famously despondent disposition.

But in truth, Miró is one of few artists for whom the act of comparison and contextualisation often feels pointless. There was no real equivalent, contemporary vision to match his peculiar straddling of the worlds of Surrealism and Abstraction.

Placing the works of others beside his proves a fruitless task as they pale – quite literally – in comparison with his dynamism, the childlike vitality of his use of form and line. One would do best with Miró’s work simply to look and keep looking: there is food enough in this feast of colour.

Opposite: Three signed prints, one unique on newspaper, together with the three original blocks from which they were made.

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New Exhibition in September

lee kang-hy0 Onggi Pots

Like the Samul nori, Kanghyo’s Onggi pots are directly linked to Korea’s rural past, to its celebrations of food, crops and sustenance.

The Jing – a thick, beaten-brass gong – rings with a metal ‘hum’ that vibrates to your belly. Above, the smaller, sharper clash of the Kkwaenggwari – a second gong, struck lightly at first, then steadily harder, faster, louder. The leather skin of a Buk, a drum shaped like a shallow barrel, provides a steady pulse while the Janggu – longer, tapered in the middle like an hourglass – strikes a rhythmic beat. The whole ensemble begins slowly, lilting, almost out of time. Then the pounding quickens, the rhythm tightens. With an almighty crescendo the drumming reaches a maddened pitch, as if the music were running away with itself. As the players begin to chant, their performance becomes a delirious ritual, the whirling, snapping, rumbling vibrations its disembodied spirits.

This is Samul nori, Lee Kang-hyo’s ‘making music’. A form of traditional Korean percussion born out of folk dances and harvest celebration, it originated in the rice fields where farmers prayed for a good yield. In its throbbing rhythms, Kang-hyo finds a vital energy that fuels the creative processes of his colossal Onggi pots. The work is extraordinarily labour intensive, and quite unlike any technique we find in the West.

Great ropes of earthenware clay called ‘coils’, sometimes six feet long, are formed and draped over Kang-hyo’s shoulders.

Standing above a clay base, the potter feeds each coil down through his hands around the edge of the pot, pinching with one hand and pressing with the other, then paddles the surface until it is smooth, all the while turning the wheel with his feet.

Within a matter of minutes, the enormous clay walls are built up into a cylinder of unbelievable size.

Originally designed to store fermented kimchi, bean pastes, and soy, the use of Onggi has declined in recent years with the invention of home refrigerators. Kang-hyo is one of a shrinking number of potters capable of producing pots of this size, having spent three dedicated years with an Onggi master acquiring the necessary skills. For a time he was making up to thirty a day; now he has to wear a brace, so demanding is the work on his body.

Though the throwing of these forms is methodical and pensive, their decoration is quite the opposite. With the hammering rhythms of the Samul nori beating from a nearby speaker, Kang-hyo covers his giant Onggi with liquid slips – first with ladles flicked and jabbed around the pot, then with his own hands, smearing, stroking and scratching over the surface of the clay. He remains transfixed throughout: there is just the potter and his work, consumed by the transcendental music.

Like the Samul nori, Kang-hyo’s Onggi pots are directly linked to Korea’s rural past, to its celebrations of food, crops and sustenance. Poets of the past have seen in the four traditional drums the representation of four elements of a storm: the roaring winds of the Jing, the thunderous Kkwaengwari, the Janggu’s heavy downpour, the Buk’s rolling clouds. In the tumultuous, swirling surface of Kang-hyo’s Onggi, the musical tempest thunders on. Vigorous and meditative in equal measure, they offer nourishment for the soul.

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graham sutherland Study for Folded Hills

When he was just 18 years old working as a trainee engineer in Derby, Graham Sutherland was trapped within the boiler of a shunting engine. Dropping through a twenty-inch dome into the cramped metal can below, he found he could not get out. The claustrophobia he experienced during his enclosure stayed with him for the rest of his life. He became intermittently agoraphobic – ‘to cross a street was agony’ – and the feeling of confinement spread insidiously into every corner of his mind: ‘I found I couldn’t go to church without considerable distress – I felt I was hemmed in and couldn’t get out.’

If what Sutherland sought in his art was a ‘way out’, as the artist George Shaw has suggested, then he certainly found it in Pembrokeshire. He first discovered the west Welsh county in 1934, whose twisting estuaries, ancient root stumps and hills that sloped like dragons’ backsides instilled in him a need to paint. It was a landscape to which he would return regularly pre- and post-war, and which would inspire some of his most vital imagery.

By 1943, when Folded Hills and its precursory studies

were begun, Sutherland had been employed as an Official War Artist. He never left Britain during his service, becoming instead one of few such artists to document production and ruin on the mainland. Between sketches of crumbling London suburbs and exploded steel girders, Sutherland would revisit scenes of the Welsh countryside – rock forms, thorns and tiered mountains – exploring both subjects with equal intensity.

In Study for Folded Hills Sutherland creates a striking amalgam of these two very different worlds. Acid yellow mounds, converging to pink and orange, burn against a red sky like the flames he had painted just months before at the Woolwich steel furnaces. The black boulders that roll down one hillside are drawn in the same sooty charcoal he had seen smeared on foundry workers’ brows. The palette is one of caustic urban heat, the shades of rust and fire that characterise much of Sutherland’s oeuvre and which spoke to the artist Brian Catling of ‘industrial oxide [reeking] of alarm and warning.’

Yet unlike many of Sutherland’s images of the Blitz, in which

Hieroglyphics I & II

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his claustrophobia was to some degree relived, here – as in all the sketches of Pembrokeshire – compression breeds life. His squat hills bulge against one another like dividing cells, pinched at the base by a spider of black ink. Searching pencil lines trace trees and tangled branches that extend like insect feelers. The condensed worlds of lichen, moss and thicket are enlarged to macroscopic scale.

As with most of Sutherland’s landscapes, we cannot know for certain where the Folded Hills lie. Rarely was it his intention when sketching to ‘map’ a topography; more important was the emotional response, the peculiar details that alone drew his eye to this spot or that perspective. ‘Out of the thousand things I see’, Sutherland writes, ‘one juxtaposition of forms above all others seems to have a meaning .. . in the studio one remembers: one’s encounters become redefined, paraphrased and changed into something new and different from that of the first encounter – yet the same.’

Wherever he found it, the view of these two hillsides appears to have struck a chord. In addition to the 1943 canvas, no fewer than seven sketches in watercolour,

gouache, chalk and pencil appear to depict the same horizon line. In the same year, the folded hills featured as one of a series of lithographic illustrations to Francis Quarles’ Hieroglyphics published in Poetry London. As Sutherland returned each time to the peaks, different elements of their character were warped and distorted: in some, he emphasises the sensual curve of each hill, transforming them into a pair of giant golden breasts; in others, the same mounds metamorphose into fattened chicks, their beaks discernible in this study in two hasty scribbles of pen. Much as the forms themselves within individual sketches seem almost to multiply, each new iteration of the scene engendered yet more experimentation.

Entombed all those years ago within the locomotive boiler, Sutherland found the closeness suffocating. That very real sense of anxiety and asphyxiation found a voice in his wartime sketches of tin mines, arms factories and hydraulic presses. But here in the teeming landscapes of Pembrokeshire, closeness signals life and generation.

Sutherland’s ‘Folded’ hills are in fact unfurling; from below they issue forth all manner of organic life.

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elisabeth frink canterbury Tales The Deluxe Suite

Frink's images reflect a natural quick-wittedness, and an understanding of etching's adaptability.

Elizabeth Frink was by no means the first artist to look to The Canterbury Tales for inspiration. In 1972 alone, the same year Frink’s second extended series of prints illustrating Chaucer’s text was published, the infamous Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini released an award-winning motion picture also based on the poem, starring a young Tom Baker. An extraordinary literary work of mammoth scope – having intended to write up to one-hundred individual tales, Chaucer completed just twenty-four – Canterbury Tales remained unfinished on its author’s death in 1400, captivating a generation of later medieval writers who delighted in ‘filling in’ the gaps within its collection of stories. From its very inception its popularity has endured. Yet of its many reinventions, Frink’s etched illustrations must rank among the most individual interpretations of Chaucer’s historic text. In their laconic style, giving prominence to rich texture and uncomplicated, almost classical form, they reveal a gifted sculptor inspired by her source material and engrossed in the endless technical potentials of printmaking.

Frink was the preeminent British sculptor of her generation, an inordinately talented female artist who – like her forerunner, Barbara Hepworth – nonetheless managed to forge an exceptional career in what was then still very much the ‘man’s world’ of sculpture. A young pupil at the Chelsea School of Art in the early 1950s, she was taught by Bernard Meadows, one of Henry Moore’s assistants. In her early career she showed flair and ambition, achieving her first major exhibition in 1952 aged just twenty-two years old, followed a year later by her first acquisition at the Tate. She worked exclusively in a figurative style, favouring heroic, ancient male figures and mythic dogs and horses to the usual sculptural subject matter of the female nude. Moving to France in the 1960s and early

‘70s, she escaped the technicolour grip of Pop and Abstraction that held the British art world at the time, choosing instead to explore the comparatively unfashionable themes of epic fantasy and folk traditions. It was a prescient move that proved, in the long-term at least, extremely successful: few other contemporaries working in stone or bronze emerge with quite so distinct and recognisable an oeuvre as Frink’s.

Though she was first and foremost a sculptor, she experimented throughout her career with print media, often in collaboration with skilled atelier assistants. Under the renowned Stanley Jones of Curwen Press fame she made lithographs and, in her later years, screenprints with Kip Gresham, demonstrating both the consummate draughtsmanship that underpinned her understanding of sculptural form and a willingness to enter fully into unknown technical territory. But it was in etching, under the direction of master printer Nigel Oxley, that Frink discovered a true affinity. Like marble or clay, the hard, waxy ground of the copper etching plate presented a surface to be carved and cut, the metal surface below weathered and bitten by acid until it became a three-dimensional plane of pits and scars used to pick up the ink. Here was a medium located exquisitely between sculpture and drawing; it is unsurprising Frink soon found she had a natural aptitude for its processes.

Engaging the help of Oxley’s studio in the early 1970s, Frink began her second set of illustrations for The Canterbury Tales, producing nineteen images derived from Chaucer’s text. Her choice of source material was inspired: episodic in nature, it lent itself well to a print series, and to an interpretative, rather than strictly illustrative or descriptive approach. Frink’s style, in both sculpture and drawing, was always naturalistic rather than representational, concerned with conveying through

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form the spirit of her subject – wild horses and boars, or raw, primal man – rather than the literal form of the body itself. It found a natural parallel in Chaucer’s writing, where realism is abandoned in favour of the many relativist voices of each pilgrim character and their special tale. Chaucer offers not one, extended moral account but a conflicting, contrasting social milieu, a rich tapestry of voices highborn and lowbrow.

His broad tonal range, from the righteous to the ridiculous, the pious to the deliciously vulgar, is deftly wrought out in Frink’s series of images: the noble white form of one of The Knight’s Tale’s protagonists emerges gleaming from the dark aquatint around him, his face chiselled to classical, masculine proportions; by contrast, The Summoner’s Prologue, a farcical anecdote about a man who has strange visions of hell in which friars are found living inside the devil’s anus, features a giant, bull-like Satan, his face squeezed to a smirk as he shits out his clerical effluent. Like Chaucer, Frink is unafraid of lending equal heft to both the sublime and the satirical.

Initially, Frink had planned to use preliminary sketches which would then be transferred to the plates using tracing paper.

In a small number of prints, like The Pardoner’s Tale, the occasional missing leg reveals the difficulty in accurately copying over the original drawing. In those instances where the resulting image was still successful, the mistake was often kept rather than reworked – little details hidden in plain sight that speak of the unpretentious environment in which Frink and her colleagues worked. Elsewhere, natural inconsistencies in the etching process were actively encouraged and exploited for effect. Oxley explains: ‘.. . the traditional way of biting a plate in iron perchloride is to immerse the plate into the bath upside down, allowing constant etching convection to take place. The hazard with this process is that it is possible to trap

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air bubbles under the surface, and these will hold back the etching. These bubbles are visible on the second aquatinting in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Being spherical they echo the moon and add to the celestial effect – an accident – but Lis insisted they remain.’ Other notable techniques involved pressing muslin fabric into soft-ground wax for texture – used only once, in the hitched-up dress of The Merchant’s Tale – and crushing, brushing, and sponging the finely dusted aquatint particles with rags to produce uneven, organic grain and tone across the plate. Frink combines a large range of textures in the plate, from aquatint to scraping and burnishing, with a bold use of open, empty space in many of her compositions. Details of landscape and setting are minimal, leaving it to the natural textures of the etched surface and her intuitive use of shape and space to indicate a sense of depth and perspective.

The resulting prints possess that same simple, direct strength that had characterised Hockney’s Brothers Grimm suite, published just three years earlier. Like Hockney, Frink’s images reflect a natural quick-wittedness, and an understanding of etching’s adaptability: that there is so much textural pleasure to enjoy in what are quite minimal, economical scenes here evidences Frink’s obvious enjoyment of printing’s irregularities, and an ability to channel the great strengths of her sculpture – tactile surface and monumental form – into a whole new medium. They remain among the most innovative images of her impressive graphic output.

There is a sense of the epic in Ken Kiff’s work, of Gilgamesh or Homeric voyage. His images of sun gods and golems read like chapters from some ancient myth. And, like the epic poems of old and their mythic histories, Kiff’s paintings occupy that liminal space between fact and fiction, real life and fantasy. To their creator, they were emphatically not the stuff of dreams or nightmares – ‘I’m not sure that one could paint a dream, without merely illustrating it’ – nor were they visions of another realm: ‘I don’t have truck with thinking about parallel worlds . . .’ From where, then, does their hallucinatory strangeness derive?

The answer, as described by critic Andrew Lambirth, was his medium: ‘As a painter, he thought in terms of paint. This may sound very simple, but it is in fact a radical position to adopt. For Kiff, subject-matter did not come first. Colour was more likely to be the initial impetus behind the genesis of a painting. From there, specific imagery might grow organically, like an amoeba, putting forth new limbs.’

As with his precursory hero Klee, the genetic link between image and material was fundamental to Kiff’s art, where form and colour were part of an indivisible continuum. Some applications of paint produce explicit figures, while others remain nonconcrete, bodiless but no less essential.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the watercolours, where the wet paint spilled and soaked with a life of its own.

Christopher P Wood, one of Kiff’s many artist admirers, speaks of how in paintings like Moonlight watercolour was, ‘allowed to flow naturally, pooling on paper and prompting

images to rise from the imaginative depths to the surface where they were fixed.’

The result is intense psychological intimacy: Moonlight’s violet ogre who – like many of Kiff’s anthropomorphic monsters – is undoubtedly a self-portrait, looks despairingly into the pool before him, taunted by a laughing lizard-fish. Behind him lies a decapitated foe; above, an illboding crescent moon in a sky too blue to believe. It is a scene pregnant with meaning – why the boiling volcano, the black-white cloud? – but, typically, Kiff offers little help in navigating its signs and significances.

Kiff’s work was seldom ‘in fashion’. The growing number of contemporary artists and writers who have discovered his paintings have found in them an unexpected, lasting influence. To the critic Norbert Lynton he was an ‘art guru’ whose work was, ‘full of colour, sonorous, sometimes delicate, sometimes tough, but never crude.’ Our world is more strangely, vitally colourful for his having painted it.

ken kiff

Moonlight

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Staff Pick

Jean-Nicolas

Gérard In my step-father’s kitchen, set on an oakwood tabletop, a small dish and beaker sit, waiting. Stationed there the night before, they will wait patiently for his return at breakfast, feed him and send him to work, only to sit and wait again for late evening when they will take up their post once more. An occasional rotation in service introduces an old friend back to the long table: a bowl, blue lip crowning yellow slip, welcomes cream-white milk and roast cereal grain while yesterday’s plate is retired to a cupboard shelf. Whichever piece is chosen, Jean-Nicolas Gérard is inevitably its creator and the equally inevitable wait begins again. These pots have waited now for over three years and will, I suspect, continue doing so, calmly and quietly devoted to one man’s daily ritual.

I use the term ‘ritual’ carefully here. Much of what we associate with that word, the sobriety and solemnity of religious rites, is nowhere to be found in Gérard’s work, which is anything but sombre. In an atelier-jardin behind the teeming boutique, Herculean plates and plant-pots stand littered like forgotten statues, overwhelmed by wild vegetation and beating with the thick heat of the Valensole sun. Amidst the lower undergrowth, smaller pots – bowls, jars and figurines – bask in the warmth of their own yellowed glazes, or sit perched and strung on door frames and metal railings as ceramic rabbits chase each other’s tails round the rim of a squat dish. This is not sober pottery – there is life and humour at work here, what Gérard refers to as simply la joie (‘the joy’) of functional ceramics, and an obvious companionship with the natural world. Like the pictorial voices so often ascribed to him as influences – Picasso’s freedom of line and expression, Bonnard’s heady hues of the Mediterranean coast – Gérard’s pots are, above all, a celebration: of materials, process, and of inspiration.

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Gérard is a potter who understands the importance of pots that nourish. Pots inspired by ritual, thrown by and for ritual, are pots of real humanity.

Inspiration, however, is another problematic term. Like Gérard’s pottery, it is both definite and loose. For some, inspiration is taken from landscape, potters historical and contemporary, and indeed any other art form; it is specific, and it provides impetus to work. In others, the process of inspiration is more subconscious and less easily clarified, its source less easily located. For Gérard, inspiration strikes in both forms: ‘When I make pots, I think it is nature that inspires me; but what makes me realise this is Japanese ceramics. I think inspiration also comes from making many pots, from looking at them and understanding them and from accepting accidents and integrating them into the creation process if it feels right.’

This process of creation is a ritual which must be entered whole-heartedly if it is to inspire any confidence at all in a potter. It is also a process in which inspiration flows both passively and actively: ‘What is a good pot? Very often it’s an accident – but you have to see the accident. The life [of a pot] comes in this way.’ The ease with which Gérard’s organic pieces can inhabit so unruly an environment as that unkempt garden, their inconspicuousness, despite sheer size and colour, and their poise amongst the greenery all stem from a willingness to let mishaps happen and to take and observe clay at face value. The result is pottery that feels as alive in form as the sgraffito marks that embellish it, and as alive in spirit as the garden by which it is nestled. But it is also pottery that, for all its gleaming colour, remains calm; pottery that waits to be noticed, waits to be used, and never shouts, courting one’s gaze only at the very moment it is needed. These pots do not shine; they glow.

Ease in form and balance – la facilité – is something Gérard has sought in the work of others too. Though Japanese potters have remained a mainstay source of inspiration, both materially and philosophically, it is a contemporary Korean potter – Goldmark Gallery’s own Lee Kang-hyo – with whom he has most closely identified this lack of constraint. The relationship between the two is immediately evident: Lee’s monumental Onggi jars, totally unwavering in their conviction of form, exude that same natural gravity and robustness as Gérard’s biggest garden pots, as well as their tranquility.

Juxtaposed with this peacefulness is the complete certainty of expression shared by the two potters: every indentation made on the clay surface, every squashed side, clasped lip and thumbprint, is considered and enjoyed for what it is – evidence, rather than error, of the maker.

When Gérard speaks of those who inspire him, his vocabulary often reflects this observation of the maker’s presence in their work. He is often ‘impressed’ by nature or potter, much as an ‘impression’ of a finger or an implement is left on the surface of the clay. On the one hand, this is simply a transliteration from the French impressionné; yet on the other it reveals some insight into Gérard’s belief in the idea of inspiration and production as a single, fluid act.

Though spontaneity typifies Gérard’s production process – in the throwing, the application of the slip, in the rapid incisions of sgraffito and the daubed glaze fingerprints – we ought not to confuse this spontaneity with a lack of forethought.

Paradoxically, successful spontaneous results require decision and control: one pot is worked on, and once an idea is formed, once inspiration has taken hold, it is reproduced at speed on a series of pots – simultaneous improvisation and predetermination. The resulting configurations of lines, spots

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and scars are reminiscent, not in style but in ‘essence’, of Matisse (a favourite of Gérard’s): at once formal and informal, held together like a ritual dance unfolding irregularly step by step.

The idea of the ritual is one that returns, inexorably, to all forms of art or craft.

Ritualistic actions are repeated and automatic, and yet faintly mystical and open to total revision, producing items which are both rudimentary and essential.

It is no surprise, then, that the rituals of growing and preparing food and of producing a vessel in which to contain it are so intertwined. In the French tradition, this bond is particularly emphasised: the same terminology, ‘cuire’, refers to the cooking of a meal and the firing of a pot.

All of this, Gérard recognises intuitively.

He prepares his dough as he does his clay, kneading it firmly with the same downward strokes, keeping it appropriately moist or dry; he refers to his inspirations, the Valensole mountains, the lavender fields under snow, as the ‘food’ for his work; he moves between studio and vegetable garden as if they were one.

Gérard is a potter who understands the importance of pots that nourish. Pots inspired by ritual, thrown by and for ritual, are pots of real humanity. They feel familiar even upon first sight and touch. They sing when used and they bring life to their contents. And they are the reason why, year after year, a small dish and beaker will sit inevitably, set on an oakwood tabletop, waiting for my step-father.

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Cover: A beach on Harris, Outer Hebrides, photographed while filming a documentary about gallery artist Richard James.

Photograph Š Jay Goldmark, July 2017.

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