Goldmark 15

goldmark

WINTER 2019/20

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g winter 2019/20 NUMBER 15

Contents 4

Andrzej Kuhn - Pensive King

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Svend Bayer - An Embarrassment of Riches

14 Dennis Creffield - A Midsummer Night’s Dream 16 Sidney Nolan - Dust Series

It is always in the last minutes of publication – hurriedly pulling together articles and images – that the resonances between pieces reveal themselves. In this, our Winter issue to usher in 2020, there are a strange few: cadavers of very different kinds are at the heart of works by Sidney Nolan and our very own Ian Wilkinson. We find out that C.F. Tunnicliffe and gallery artist John Farrington shared a background as pig and cowmen. And in works by Kuhn and Swoon, both new to our magazine, we have joyful expressions of humanity at its most caring. Enjoy these, and our welcome back to Svend Bayer ahead of his March 2020 show, in this latest offering.

24 Swoon - Sambhavna 26 Pablo Picasso - La Célestine 34 Michael Rothenstein - Kill Your Darlings 38 John Piper - Brighton Aquatints 46 John Farrington - New Exhibition 48 Charles Tunnicliffe - Hawks and Falcons 54 Pots to Give and to Hold 58 Ian Wilkinson - Our Late Familiars

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 15 © Dennis Creffield 27 © Fiona Goldmark Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro Design: Porter/Goldmark, December 2019 ISBN 978-1-909167-73-5

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CONTRIBUTORS Dennis Creffield Born in London in 1931, Creffield studied with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic then attended the Slade, where he won the Tonks Prize for LifeDrawing and the Steer Medal for Landscape Painting. By 1964 he had been appointed Gregory Fellow in Painting at Leeds University, his expressionistic style meeting acclaim. In 1977 he won an ACGB Major Award for painting but it was ten years later that Creffield gained public recognition with a commission from the South Bank Board to draw all the English medieval cathedrals, forming a two-year touring exhibition of which Goldmark Gallery was the sole sponsor. Creffield’s work is represented in several public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain and Leeds City Art Gallery.

Creffield died in 2018.

Fiona Goldmark handles the increasing number of artist estates that Goldmark now represents, managing stock, organising major touring exhibitions, and promoting deserved reputations around the country. Long-suffering wife to Mike, she has played an integral part in the history of the gallery.

Over the last three years she has attended a part-time art history course at Cambridge University.

andrzej Kuhn pensive king In September 1939, 17 days after Germany invaded western Poland, the Soviet Union counter-attacked the country from the east. Over the next two years, half a million Poles – one in ten Polish men – were imprisoned by the Russian army, among them Andrzej Kuhn’s father, while a further one-and-ahalf million were deported to the wastes of the USSR. Kuhn was just 10 years old when, with his sister and his mother, he was transported first by cattlewagon, then ox-cart, over 1,500 miles to a camp in Kazakhstan, along with 300,000 Polish citizens from the annexed eastern territories. After six months in captivity, Kuhn’s mother managed to escape with her two children. They fled for ten days before the family were caught and their mother sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, where she died.

In a move of calculated arbitrariness, typical of the Soviets’ reign of random terror, Kuhn’s father was then released and, by a quirk of fate, reunited with his children, who had been interned in a state orphanage. Together, the three trekked from refugee camp to camp, exiled in pilgrimage through the Middle East to Egypt before alighting by boat in England in 1947.

After six years of labouring, a stint in the merchant navy, and a studentship at the Chelsea School of Art, Kuhn left London for a coastguard’s hut near

Boston, Lincolnshire, overlooking the salt-marshes of the Wash, which he named Atlantis. When he arrived, the surrounding panorama was utterly flat.

Planting a ring of trees around the house, over the years a small grove grew around him and his garden, where he sat wooden sculptures of warrior kings and mystic prophets made from carved timber, wood scrap, strung with beads and armoured in empty shotgun shells.

This is one such wooden sculpture; the first, I think, of any of Kuhn’s work to have featured in our quarterly magazine. Most that arrives between issues are the paintings; and most of these promptly sail off to new homes before any chance of singing their praises here.

I have written the above for those who will not know of Andrzej Kuhn’s story: not as an explanation for the work (which he would be reluctant to give), many of which conjures wanderers from far-off, imagined lands; but to affirm that its human generosity – contemplative, glorious, sensitive, melancholic, and enriching as it can be – came from a more than superficial understanding of the power to uplift and console.

His sculpture, like the Sumerian carvings he invoked on canvas, is votive; an offering. Capsuled within it is a spirit of wit and warm-heartedness that was the soul of all that he made.

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svend bayer

An Embarrassment of Riches

New Exhibition in March

After six years shipwrecked on the ‘Isle of Despair’, some 40 miles from the mouth of the Orinoco river, Robinson Crusoe fashions himself a masted canoe and ventures around the island circumference to navigate its bounds. On the far side, he finds a perilous stretch of rocks that bar his journey round, stretching far out from the mainland. Launching off from the bay, he is quickly drawn into a strong current and finds himself carried out leagues from the shore, until the island is little but a hazy blot on the horizon. In his desolation, thinking himself dead in the water, he records one of the book’s most famous lines: ‘Thus, we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.’

Defoe’s simple lesson – you don’t know what you have, until you haven’t – I learned on return from college after my first term, having lived alone for three months. Pots, thousands of them, were everywhere in our home. We lived with them, ate from them, knocked them over as children and stashed stolen empty chocolate wrappers in them when we thought we’d been rumbled. They were a simple fact of life; so much so, that I never really noticed their presence. So when it came to leaving for the first time, the small and inexplicable emptiness I felt living in my dormitory room, bereft of any pictures or pots, I could not ascribe to any particular loss.

It was only on arriving home, by way of the Goldmark Gallery, that I came to realise what I had been missing all along. There, arranged on raised benches and shelves, was row after row of pots by Svend Bayer for an exhibition in 2012. A flood of recognition hit me, and I spent a whole day quietly walking from shelf to shelf, reacquainting myself with a world I had forgotten without knowing it. Bayer had struggled for the show, and the pots there were hard won; several prior firings had major failures, some with up to three quarters of the yield lost. But what he had achieved, agreed Gil Darby, late curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, matched the finest Sung Dynasty pottery held in international collections.

I remember being struck by two successive thoughts: these are perfect pots; where on earth do you go from here?

I didn’t know the answer to that question; nor I think then did Bayer. Most makers are content to chase perfection, but

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few are confronted with following or repeating it. Eight years is a long time, however, and they have not passed without change. Gone is Duckpool Cottage and the kiln sheds near Sheepwash, Devon, built by Bayer’s own hand and where he had been based for many years. He is now to be found heading the kiln team at Kigbeare Manor Farm, 10 miles south. Three years ago, Bayer led the team in building a huge new wood-firing kiln, based, he notes a little wearily, on ‘the easiest kiln I’ve ever had to fire’, and which has continued to defy all expectations of simplicity and cooperation.

Bayer, like Crusoe, is a loner (self-professed); and that is about where the comparison ends. Of Crusoe’s megalomania, his delusions of grandeur, his mercantile coldness, or his ability to lay ownership to all that he meets, there is none in Bayer, save only a certain amount of canny pragmatism and a quiet single-mindedness that anyone castaway, whether by choice or accident, would be glad of in their maroonment.

But there have been many times when hearing about Bayer’s work that I have been reminded of that little canoe boat, dragged off into dangerous waters. Most recently, he described his difficulties firing through early winter for his upcoming Goldmark show, which our lucky film crew of two were party to. The torrential rains of October and November had cooled and dampened the chimney stack, preventing air from drawing properly through the body of the kiln and killing any temperature rise. Reminded of a similar predicament in the past, he kindled a small fire in the chimney to help dry it out and increase the draught. The temperature rise resumed, unabated, until the very last, and most critical, push of the firing. He knew, at the back of his mind, that there had to be an explanation: exhausting all possibilities, and now visibly worried, the team thankfully discovered that a damper at the back of chimney had not been pulled out – ‘like driving with the brakes on’, Bayer remarks – and the problem was solved.

All that work, all that time invested, resting on a moment; and in that moment, on a single decision. How attractive must those prior weeks of mixing cold, caustic glazes, or stacking shelves, or splitting wood, seemed when, at first, an answer eluded them.

Bayer’s firings are uncommonly long, and all-consuming: a week packing, a week before that glazing, and a kiln firing that is now on average 110-120 hours – five days, split between a team of three working four hours on, eight hours off. By the end of the firing, Bayer says, you are totally disoriented; particularly if, like him, you are happy to take the unpopular early morning shift of 2 to 6am. Once begun, there is no stopping the kiln: no breaking, no interruption, no taking it slow or speeding up for convenience. Time is the ultimate arbiter. If you want the kind of extreme atmosphere of reduction and oxidation Bayer prizes, extracting the very most from the wood ash and a simple palette of glazes – celadons, kaki, and raw clay – you must plot your course and stick to it: a steady, but inescapable, temperature rise charted on a graph.

Firing, like navigation, though at its basis a mathematical art, is not an exact science; its apparatus only rudely calculable.

Like any mariner, Bayer is at the mercy of weather and other variables beyond his control. But though in the past Bayer has said he does not enjoy the firing process, he does take to command of it naturally – not command of an authoritarian kind, but something closer to that of a veteran skipper: feeling the currents, adjudging present course, through an unconscious combination of gut, experience, and well-trained prognostication. There is clear-cut physics, chemistry and fluid mechanics to the behaviour of his kiln, like any other: a huge, long, round-vaulted chamber, like the big upturned underbelly of a ship (I find that Tim Gent, in 2012, described him building kilns by sight, rather than measurement, ‘in the manner of a good traditional boat builder’; and that Sebastian Blackie thought his Duckpool kiln swollen ‘like a whale’); but underneath the bones of it all, as the trio begin stoking, Bayer ever alert to developments in atmosphere and pressure, you do feel as if you are watching them fighting a greater force, like the fateful currents under Crusoe, always threatening at any minute to draw them off course.

A firing, however important to the potter, is only the culmination of weeks, and usually months, of preparation and labour. ‘Traditional’ pottery of this kind demands a relentless working pattern: throw, glaze, fire, with all the day-to-day

activity of studio and resource management in between. The upshot of that unremittingness is that writing on what is, in ceramics’ broader scheme, a relatively narrow corridor of pottery becomes ever more difficult. We fall into our own working patterns: how difficult the life of a potter is; what dedication, what commitment they show to their craft; what differentiates their chosen vein of pottery; what individuates a maker from that chosen ‘tradition’.

On this last point at least, Svend Bayer makes it easy, because there really isn’t anyone making wood fired pots like his – certainly none that are alive. His peers, if there are any, are those anonymous makers of imperial China and Korea; thousand-year legacies whose spirit Bayer has channelled into his five decades of work, without it ever feeling like anybody’s but his own.

Where he has established a particular reputation is in the making of big pots. For a long time now it has remained central to his working practice; a kind of meditation in action, limited only by whether he can move his labours by himself, since he has more often than not been working alone. This obsession – if he would let me call it that – began under the vigilant eye of Michael Cardew, with whom Bayer spent three emphatic years at the very start of his career, and who quickly realised the indefatigable talents of his ward. Cardew, too, liked to make big pots; and he was generous enough to let Bayer not only make, but also occasionally fire his own large work after showing him how to properly coil from a thrown base.

At 73 (you would not think it), the weathering to his body by years of what has been, effectively, hard labour now finds him at the end of this journey. Making the pots, as he points out, is easy enough; but moving them is another matter entirely, and though naturally fit he is a slight man: ‘I can’t use brute force; I’ve got to kind of think my way around moving things.’ Bayer’s potting at scale came to its peak in 2004 with a series of extremely large vessels made for an exhibition.

The show was an unmitigated disaster: a second, simultaneous, display in a separate venue drew all attention away from his exhibits. There were no staff to watch over the pots, and vandals broke in twice to push them off their plinths.

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Bayer’s insurance pay-outs were the only recorded sales of the show.

The series returned instead to Bayer’s garden at Duckpool, where they became a permanent feature; they now stand as a monumental record of a time in his career, the last really big pots he ever made. All will be on display at Goldmark for the opening of Bayer’s March 2020 exhibition.

Joining them is a very special selection of work. These will be the first pots by Bayer we have received in eight years, the very best pots put aside from three years of firing at Kigbeare – an ‘embarrassment’, Bayer calls them, with typical humility; a word I’ve only ever heard used collectively of riches.

I will leave the task of discussing their finer details to David Whiting, who is set to author what will be our 47th pottery monograph. But my impression from the work I have seen so far, and what I thought unthinkable as I walked around that exceptional 2012 exhibition, is that Bayer has surpassed himself.

Much wood-fired work is all surface; an encrustation of glass lobes and delirious rivers of ash. But in Bayer’s pots, you never feel overwhelmed by the extraordinary effects of his kiln, the intense violence inflicted on large vases and vessels in the firebox. ‘No amount of wood firing will help a bad shape’, he has said in the past; it was his sense of form, his prowess on the wheel, that prompted Cardew to describe him as a ‘force of nature’, and form is forever at the forefront of his mind.

I can think only that these new pots are like planets. That in their swirls of wood ash, seas of celadon blue and green, scallop shell skeletons raised like white cliffs from the foam, they are like living globes of constellatory importance. My fingers are drawn over them by their tips like ships looking for safe passage to new and distant lands. As I did eight years ago, I feel I have arrived again.

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dennis creffield

A Midsummer Night's Dream

In December 1988, Philip Dodd, then Deputy Editor of New Statesman, interviewed the artist Dennis Creffield in his Brighton studio. Creffield had just completed an undertaking to draw all the medieval cathedrals of England, and was returning to a series of charcoal drawings and paintings on the theme of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream after receiving a private commission. The following excerpt is taken from Creffield’s responses in that interview, first published by Goldmark 30 years ago.

The problem with making a painting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that it has very little iconographic history. The only serious paintings that have ever been made on the subject are [Henry] Fuseli’s; for the rest it’s just illustration. So I went to the actual text of the play.

Why is it set in a wood outside Athens? What significance does Shakespeare see in setting it in such a place? From these questions, I began to have a vision of the figures as archaic Greek ones – so I took as my first source material archaic Greek sculpture. Then I discovered that the play was probably written for a private wedding, and that Queen Elizabeth was present at the first performance. Since she was feted as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, and was a patroness of the theatre, I also began to think in terms of the Elizabethan portrait. That gave me my visual dramatis personae – archaic Greek sculpture and Elizabethan ‘fantastical’ painting, both of them rooted not just in my thinking, but in the text or context of the play itself.

I used to make single images – but over the last ten years I’ve begun to work in series. [David] Bomberg, although he didn’t do it himself, always encouraged us to make a number of canvasses so that you could work on something and put it aside. One is always looking for a freshness; you don’t want just to hammer at a painting.

The images are much more self-conscious than earlier work.

For instance, in all of them you will find, in the top right hand corner, Shakespeare, who also masquerades as the moon. I didn’t think that idea up; I discovered it through a process of drawing. Take another example. In a number of the works, I give them a frame, which is a thing I very rarely do. I always very much work to the edge of the page, but in this instance I did it almost as if it was a manuscript. I wanted to be very artificial, to make something that one is reading almost. I’ve tried to resolve the relationships of the figures, one to another, in a very naïve sort of way. Like a medieval thing, I’ve used the top for the metaphysical, and placed there the attendant and overriding spirits of Oberon/Titania and Theseus/ Hippolyta; the bottom half I’ve kept for the humans.

For me there is this extraordinary idea of Elizabeth as Titania – she is present as the presiding deity, as the Queen and Shakespeare’s patron, but she also becomes the deity of Titania as well. There is in the portraits of her, and in everything you read about her, this strange unnaturalness and etherealness. She is the nearest in post-Roman times to a divine person, isn’t she? And the fantastic idea of her virginity, Gloriana, Queen Mab. Indeed they worshipped her in terms of a Goddess and she would act up to it.

Dennis Creffield

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sidney nolan Dust Series

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A British writer on an Australian subject cannot evade the freight of our past relationship.

There have long been two Australias; the one before January 1788, when the first thousand convicts and prison guards arrived at Port Jackson (modern-day Sydney); and the slow and sprawling emergence of a new nation state in the aftermath. Bereft of the American colonies and desirous of new expanses, Britain swiftly designated Australia its newest penal colony and built a protectorate on the freely available labour of exiled petty criminals. The introduction of white, and often Irish, prisoners saw the displacement and subjugation of black aboriginals, who found their own sixtythousand-year history on the continent quickly encroached upon; and then the arrival of white, often English, industrialists, ‘squattocrats’, and natural asset strippers, hand-in-hand with the colonial police, duly flattened them both into the dirt. The largely peaceful, and occasionally violent rebellion of the former against the latter secured them a home in exile and laid the foundations of today’s federal Australian state; but at the expense of the natives, who found themselves sold ever further down the river.

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But before any European stepped foot on its shores, Australia had long lived a double life of its own. This is among the oldest, largest, flattest, and driest masses of land in the world.

A home of extraordinary life and wealth: a hotbox of evolutionary weirdness, teeming with floral and faunal idiosyncrasies – and, in places, a natural cemetery, its biodiversity matched only by its capacity to kill. Australia was not impressed by the arrival of the white man, and summarily dispatched him with various extremes of season, weather, and venomous beast. Those it did not starve by crop failure, finish by flashfire, wither by poison, exhaustion or thirst, it whittled by killing off what little livestock was reared in those early years of settlement.

Sidney Nolan painted many versions of Australia: by air, up creek, small town and desert dune, but it is a slow, murderous homeland that provides the setting of Dust, a suite of 25 etchings published in 1971 after earlier drawings made in the winter of 1954 in London. The originals were in part inspired

by Nolan’s time with the film crew of John Heyer’s The Back of Beyond, the wonderful 1952 docu-drama of one legendary mailman’s journey along the Birdsville Track, a three-hundredmile stretch of stock train road from the tiny eponymous whistle-stop, through the depths of the Australian outback, to the little town of Maree. He met the crew on a travelogue commission from Brisbane’s Courier Mail to document the catastrophic drought then gripping much of rural Queensland and the Northern Territory.

This is desolate country; much of it empty of people and rich in folklore, tyrannical in its unbroken flatness, with nary bush nor bosk thick enough to mask the oppression of the midday sun. The experience burned itself into Nolan’s memory and on his camera film, and in Dust, more than a decade later, he looked to recapture its power in the bite of the etcher’s acid: ‘There is quite a trench...I forget just how deep it was, but more than a thirty-second of an inch. It’s quite deep, so that when the ink is rolled on – or in – it comes out very

embossed. You can run your fingers over it and feel a distinct bump. It looks the opposite of the scrape-method I use to get transparency; the shimmering light in the centre of Australia...but you still get something of the same interpenetration of light.’

Along the trail Nolan encountered dead cattle and horses shrivelled in the sun, their bodies littered across the savannah in a catalogue of inexplicable postures: upended, flattened like canvas and petrified mid-step. Some, the drowned victims of last year’s seasonal monsoons, were now found perversely suspended from trees after the evaporation of the bogland water. Many had died not from the heat, but during the freezing nights, only to be discovered still huddled in the morning, where they were left to bake. Jackaroos – young stockmen – were unable to transport herds for agistment elsewhere; railroad connections then were rudimentary, and the area affected covered virtually every breeding ground of the Australian cattle industry. Paralysed with indecision whether to bring water to the cows or the cows to water (what water could be found), a million and a quarter animals perished over the duration of the drought, more than a fifth of them stranded needlessly along stock routes.

Greatly affected by what he found, Nolan took over 60 photographs of these mummifying corpses, ‘strewn on the baked and cracked plains.’ As it had done to weekly reporters on the disaster, it seemed to him an event of almost providential significance: ‘There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.’

Such conditions have long favoured wilier survivalists.

Australia’s native monitors, its corvids, its dingoes, are all scavengers; their adaptation to its harsher climes, and their persistance through drought and desiccation, succeeding like bushrangers on the failures of others, have made a long and

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cruel mockery of attempts to turn Australian savannah land, some of it the least fertile in the world, into sites for rearing cattle. In a print titled Mulka, after a cattle ‘station’ or reservation off the Birdsville Track, Nolan gives us a tree top that could be mistaken for the wing-sweep of a buzzard or crow; the rusty frame of an abandoned plough or camp bed its carrion.

Returning to the source material of photographs and drawings twenty years on, the parallels between the phenomenon and the etching process felt inescapable: the ‘heat’ of the acid – now chemical, not solar – sears the surface of the plate, dissolves and digs into it and fossilises its image in metal, much as the drought had left its cracks in the earth.

As the name Dust would have us know, this is a series about death: a lifeless landscape where living things are returned, ‘ashes to ashes’, to the hard earth. Horns and bones, plucked clean of meat, stick up out of the dirt like ossified landmarks, like dead trees, like skull-and-cross-bone signposts in scrubland. In places the bite is so deep, the etching ‘trench’ so broad, it as if the acid had burned through the plate onto the page and the print were now bleeding out before you, like a photograph peeling in the fire: a corrosive warping, leaching, smearing, grimacing.

There is a strange and eerie openness to the landscape of Dust, which to foreign eyes might appear imaginary; a Surrealist scantiness, like those grand sandbox arenas of de Chirico, Dali and Magritte, but in fact anyone who has flown by plane over Central (known colloquially as ‘Empty’) Australia, as Nolan did in the late 1940s, or who has ridden out into the desert by truck, or has seen some of the extraordinary photographs he took, will know that this is a more or less realistic depiction of the boneyards the outback becomes in high summer. It is a setting which is decidedly lunar; which television scientists have, in recent years, used to make more real to us the waterless landscapes of Mars or the Moon.

Architecture – man’s ultimate imposition – stands ridiculous

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in this terrain: colonial-era townships and soapbox verandas with all the permanence of a cereal packet. Their scrappiness serves to remind us of the politics of this place; the history of the formerly dispossessed striving, in these least habitable reaches, to carve their own niche, much like those entrepreneurial rangers who crossed the mid-west of America to stake a claim, only to be met with the vicious realities of frontier affray: indigenous genocide, the hardened cull or be killed mentality with which America is still desperately trying to come to terms even to this day.

Bewildered by the hugeness, the vast apathy of the land before them, frontiersmen arriving in the Wild West struggled fiercely to impose some sense of European manners on an utterly uncaring wilderness, with fatal consequences for the ‘primitive’ natives they found already living there. Their passage was adopted in later years as the defining moment of America’s foundation myth; its settlers, cowboys, and sheriffs enshrined in legend as its first celebrities. But in Australia, there was only one major equivalent figure: Ned Kelly, a name so synonymous with Nolan’s that you cannot think of one without the image of the other.

Artist and bushranger shared an immigrant heritage: Kelly, the son of a pig-rustler father and a migrant – that is to say, not criminal – mother, both of Irish stock. Part brawler, part poet manqué, today he would probably be described as a ‘delinquent youth’, born in the same month as the notorious Eureka Stockade incident, in which prospecting miners rebelled against administrators’ efforts to quash ‘illegal’ mining on Crown land at the height of the Victorian gold rush. In this turbulent social context, the young Kelly soon took to crime.

While under the employ of senior bushranger Harry Power he was arrested several times by police and brought before magistrates for counts of rustling and pilfery, much of which he certainly committed, much he patently did not; an injustice that quickly instilled in him a hatred of authority figures. After serving a hard labour sentence for two years, Kelly returned

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to rustling until 1878, when a fracas with a constable at the Kelly household saw his mother arrested for attempted murder and a like charge brought against Ned and his brother, Dan, neither of whom were likely there. In retaliation, the infamous Kelly gang foursome was formed; embarking on bank robberies, station raids, hotel hostages, and brutal confrontations with police and informants, they racked up sizable bounties over a two-year period. In a move that highlighted the social inequities of which the Kelly episode became the paradigm, the police even employed black aboriginal trackers (with the promise of rewards which they never received) to help root out the Irish Kelly gang. Eventually, the Kellys were subdued during a prolonged showdown at a Glenrowan hotel: two of the four were shot dead, and Kelly (riddled, the story goes, with 28 bullet holes in his body) was dragged before the authorities. When the judge – the same who had sentenced his mother – completed his sentencing with the customary ‘May God have mercy upon your soul’, Kelly is supposed to have replied, ‘I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there where I go.’ He was hanged at 25 and a half – and within 8 months the judge followed him to his grave.

Thug, begrudging bandit, or revolutionary martyr, Kelly’s place in Australian history is still in dispute. But just as you cannot think of Nolan without Kelly, Nolan could not conceive of an Australia without its most famous underdog; and so he reappears here in Dust with reassuring inevitability, somewhere between phantom and cardboard effigy, conjured from the country’s past and propped up among this barren landscape, his spirit to inhabit forever the brush of ‘Kelly country’.

Heroism and defiance, in both the indigenous population and the European exiles who settled here, defines Nolan’s Australia. The legend of Kelly lies at the heart of that strain of his art, but he drew on native myth too. The Wandjina

petroglyphs in Kimberley, Western Australia, are among the earliest aboriginal murals to have survived their 4000-year history. Made with red, yellow and black pigment on white ground, these images of celestial creators were repainted continually to ensure their persistence and power, and to herald, or to encourage, the coming monsoon rains. There are conscious parallels with these paintings in Dust: the etching plate as a hard, talismanic medium, the layered and layered painting mirrored in the continual re-inking of an edition. But Nolan’s equivalents portend no such deluge; they are not mythological dreams of reverence but a scorched record of persistence, one often futile, in the face of environmental and ecological heat death.

For one so invested in myth and mythicism, dread realism is the decisive thrust of Dust. The heroism of Kelly flounders in the upfront bathos of the country, a mean indifference that even his spectre cannot outdo. Looking back on the drought and carcass paintings and the photographs which inspired them, Nolan was reminded of seeing the calcified remains of the victims of Pompeii: ‘I feel that maybe this is the fate that awaits Europe.’

What, then, would he make of the fires raging across Australia today? A tenth of New South Wales national parks under bushfire, a fifth of the Blue Mountains aflame, 2 million hectares burnt in 6 months? Would we have paintings of a new Australia, in the grips of a very 21st century crisis: smoke blankets over Sydney, or the citizens who dragged the charred remains of their houses to protest at the foot of Canberra’s Parliament House – carcasses of a new and chilling kind. Or might he point us to Dust, and to the photographs before it, to say ‘we have been here before; I have shown you already’ – and, perhaps, finding an indifference not of climate but of human corporations to blame, invoke Kelly one more time: ‘I will see you there where I go.’

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swoonsambhAvna What an extraordinary evolution the career of Caledonia Curry (trade name ‘Swoon’) has seen over the last twenty years. In 1999, while attending the Pratt Institute of Art, Swoon first took her work to the streets, wheatpasting her block-printed paper portraits to little noticed and neglected corners of the city – and becoming one of the first internationally known female street artists in the process.

The simple aim was to bring art to the people; to make it more accessible, and give life to unloved public spaces. Over a long period of discovery by museums, art institutions, and collaborators, that goal has morphed into a powerful series of activist projects in aid of numerous causes: rehabilitation, climate emergency, political protest, and public celebration.

Street art as a genre – if you can call it that, so impulsive, unpredictable, and organic an art form it is – often weaponises itself (and often rightly) as cynical critique. Swoon’s does none of that. It is totally human at its core: reflecting and confronting themes of therapy and addiction, poverty, homelessness, and motherhood, all of which have touched her closely – sometimes painfully closely, as with her own mother’s self-destructive descent into substance abuse.

Most of all, Swoon’s art – almost all of it portraiture – is a reflection of people. Cities are the living, architectural embodiment of people; people working together, clashing together, jostling for literal and representative space, all the while struggling to find common ground and collective prosperity. So it is strange that, given the visual real estate taken up by billboards, LED adverts and superscreens suspended in city centres, so little of the imagery seen by everyday citizens mirrors the lives of people themselves.

Swoon’s is a quiet, contemplative corrective of that fact. Her portraits are supremely local; either of people she has met on trips abroad or of intimate personal friends, but they have a universal strength. On the sides of buildings, or installed hanging from gallery ceilings, they are a modern hagiography: everyday saints of the city.

The three girls of Sambhavna – curious and shy – Swoon found during her travels in India in 2009. Two years later, she spent a residency working directly with the Goldmark Atelier on editions for Black Rat Press and their 2012 ‘Printmaking Today’ exhibition. Like all of her work, the trio soon took on a life of their own elsewhere: you might find them peering from the walls of inner New Orleans, or Juarez and Oaxaca in Mexico, on a Hong Kong tram, or peeling from a Melbourne alleyway.

An original proof still stands watch in the Goldmark Atelier, like angels overseeing future projects.

This is just one of their many lives; a process that begins on the linoblock but can go anywhere: cut like lace into paper, wheatpasted, or transferred at scale to giant, brown paper prints, or collaged in delicate assemblies such as this.

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pablo picasso

la cĂŠlestine 26 |

In 1965 the 84 year old Picasso underwent major surgery, followed by a period of convalescence and slow recovery.

The effect upon his work was predictably traumatic: this giant of 20th century art was forced to consider his own mortality both physically and artistically.

Picasso characteristically responded with a formidable productiveness, and in the final years of his life he applied himself with an absolute single-mindedness and energy that produced an extraordinary body of work. The 66 original etchings done for La Célestine are part of Picasso’s 347 Suite, a collection of 347 etchings and aquatints generated in a furious creative frenzy; the 87 year old artist turned out etchings at the rate of virtually two a day between March 16th and October 5th 1968, a mere seven months.

The La Célestine suite are illustrations, or more accurately a response to one of the most significant works in Spanish literature, properly known as La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, a dramatized novel written by Fernando de Rojas and published in Burgos in 1499. Picasso had been familiar with the work since adolescence and in later life he collected various rare editions. The tale revolves around Celestina, an aged matchmaker whose corruption knows no bounds as she resorts to pulling one ruse after another in order to further her position.The old procuress and her

La Célestine etchings shown actual size

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hedonistic band of prostitutes, corrupt servants, clerics, officials, swaggering pimps and courtiers inhabit scene after scene driven by gross self-interest. The bawdy lewdness of the La Célestine plot is evident from its beginning, as is its account of selfish human indulgence, and the reader is the voyeur of all their sordid dealings.

Picasso had become an old man; but he was as proud as ever, he loved women as much as he ever had, and following the operation he faced the absurdity of his own relative impotence. He summed this up in a comment he famously made to Brassaï, the Hungarian-French photographer.

“Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to reach into my pocket and offer you a cigarette, even though I know very well that neither of us smokes any longer. Age has forced us to give it up, but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it anymore but the desire for it is still with us.”

The acceptance of his own ‘castration’ was a challenge to his considerable pride; and, coupled with the isolation from the world in the villa at Mougens (a consequence of his monstrous fame), condemned him to a singlemindedness without escape. John Berger describes the aged Picasso as having a kind of mania, which took the form of a monologue. A monologue addressed to the

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practice of painting, and to all the dead painters of the past whom he admired or loved or was jealous of. The monologue was about sex. Its mood changed from work to work, but not its subject. La Célestine, with its frank sexual content and contemplation of waning sexual potency, was the perfect vehicle for this expression. Sexual symbolism had always been one of the principle elements of Picasso’s work, and La Célestine confronted man’s and woman’s most basic impulses and passions. Picasso omits and suppresses nothing. It seems certain that late in his life he considered Rojas in much the same way that he was dialoguing with the greats of art history, transforming their work according to his own interests, turning Rojas’ Celestina into his Celestina.

This return to a “romantic narrative” was also a reaction against the waves of conceptual and theoretical “art” that was all the rage in avant-garde circles in the late 1960s.

Picasso firmly rejected the notion “anyone can be an artist, and anything can be art” and his resistance took the form of a period of Herculean creativity that pointed the way back to an aesthetic beauty, technical brilliance and the narrative of art history.

The dazzling technique displayed in La Célestine is part of this response and was facilitated by the celebrated printmakers the Crommelynck brothers, Aldo and Piero.

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They began their association with Picasso in 1961 at the rambling La Californie house and studio near Cannes, and when Picasso moved to Notre Dame de Vie in the Cannes countryside the Crommelyncks followed, opening Atelier Crommelynck in an old bakery in nearby Mougins. The brothers came with a formidable reputation having worked with the likes of Braque, Miro and Giacometti. As ever, once Picasso had got his teeth into a project his aides were sucked into the vortex. The brothers devoted their entire efforts to coping with Picasso’s graphic output until his death in 1973, producing 700 engravings over this period often working through the night and proofing successive stages so Picasso could continue working on the plate the following morning. They were staggered at Picasso’s command of the technique, commenting: “He never ceases exploring…The astounding rapidity of his hand, combined with an equal quickness of mind… enable him to accomplish in a single operation what others would be obliged to spread over several phases.”

For Picasso, printmaking was an art in itself, and from1963-65 in collaboration with the Crommelyncks he refined a system of creating a whole range of whites, greys and blacks by biting his aquatints directly by hand. Working on the copper plate demanded concentration: conscious attention and the hand are absorbed by a difficult piece

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of work which is craftsmanlike and physical; this tense application allowed the imagination to operate more freely.

Picasso manipulated the sugar lift aquatint technique by greasing the copper plate, which produced a droplet like texture which enabled him to play with light and shade without varying the strength of the black. This remarkable technique worked with extraordinary effect in plates such as Conversation and Homme à la Pipe Assis, Maja et Célestine. The skill appears to be a matter of course; one is seduced and intrigued by the balance, the rhythm and the meaning. Picasso was so in command of his craft that he only had to leave it to do its work and the details took care of themselves. The economy of means is magical.

Coupled with this supreme technical skill is the highly personal and facile drawing ability of the artist’s later years.

In the La Célestine etchings, the scenes are lively and articulate, the prints almost hurried in their execution, antimodern in their crudity and seemingly as debased as their lewd subject matter. Picasso was retreating from his modernist innovations of the past. Instead of the polished Cubist compositions that were expected, viewers were confronted with what appeared to be an old man’s gratuitous scribbling of an erotic sort. However this hasty approach, as seen in Fuite à L’Aube or Enlévement, à Pied, avec la Célestine, perfectly captures the bawdy content

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and humour of the Célestine text and gives extraordinary life to these tiny works of art. Indeed the clever distribution of brush stroke layers in all shades between light and dark, and the enormous variety of mark making, produces a pandemonium for the senses.

On viewing this suite in its entirety it becomes apparent that what inspired Picasso most was the lovers' meetings arranged by Celestina and held in her presence.

His desire – still very much with him – now finds its gratification in the depiction of love making and amorous play and he cast himself as narrator and observer rather than the participant identifying with the aged Célestine, whose waning abilities don’t permit her to take part in the kind of sexual encounters she arranges.

These later prints are about telling stories, and telling about himself. In Petit Vieux Flatté par la Célestine, Picasso’s naked self portrait depicts an old man in front of warm, fleshy, genial life, forced into the role of mere observer. The image is unabashed; he stares back at the viewer naked and resigned.

The suite is full of scenes of exposure and inspection, enormous nudes dominating the scene exposing themselves unashamedly and staring directly at us. Picasso delighted in their brazen attitude, capturing them at their most base and carnal, and he celebrated it. His voyeurism represented a fervent homage to life itself.

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Humour and parody runs through the suite; there is an intermingling of high and low life, courtly life as compared to mankind in the raw, musketeers and noblemen depicted as voyeurs or worshippers. The cavalier genuflection of the well mannered suitors entering the boudoir with the flourish of a synchronised bow, focused in on the centre of pleasure of the audacious dominating nude in Trois Mousquetaires Saluant une Femme au Lit, is both a nod to the art of the old masters and a wonderful comment on the paradox of the human condition.

Pablo Picasso was an unparalleled force of creativity who continued to invent and reinvent throughout his life pushing the boundaries of art to new extremes.It is a mark of his incredible power as an artist that this thirst for innovation never tired; he continued to paint, draw, etch and sculpt with incredible energy until the end of his life. It is their sheer bravura, honesty, wit and imagination of these ‘late works’ that makes them so fascinating and enduring. Suite 347 was a ‘succès de scandal’. Exhibited simultaneously in Paris and Chicago in 1968, it is now viewed as an outstanding artistic and technical achievement, unique in the annals of engraving.

Fiona Goldmark

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Kill Your Darlings

michael Rothenstein In 1965 Julie Christie (she of Doctor Zhivago fame) won an Oscar for her era-defining turn as actress Diana Scott in John Schlesinger’s Darling. In the titular role, Christie’s Scott is a young mini-skirted model who, bored with her husband, engages in a series of affairs passing from bookish lover Robert Gold, a TV arts director (played by Dirk Bogarde) to Laurence Harvey’s cucumber-cool ad exec Miles Brand, who starts to get her acting work after she first has sex with him. Eventually both relationships sour, and left with apparently no alternative, Scott relents to the approaches of middle-aged Italian prince Cesare, who promptly abandons her in his palace to a coterie of doting servants.

As a central performance, and as a film that in its moral atrophy captures the failings of London’s swinging sixties, it was a triumph – but it did no wonders for the many single young women in the mould of its central character. In one now famous dance routine (to the knowingly chosen crooning tune of ‘Someone to talk to’ by the Breakaways), Christie revolves, hip-shifting, around the room, always ending up inevitably back with Harvey, her nervous hands snaking and peeling over his shoulders as they come together. At one point he lures her in, ever so slowly, for a kiss, only to softly peck at her, detach, put her back in the middle of the room. She sways around him as he drinks, her hands longingly clasped to her arms as if shivering from the cold.

It’s a beautifully constructed bit of filmmaking that stands up to contrast with Rothenstein’s Christie print: here too she is a bird caged, under the dominion of an ever-preyful cockerel, bound in a prison of printed wood. It is typical of Rothenstein that the particular discoveries of child and adulthood – the bright, cock-of-the-walk braggadocio of the rooster, and the ‘violent’ impress of cut timber – become the prism to this meditation on predation. It is an image that skewers the still prevalent mood surrounding the fragility of women’s careers in Hollywood, a vulnerability that was never

helped by that decade’s emphasis on individual permissiveness and social laxity. By the close of the film, Christie’s ‘darling’ is left rebounding from relationship to relationship like a puck in some very sorry pinball machine, with about as much agency, pinging from apartment to club to party to palazzo.

If the template of Darling seemed familiar, it was only 10 years earlier that Marilyn Monroe had set the standard for young women abused by the media industry. Her career bears striking similarities to Scott’s: model turned actress, compelled to give sexual favours for a leg-up in the business, only to be exploited by sleazy producers throughout the height of her career. So closely controlled were her film contracts, that to leverage some negotiating power with executives she was forced to found her own production company, and even then failed to evolve her on-screen persona beyond free-wheeling sex symbol. When, on the morning of August 5th, 1962, her body was discovered in her Brentwood home, the papers did not take long to find their angle: ‘Marilyn Monroe Kills Self: Found Nude in Bed…Hand On Phone…Took 40 Pills’ ran the New York Daily Mirror front page. Her death was a depressing repeat of that of Jean Harlow, the original ‘Platinum Blonde’ of the 1930s, who at just 26 died from kidney failure mid-

view more Michael Rothenstein at goldmarkart.com

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production on a film, after a gruelling schedule of six pictures in almost as many months. Monroe had been in talks to play Harlow in a new biopic before her suicide.

Rothenstein had 15 years to digest this moment in media history. He had the already established iconography of Warhol, who had single-handedly made Monroe into the Mona Lisa of her age. Rothenstein’s rendition is almost a rebuttal to Warhol’s giant, technicolour head. Here Monroe barely fits her boxed frame on the page; her raised arm, meaty in the abstract, like a flexing thigh, pressed against her face and obscuring her famous hair. Below the rough expanse of dark blue and black splatter ink runs a quote from Cartier-Bresson: ‘She’s American, and it’s very clear that she is – she’s very good that way – one has to be very local to be universal.’

There is a sinister, unspoken subtext to ‘local’ here: to be universal, any man had to think he had a shot. Monroe’s ex-

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husband, Arthur Miller, put it rather more tragically: ‘She was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.’

The last in this unofficially connected trio of prints cites a story that could almost be the real-life sequel to Christie’s Darling. It depicts, front and centre, Anna Fallarino (misnamed ‘Succione’), the trophy wife of husband Camillo, the Marchesi of Casati Stampa di Soncino (an old Milanese noble family).

Having bought the annulment of Fallarino’s previous marriage (purportedly a billion lire deal – a warning sign, if ever there was one), Camillo, an impotent candaulist, would encourage his wife to have sex with strangers invited to their mansion.

When he discovered she had struck up an affair with one such lover, beach boy Massimo Minorenti, he shot them both with a rifle before turning the gun on himself.

In a particularly morbid turn of events, the erotic

photographs of his wife kept by Camillo were slipped by police to members of the media, who immediately – and shamelessly – published them in the aftermath among Italy’s crasser tabloid outlets. In Rothenstein’s version, one of these many ‘snaps’ is used. His setup, with the two repeated panels either side, mimics an altarpiece or reliquary box: and Fallarino, her crucifix slung conspicuously between her exposed nipples, is made a martyr of an age of ‘soft’ porn sensationalism and sexual violence.

As with many of Pop’s more mercurial figures, Rothenstein was remarkably prescient of the impact mass media would have on the confusion of our private spheres. ‘We lead our own life with its very definite restrictions,’ he remarked in conversation with art historian Mel Gooding, ‘with its own kind of scale, and on the other hand, we move out, through television, into this immense world without boundaries, but

it's a shadow world; we move between these shadows of this inimitable space, an inimitable variety of action, people, scenes, landscapes, constantly shuffling between this immensity of the shadow world, back into the tininess of our own private world.’

Here Rothenstein was talking about one-way television; but the powerful backlash of the #MeToo movement could hardly have happened without a two-way Twitter, where private and public collapse, to turn those thousands of ‘tiny’ lives and private, individual experiences, into a single voice against monolithic figures like Harvey Weinstein, outing the casting couch not as a ‘droit de seigneur’ myth but an all too familiar reality. What a Rothenstein take on social media’s reshaping, and regulation, of celebrity might look like, we can never know; but from these equally hard-hitting and poignant prints, we can hazard a guess whose side he might be on.

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john piper vIn the winter of 1937, Alexander Calder performs for his hosts, John and Myfanwy Piper, his now world-famous mechanical Circus.

He had likely first met John in 1934, when Piper went to Paris with his first wife to visit the studios of its resident abstractionists; then John and Myfanwy’s AXIS, the first British journal dedicated (with diminishing strictness) to abstract art, published the earliest reviews of his work in the country. After a holiday with Calder and his wife Louisa in Varengeville in the summer of 1937, the Pipers invited their new friend to visit their home and studio. He was not the only artist guest that summer: Naum Gabo and Moholy-Nagy, both decidedly out of place in the English countryside, came too, and the rather brusquer Fernand Léger, who, Frances Spalding reveals in her biography of the Pipers, ‘complained at the lack of cows’ as he painted the surrounding south Bucks scenery.

By November, Calder was making preparations for a London show the following month. In the backyard of Fawley Bottom, the Pipers’ rundown country residence, he assembled and painted one of his ‘stabile’ sculptures, where it was to return permanently after the exhibition.

America’s pioneer engineer-sculptor, in the front room of a house called ‘Fawley Bottom’, setting up miniature trapezes and wire clowns; if you can hold that image in your head, then you can get to the heart of John Piper’s strange and still much-misunderstood bestriding of the worlds of continental avant-gardism and eccentric English reserve. He

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view more John Piper at goldmarkart.com

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was at once an art radical and a traditionalist; modernist and man of whimsy. By the same token, here, in this intimate art historical vignette, you find the contradictions innate to Piper’s Brighton Aquatints: a series quite unlike any other Piper produced in his lifetime.

As a suite – as a publication – it is entirely out of sorts: twelve bound etchings produced in the 1930s, when the etching market was by common consensus dead on its feet; and a guidebook of the kind last produced with any great verve in the mid19th century, one quite unlike the Shell County Guides series Piper’s friend, John Betjeman, had dreamt up in the early 1930s, and to which Piper had supplied an equally individual account of the hidden treasures of Oxfordshire.

Much of what made Brighton the tourist draw it had become – the grand hotels, sweeping piers, and outlandish Regency projects – were built at the height of the tour-guide trade, when Murray’s, Black’s, and continental rivals Baedeker were household names (providing the households were wealthy, upper-middle class).

The town, with its quirky architectural melange and rough-and-tumble reputation, had evidently charmed Piper; in ‘The Nautical Style’, published in Architectural Review, Piper set out his paean to this ‘proper background for popular English seaside life’: ‘The great yellow and white façade is ranged along the Parade, to face the incoming breakers. The piers, the fishing boats pulled up on the shingle, the bandstands and shelters…bow windows and porticoes, the wide pediments and barge boarded bays…curves and sweeps… all these keep up the seaside spirit. They make thousands of people remember

Brighton, and long to return to it…’

Lured away from the abstract collages he was then making on beachfronts, the aquatints marked an important milestone in a very slow, and very steady, disentanglement from abstraction. He began tentatively with oils of Brighton and Hove, and from there – at John Betjeman’s instigation – moved to the proposition of an etching series.

The friendship with Betjeman (then a journalist by career, and a poet in private) was one of several important associations Piper made in the 1930s with writers and contributors on the roster for Architectural Review, the other important acquaintance of the time being James ‘Jim’ Richards (husband of painter Peggy Angus). Richards, who in the same year had penned the accompanying text to Eric Ravilious’ High Street, was critical in lending his expertise to the series. Together, in 1938, he and Piper had driven around the country cataloguing the more obscure, unsung aspects of English architectural vernacular: neglected chapels, brick walls, and pub interiors, cameras and notebooks in hand.

A similar approach was made in Brighton, where the pair meandered through the town noting both exemplary and idiosyncratic passages of civil planning. Some of the less obvious views of the suite – the ‘mixed styles’ of Regency, Victorian and ‘Modern’ lodging houses off Brunswick Terrace, or the vista from the station yard, with a great field of terraced houses below – came directly at Richards’ suggestion. As with High Street, there is a like levity and care of observation shared between the two series, though in medium, and therefore touch, they are quite different. In the Brighton prints the quality of the line is not unlike

In the wonderful grain of the aquatint they have almost the feel of hand-coloured daguerreotypes, or cabinet-card photographs; the black border of First Avenue Hotel

like that produced when contact printing camera film, or the oval crop of Brunswick Terrace and Regency Square

like late Victorian photographic mounts.

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Bawden’s early etchings: feather-light and spare, well contrasted with the salty texture of the aquatint (Bawden had in fact already etched a view of the palace pier, and followed up Piper’s suite with his own linocut revisitations of Brighton in the mid to late1950s).

In making his synopsis of the town, Piper had few preliminary examples to work from.

Turner had of course visited extensively, famously surveying the seafront at length in an extended stay in 1824, and made wide, panoramic, oil and watercolour painted views from sea of the Chain Pier (collapsed in a storm in 1896), the waterfront bathed in a heady, golden glow. One such seascape was translated by engraving in the collected Picturesque Views, but here the town is virtually illegible, recorded only at a hazy distance (intriguingly, the typography used in the Brighton Aquatints, common to bound books of engravings from this period, is virtually identical to that in the Turner suite, which he started to compile around the same time as his Brighton sojourn).

This was the first time Piper had used aquatint, and its success is no doubt indebted to the aid of technicians at the Royal College of Art, whom he sought out of hours in the latter months of 1938.

Sketches for the prints were made during the winter of that year; so while the hand colouring of a select 55 sets (of which these illustrated are one) took place nearly eight months later, the overwhelming mood of the suite is of typically British drizzle and bluster. Far from ‘London-bythe-sea’, Piper’s winter Brighton is empty of tourists. In the wonderful grain of the aquatint they have almost the feel of handcoloured daguerreotypes, or cabinet-card

photographs; the black border of First Avenue Hotel like that produced when contact printing camera film, or the oval crop of Brunswick Terrace and Regency Square like late Victorian photographic mounts.

Piper and Betjeman shared a kind of architectural knowledge more akin to private collectors than academics; a sense of place and setting that was equal parts personal, idiomatic, and carefully curated, rather than drily objective and analytic. The whole publication has an air of pastiche, or of pretence to an age that it did not have.

Piper supplied descriptive, conversational paragraphs for each plate of the kind he had penned for Architectural Review

articles, ‘expressed rather in the manner of a postcard to an intelligent godchild’ (Piper scholar David Fraser Jenkins, aptly construing the manufactured element of faux-seriousness in the suite.) But the real triumph was in Betjeman’s convincing Lord Alfred Douglas – washed-up ex-lover of Oscar Wilde, and Brighton resident – to provide the publication foreword. Lord Douglas’ contribution was quite unexpected: a strange, highly intimate account of his father’s sombre disregard for his children, mediated through recollections of trips to the Pier and Aquarium (‘[which] invariably involved being handed sums of money grossly in excess of what would have been sufficient for the purpose’), and littered

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with stupendously opinionated, Wildean turns of phrase (a favourite: ‘in the summer months it is invaded by a huge army of “the unwashed of Ipswich” (that is to say, metaphorically speaking, for of course, they have no actual connection with Ipswich) and “the front” becomes almost impassable and quite intolerable.’).

After the scandal of Wilde’s public outing, Douglas had retired to Brighton where he lived alone in a loveless marriage. The hometown he describes is at times a rather depressing place, where ‘painful cases’ and ‘grave charges’ of murder and other crimes are ‘not infrequently associated with it in the reports in the papers’ (the famous Brighton ‘Trunk Murders’ of 1934 saw ‘The Queen of Watering Places’, as the town was nicknamed by the poet Horace Smith, blackly renamed ‘The Queen of

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Slaughtering Places’). But in its final paragraph, in a reflection that captures some of the delicate melancholia of the prints, he describes (with gallows humour) the nostalgia of its Victorian delights: ‘I had almost forgotten all this till I saw Mr Piper’s aquatints and discovered that the Brighton of my youth is still in existence, and that nearly all the old landmarks remain exactly as they were. If only I were fourteen instead of nearly seventy, no doubt I could easily recapture that first fine careless rapture of the middle ‘eighties and the early ‘nineties. It is probably still there if one could only come by it. In any case, I noticed that in the long run nearly everyone ends by coming to live (and die) in Brighton. When I say ‘everyone’, I mean, of course, just what the papers mean when they announce that ‘everyone now agrees’ that so-and-so is the

case. I mean that I could give at least a hundred cases of people I know, among what Paris newspapers used to call les Highlifers, turning up late in life and announcing that they now live in Brighton. Refreshing myself with another glance through Mr Piper’s aquatints, and looking back with my mind’s eye to Oriental Place, I arrive at the conclusion that they might easily do worse.’

Having decided to hand-colour 55 of the printed sets, Piper was faced with the unenviable task of painting 660 prints, to more or less the same design, over a period of months. To speed up the process, the task was shared out among various guests at Fawley Bottom, the etchings spread out along the dining room table where Piper showed his helpers how to finish each print (according to Jenkins, the entire run of Brighton Station Yard was painted by Betjeman over the summer of 1939).

In the colours themselves, Piper anticipated the wartime paintings only a few years down the line, including those images of smoking Coventry Cathedral, when the dark maroons, blues, yellows, and soot blacks captured a sense of ruinous foreboding. Here, they are but the final touch in confirming the strange, and still somewhat irreconcilable, anti-modernism of the project, embarked on in this period of such rich exchange with fellow avantgarde artists and breakers of convention.

Piper’s first biographer, Anthony West, wrote to the artist during the final stages of his draft to say that he had been faced with a difficult balance to make between ‘abstract knowledge Mr P., and the old mossy gothic Mr P.’; in the Brighton Aquatints, this in-between suite, we get precisely that.

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New Exhibition in February

john farrington The strange, grimed and glorious paintings of John Farrington and Edward Burra share a local soul – though they were born to very different worlds.

Burra, the son of a wealthy barrister from a generation of bankers, enjoyed a dull if secure childhood in the picturesque parish of Rye in East Sussex. ‘Put down’ for Eton, he would have attended were it not for a combination of rheumatoid arthritis and pneumonia, which left him crippled with muscular pain. Home-schooled instead, he escaped the suffocation of well-to-do Sussex for Chelsea and the Royal College, then the cheerfully seedy subterranean bars of Parisian nightclubs, Marseillais sailor boys, and Harlem queer culture, all to the razzmatazz tune of New York’s subversive jazz bands. Unable to stand for any length of time, he would feast his eyes then return to Sussex to rework images from memory, almost exclusively in watercolour.

John Farrington, by contrast, never had to leave to find his own thematics. Having never had any money, he couldn’t have had he wished to. Instead it was all there before him: the very grim realities of animal farming (experienced first-hand as a cow and pigman), the vibrant squalor of much rural living, the seasonal misery and majesty of its winter and summer setting, or the infernally weird world of Black Country suburbia; rabid dogs, bird-snatchers, and

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elderly breeders of buckets of frogs. While Burra had to seek his underground out, Farrington had only to live and work in his – and in doing so, has given us among the most powerful of accounts of run down, outand-out, middle-England living.

Come February 15th, Goldmark will be hosting Farrington’s latest retrospective, a quarter-century since first representing his work. He was first brought to Mike Goldmark’s attention by fellow artist Rigby Graham, who discovered a poster for a Farrington show during an overnight stay in the Welsh town of Machynlleth in the early 1990s. They had first met 30 years previously; then penniless, as Graham described, and with little by way of money or materials, Farrington ‘acquired an ability to paint on anything, with anything,’ be it barn door or plywood scrap, pinched from a builder’s skip – ‘a facility which has not entirely left him.’

Farrington is now 86, and, like Burra, unable to stand at length, so with poetic coincidence has himself returned to watercolour. But the paintings on show at Goldmark – vast, profound oils and intimate vignettes of his imagination – will cover an extraordinary decades-long exploration of the contingent kingdoms of man and beast.

This exhibition marks an opportunity for a wider audience to see these colliding worlds from a very special pair of eyes.

Charles tunnicliffe Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe was one of those artists whose work is probably far better known than the name attributed to it – a name which, even in the early years of limited sales and gallery neglect, he promoted only reluctantly.

Yet over a 50-year career, his work became the defining face of British pastorale.

From summer-show paintings of flying ducks, trooping Chinese geese, or shire horses bent to the plough, to the Ladybird nature book covers of the 1960s and ‘70s, to the ubiquity today of cutesy black-and-white illustrators exhibiting in country town gift shops that bear his touch – some of them a surprise; most endlessly disappointing – the influence of Tunnicliffe has changed how we imagine and portray our native wildlife.

A Cheshire lad who, by grace of a scholarship extended to him by the Royal College of Art, ended up a fully-fledged Academician in 1954, Tunnicliffe pretended to a kind of clodhopper straightforwardness that his biography quietly betrays. Though never outwardly academic, his versing in the two subjects to which he devoted his life – art and animals – was deep, reflective, and grounded in empirical observation.

Like the work he shared as a young man on the family farm (from milking to pig-killing), he learnt more in the doing than by abstract theory. In conversation and in published instruction he remained ambiguous and pragmatic: here there is little of the academy painter, concerned with narrative, symbol, or ‘the canon’, but whether it is Bruegel or Blake, in the work – and in illustration especially – his visual command and literacy is there to see.

Animalist or artist; this was the anxiety at the heart of his self-identity, and while the two seem happily reconciled in

the paintings and prints, they appeared irresolvable to many critics during his lifetime. The portrait of Tunnicliffe painted in Robert Meyrick’s 2017 catalogue raisonné of the prints is of a highly talented and misunderstood artist, who, though latterly popular and critically and commercially successful, derived little satisfaction from the lukewarm acceptance he received from either of the two worlds he straddled, those of ‘Fine Art’ and ornithology.

He often described his work as a kind of blue collar labour, like that of a farmer or wheelwright, and drew invariably when questioned about his childhood on an ancestral legacy apparently steeped in the seasonal rituals of the land. Meyrick reveals that in fact his father’s family had been cobblers; and that it was only on a doctor’s advice that Tunnicliffe Senior moved with his wife, the daughter of a farmer, to a homestead near Macclesfield where the young artist-to-be was raised.

When pressed in later interviews on process or philosophy, the implication was always that he could as well have become a farmhand as a painter; and that he wasn’t going to let the mystique of his profession (which he described, rather pointedly, as ‘doing some painting’) get in the way of the subject matter.

That stubbornness, and refusal to be pigeonholed, was famously summed up by Tunnicliffe’s friend, the painter Sir Kyffin Williams: ‘When the world of art was arguing to decide

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what was art and what was not, Charles Tunnicliffe just lived and worked.’ Turning his back to critics both side of the aisle – fine art purists on the one hand, and bird-watcher pedants on the other – Tunnicliffe did just that, retiring in 1947 to the seclusion of Shorelands, a bungalow on the Malltraeth marshes of Anglesey, where he lived with his wife and fellow artist Winifred until his death in 1979. Here the local marshland is fed by the river Afon Cefni, and hosts birdlife sanctuaries which provided no end of inspiration for their latest resident.

Hawks and Falcons – on the face of it, a thoroughly prosaic set of prints – came at the very end of that long period of self-isolation; a suite of ten images, two larger and eight smaller, of a range of sporting falcons in varied poses.

Remarkably, this was Tunnicliffe’s first attempt at lithography, commissioned for a proposed book on falconry to be published by Ron King’s Circle Press, and commercial illustration aside, the first real prints he had produced in over 15 years. In the past, he had found illustrative projects often made demands of compromise. Early book commissions had rejected etchings in favour of line drawings and engravings; the half-tone process required to replicate the depth and breadth of blacks in etching and aquatint was too expensive.

Likewise, paintings for books were often made unnaturally brighter, in the knowledge that four-colour printing would dull them in translation. So it seems strange – perhaps a reflection of his remoteness on Anglesey – that it should have taken him so long to turn to lithography, in many ways the most direct of all printing methods, and certainly the closest in touch and design to actual drawing.

In Malltraeth, Tunnicliffe had made a habit of sketching directly from dead birds, holding their wings out full span while noting and painting the arrangement of feathers, much like a quattrocento anatomist. These studies soon built into a vast personal reference library, invaluable both in honing a

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muscle-memory repertoire of forms and for consulting when unable to meet a subject in the flesh. Undoubtedly they had proved useful in this late project, when ill health likely prevented his accompanying a live hawking. In October 1972 King received two zinc plates in the post with the eight smaller falcons, the images drafted with wax crayon and sharpened in detail with a fine brush and lithographic ink: ‘To tell you the truth,’ read Tunnicliffe’s attending note, ‘I had to swot up my falconry knowledge again. Amazing how much one forgets when one had not been directly in touch with it for some time.’ He had last been involved with the subject in Henry Williamson’s The Peregrine’s Saga and Other Wild Tales, the fourth book by Williamson that Tunnicliffe illustrated (including, most famously, Tarka the Otter). Like Williamson’s text, he refrained from anthropomorphising his subjects. There is no overt human pathos in his animal scenes, no symbolism, no Christian readings of divinity, salvation, and self-sacrifice; just the violent opera of life.

The chivalric falcon, Ronald Stevens tells us, was ‘a symbol, the burnished, steely hard bird of the nobility’, processed through baronial halls and exercised in the demesnes of courtly estates: ‘In the minds of men it took its stand on the summit of the ivory tower of aspiration. It lured the imagination into the realms of fantasy where young manhood put on the armour of virtue to venture through deserts of self-discipline in quest of a fabulous blue falcon or a white falcon of surpassing excellence, symbols of the unattainable that haunt the dreams of men.’ Author of four volumes on the subject, Stevens was a lifelong falconer, renowned not only for his expertise but for conveying the adrenaline joy of the pastime to the public through his writing. To the uninitiated, as most of us are, it is precisely the arcane particularity of the subject that he describes that at once entices and confuses: its strange, age-old language of ‘tiercels’ stooping, eyesses in the eyrie,

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laggars, lanners, sakers and gyrs, ramage falcons and the rousing of feathers.

Among the birds depicted in Tunnicliffe’s suite is Stevens’ very own ‘Gyr Falcon’, one of the two larger images in the series, its berry-black, beaded eyes staring right out from the page at us. In ‘The Taming of Genghis’, Stevens had related the profoundly moving personal tale of his relationship with one trainee falcon, seized in its infancy from the mountains of Iceland and brought back to be trained from the author’s solitary home on the Welsh marshes (the poetic symmetry was likely not lost on Tunnicliffe). First published in 1956, I like to think the artist had a copy beside him when he drew this plate, open perhaps at this passage when Genghis is first liberated from the blackness of his training hood: ‘The hood that Genghis was still wearing was about to be removed. From the time of his capture it had covered his mind with darkness, the darkness of the tunnel through which he is travelling from one life to another. Only for a little time will he glimpse surroundings that will be so weirdly strange to him that he will be relieved to find himself back in the former darkness of the hood…’ ‘…This mews, this ill-lit cave that we are in – is it a tomb, the final abyss that I have dragged him down into? Its chill and silence say it is, and we ourselves are as rigid as a couple of corpses. But the candle’s flame continues to burn no less steadily than it did before, and its light falls upon him and me. For the first time in his new life he sees that we are together. In the teeming sensations of his mind, through the density of amazement and awe, he is trying to grasp the meaning of me, for I have gone far beyond being his captor.’

‘He is staring at me with an intensity that I can feel but not see. I cannot get my eyes up to his for he would see in mine more than he could bear. Falconers do not look their ramage hawks in the eye. But I can see his powerful feet with their

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spreading toes, their petty singles armed with eight black, needle-sharp claws curved like scimitars, and above them his mail, his breast feathers drawn tight by fearful anticipation.

Above that I dare not look. As I am now, so, with downcast eyes, a heathen would contemplate his idol.’

In the end, the costs of the project proved too great to proceed. Tunnicliffe’s plates were shelved until their rediscovery in 1975, when they were printed in sepia and limited to an edition of 90 copies to be issued individually and in collected folios. In the three years since their drafting, the zinc plates had oxidised, making it difficult to print from them. Then a flood at Circle Press premises in the early 1980s irreparably damaged a large number of the prints. Complete portfolios outside private hands, like that offered here, are an increasing rarity.

Like the man himself, the birds of Hawks and Falcons give the appearance of absolute, dead-eye straightness. As with all his work, they are not difficult to read, though invariably they surrender more to enjoy the longer you spend in their company. A falcon’s unwavering directness, often lauded by keepers of birds, is that same which saw Tunnicliffe’s popularity among ‘layman’ appreciators of art. There is no sense of being deliberately deceived, confused, or distanced from some secret, unspoken meaning in his art; the kind of knowing, and more often than not totally vacuous mystification which has seen so many ‘non-art’ people turn against contemporary art and artspeak. Put simply, Tunnicliffe spent a life recording a world which few of us have the time, skill or patience to witness and explore ourselves. That in itself was as powerful a statement as one could make: to hold back from hysterifying the everyday violence of the natural world; from beautifying its uglier, muddier reaches; from indulging sentimental and saccharine comparison, in favour of a sometimes fiercer, brighter, stronger truth.

pots to Give and to hold Even the most ascetic, least material of monks has need of three things: robes, in which to clothe himself; a temple, in which to shelter himself; and a bowl, with which to feed himself.

This might seem a strange message with which to encourage people to buy (and use, and live with, and love) more pots. I wish only to point to the fact that these fundamental necessities, these universal comforts of warmth, protection, and nourishment, are just that: common to us all. And since most of us do not live in saintly abstemiousness, we could treat ourselves to the thought of enriching our experience of them, in whatever way we can.

The preparing, eating, and sharing of food is the important, universal ritual. Beside shelter and warmth, food is the one thing we all need; and that necessity, the one thing we all share. To cook a meal for a fellow human being must be among the most profoundly simple, yet profoundly compassionate and human gifts we can give to one another.

An explosion of information in the last three decades on home cooking and fine cuisine, farming and gardening, foraging and factory producing, has expanded our food horizons exponentially. But while we spend more and more of our energy thinking about what we are going to eat, and where we get it from, few of us have taken the time to think about that other fundamental aspect of how we eat it – in today’s rush-hour, stress-shocked

climate, more often than not at speed, on the go, without savouring it, and from poorly designed, low quality, mass-produced tableware.

Food is far from the only aspect of our lives in which we have focused on substance while neglecting the vessel. Books we once made beautifully, but expensively.

Fortunately, an age where great literature was gatekept by those with enough money to own personal libraries is largely gone, and now virtually anybody with sufficient time and patience in a second-hand bookshop (if they can find one) or, with a little more in one’s pocket, in a high-street book store, can buy any one of a thousand classics. But while we endeavoured to make them accessible, at the same time we stopped caring so much about making them readable. So behind fancy, flashy covers with embossed and reflective text, we find too long line lengths in small, black print, on mean paper, the margins and gutters pushed to the edge of the page in an effort to cut down production costs.

The result is that many of us, an hour or so in, give up on reading these books; the experience becomes too uncomfortable, the struggle to compensate for these typographic flaws not worth the payoff. With

the worst offenders, the experience is headache inducing. More often than not, we mistakenly think the fault lies with us – ‘I am not clever enough for this text’ – when quite the opposite is true.

As with books, we have more freedom in what we choose to eat, whether depending on mood, situation, or ethos, than ever before in our history. Thanks to round the clock, round the calendar supermarket supplies, we have access to virtually any kind of food; and those ingredients too obscure for high street shops (I’m looking at you, Ottolenghi), are now available to us online in the blink of a Google search. In theory, this has opened whole worlds of new ways of eating to us: soft, warming meals contained singly in bowls; small, simple, contrasting dishes for long, drawn out evening feasts, picked at with company long into the night bit, by bit, by bit. The reality is that, paralysed by this plurality of choice, most of us are settled in routines of eating we often long to escape.

The objects we eat from are as intimately connected to the food we consume; but if we sometimes neglect our love of food, we almost universally neglect the things we serve them in. Look at a nation’s pottery, and you will find not just an insight into their

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cuisine, but their national character and values. For Europeans, this has long meant gatherings round high tables, food dished out onto plates; the meal as charity for the thankful, the service an act of grace, rooted in a Christian theme of the spiritual dignity of breaking bread. In Japan, you will find similar customs too, but of an entirely different appearance: this food on that plate; this drink from that bowl; structure, harmony, respect. Today, those customs are so culturally intertwined that the sharing of food in one’s home becomes an intimate expression of personal values. Pots should be central to that expression. Change the vessel, and you change the meal: bowls are to be hugged in the hands, sat in a soft chair, perhaps legs folded; plates and platters to be laid out across a table in jubilant array.

Like mass-produced books, plain, white, machine-made tableware is straightforwardly functional. It is mostly affordable and unobtrusive; and it has given families who would otherwise not have the means the ability to share food with friends and loved ones. But unlike the frayed and folded corners of a much-thumbed edition, or the furiously underlined passages of a poetry volume, or a borrowed copy of a family favourite novel, there is no conversation to be had with plain white plates; no relationship to be explored; no memory to inherit; no variation; no sense of change.

The smell of a new book is matched only by the smell of an old one; change, an object’s ongoing history, is part of its appeal.

Handmade pots change: sometimes a patina of overuse, sometimes in our relationship with an object; a sudden realisation of a detail, an aspect, we had not noticed before. When all your tableware looks the same, there is none of the seasonal, or the random, instinctive, rotation of the kind we do with our food all the time.

Winter calls for those hot, heavy meals,

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made in big pots to last a few days, when motivation to cook as the darkness draws in becomes harder and harder to find. Meals which heat the kitchen through as they simmer on the hob, or roast in the oven. I tend to look to darker pots in winter: glistening black tenmoku, or a wintry nuka on dark clay, like snow on hard soil. Summer calls for more and smaller pots: little bowls for olives and cured meats, salads, meals of picking and plenty, but occasionally there is an impulse to shake things up – winter salads and summer crumbles – or to draw out a pot unused for a time: jet black slipware for crisp, red tomatoes in the height of June, or a pale, delicate porcelain dish to contrast a thick, rustic helping of November pudding. And perhaps the most enjoyable of all, handmade cups, of which one, two, five is never enough. Some handles encourage the hand to hold the mug from the crook of the finger; others ask for the palms to clasp, fingers slipped between cup-wall and handle-nook.

Whatever the design, when it is made by a person, what you have is not an aggregated average – it prompts, rather than demands you work to its specifics. And there is nothing quite like the impish, impulsive rejection of a favourite mug for a ‘second fiddle’, from the dusty back of the cupboard, only to find it become the new go-to staple.

In the 15 years we have been selling pots, we have always sold domestic ware: pots made to live in a home, to serve an immediate use. They are all vessels of one sort or another: to hold, like bowls and plates and cups; and to give, be it jugs or bottles or dishes. We decided to sell them because we had lived with them – and we still do, when we can get our hands on them before our customers do.

Three things: clothes, shelter, and food.

We can’t help with the first two…

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ian Wilkinson

OUR LATE FAMILIARS

We – Mike Goldmark, Ian Wilkinson (Goldmark Atelier’s master printmaker) and I – are looking at Wilkinson’s A Final Supper.

Thirteen mummified figures, photographed in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo in varying states of decay, have by means of a well-known editing suite digitally convened for a familiar BYOB (‘Bring Your Own Body’) evening meal. Wilkinson points to the metal cage on the long table in front of them, within it a tiny skeleton bird: ‘I think I spent something like 24 hours stripping out the space between the bars. So it’s been, at times, a labour of love.’

Supper is spread before us over the front cover of a pre-pub proof of Our Late Familiars, Goldmark’s latest, and certainly strangest, publication to date. Within its satin black jackets are some 60 odd photographic images made by Wilkinson of the catacombed remains: saints and sinners, skin and bones, all still dressed in their finery. Joining them are a host of portentous birds, equally dequipped of mortal flesh, who hang over them like spiritual messengers, bearers of tidings good and ill, or bound in saturnine cages.

Over a long period of gestation, what began

as a private project, reanimating Palermo’s eternally interred, has slowly morphed into something far larger. Acclaimed writer Iain Sinclair (made ‘the kind of Sicilian offer one cannot refuse’) was invited to provide commentary; and unwilling to contend with the unshakeable power of Wilkinson’s work, yet wholly seduced by the plural connections of Palermo – to people, place, and texts – he quickly turned what was to be an attending essay into a five-part, feverdream immersion in a web of tales and a vacation of his own, all within the setting of the 17th century necropolis.

But it is the prints we are here to discuss today, and their unanticipated beginning in an otherwise spur-of-the-moment visitation to Palermo’s underworld city.

Some 400 years past, the local Capuchin brotherhood found its cemetery was at full capacity. New crypts were excavated beneath the existing graves, and its first member experimentally embalmed and vinegared in his Franciscan habit. With time, the practice began to appeal to wealthy families, and an honour once reserved for members of the order was licensed out first to noble Sicilians, then less prosperous applicants. Like medieval Catholic ‘indulgences’, donations for a relative’s upkeep were to be kept frequent and punctual as the friars capitalised on this steady stream of income (when payments were missed, bodies were withdrawn to backroom shelves until the deposits returned). Depending partly on the age of the entombed (among the thousands of remains within the catacombs, they range from infant children to elderly dowagers) and the skill of the embalmer, the skin would tend to leather and last longer than their dress. Families would pay not only to keep their remains there, but to visit and to reclothe them as their garments frayed and disintegrated. The collection today remains a fascinating insight into historical fashion and a spectrum of society ranging from the privileged to the impecunious: from plumstockinged children in neat leather heels, to bodies with feet bandaged in rustic wraps.

For Wilkinson, his first visit prompted a visceral awakening. As a child, he had suffered a recurring nightmare: descending a darkened staircase, he would enter a corridor where, unseen in the shadows, unknown figures whispered about him.

From within the crypts, apparently, one can hear the muffled voices of visitors directly overhead and above ground; one of the

altogether more haunting features of the place. The association of these two katabases – one real and one imagined – proved too strong to ignore. Resolved on a new project, Wilkinson bought himself a camera and over five years returned, sometimes multiple times within one year, to document the subterranean population of the crypts.

This was his first foray into photography, he tells me – ‘And probably my last, too.’

He doubts he will have the tolerance, or the patience, for so long a project again, and the work called for the camera, at a time when in print and paint he was increasingly less satisfied: ‘I didn’t want to lose anything in the translation, or the reconfiguration into paint. It had to be real.’ Photography was the chosen medium; to take up the camera again, he remarks, would dilute what has been a profoundly unique and personal endeavour.

The purism of Wilkinson’s approach, however, posed problems of a more practical kind. Casual snapping aside, he had never used a camera professionally.

More importantly, the potency of his first dream association had to be united with a second – another childhood nightmare of a blackbird alighting on the windowsill, to tell him (without words) that it was ‘time to go’. You will often find birds performing the same rites in these images: conveyors of souls from one life to another, in private communion with their owners about the spiritual journey ahead.

Wilkinson felt instinctively that these two visions, of equal intensity, should be joined.

He tried in vain to photograph birds from life in the wild (‘but could I, fuck!’); but, by lucky happenstance, like the catacombs, life delivered them to him dead in the collapsed chimney breast of a dilapidated farmhouse in the outskirts of Northampton: ‘The chimney was cracked, and behind the hearth you could see hundreds of tiny claws

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and beaks poking round the edges.

Bizarrely, they seem to have built their nests in stacks of straw, one upon the other after the previous lot had died. Pulling away the brickwork, we found them beautifully preserved – perhaps 100 or 200 of them, all on top of each other, and in different poses. Those at the bottom could have been a hundred years old.’

Rehomed in Wilkinson’s studio, these skeletal birds could be photographed at leisure, side-lit with a bright flash against a near-black background – and, with a little digital trickery and minimal handshadowing, interpolated into compositions with their human counterparts. Most appear exactly as they were uncovered, in their incongruous variety of postures – ‘They were quite stiff,’ he notes, ‘though occasionally I broke their necks to get the right angle’ – and all the birds in the series came from the chimney breast (‘Except one,’ he adds, ‘which I mummified myself, and just had to put in’).

The birds and the figures came together with comparative ease, balancing like configurations with like; sympathies in repose. Sometimes that was all it took: a limp, gloved hand and a curled crow’s foot; a supine figure and a bird collapsed in on itself; a nodding head, the folds of the neck still intact, gently depressed and pleated like vellum, and a young chick, its beak delicately, dolefully, downturned. Often he would have a composition in mind, and it was a matter of finding the right players to come together. Other times the portrait absolutely dictated the orchestration. In one, an otherwise well-composed Christlike individual – bristles still stiff on the chin, eyes not yet completely putrefied – has a collapsed skull, the top of his head bizarrely exposed, where a tiny bird has taken to roost: a nesting animus, or a symbol of rebirth. Whatever the composition, it is always the relationship between the bird

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and the human worlds – between otherworlds and our mortal coil – that drives the series.

Birds, corvids especially, have long been associated with death, the soul, and spiritual realms beyond our own. In Wilkinson’s work they are like spiritual porters, sometimes polite and understanding of their hosts, assembling with mourning families about preparations for a lost one. Sometimes their insinuation is only very faint, overlaid with transparency, as if to suggest the thought, rather than the imminent presence of death itself. But always – and how could it not be?

– death is there, pressing against the darkness through its catalogue of cadavered responses: anger, despair, acceptance, and black humour.

Where the birds fell, almost literally, into his lap, Wilkinson had to work for access to the catacombs. Photography in the crypts is strictly prohibited; so, in keeping with the Sicilian theme, it was through his daughter’s contact with ‘a friend of a friend’ that he was introduced to Fabrizio, his very own personal Charon, who, not for an obol in the mouth but a pretty sum, would usher him underground during siesta time (1-3pm) locking the door behind him and leaving Wilkinson alone for his conference with the dead. ‘There is natural light from above, and some floodlighting, so it’s not dark down there. But the idea of being trapped in there with them all just added to the whole experience. One time there was a power cut, and all the floodlights went out. I got some interesting photos in the process, but that was quite something.’

Significantly, Fabrizio was in possession of the catacomb master key. Some of the sections of the crypts are entirely open to tourists, but others, the rows of priests in particular, can be viewed only from a distance. These are some of the most powerful images in the series, if only for the instant recognition their vestments give:

one, an important archbishop from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, his biretta cap, white collar and ruby shirt lovingly preserved and his eyes still largely intact, looks on in pained agony, his silent maw stretched wide, as he contemplates an avian crucifixion of the artist’s own making.

Wilkinson had access to all areas of the catacombs. At his request, an obliging Fabrizio furnished him with a step ladder in order to photograph the corpses on the second rows of alcoves above those at ground level. Even then, many of the figures are protected by metal bars (their shadows appear in some of the shots), some in a tightknit mesh, others a few inches apart, through which Wilkinson could just thread his lens to achieve the image he wanted.

But perhaps the strangest aspect of this project? Wilkinson does not find their company unsettling or disturbing; he takes no perverse joy in their macabre quality, feels no revulsion in their degeneration. ‘It’s like something I can’t switch off – or on. I talk to them while I’m down there. And I have this idea that they’re putting on a performance when the punters come round.

When the doors shut, and the tourists go away, I like to think the party starts; they continue their conversations with a glass or two of vino rosso.’

A synchronised slackening of muscle and tautening of skin has pulled the mouths open on many of the faces, leaving them with cadaverous grins and grimaces, or faces held in mock awe and amazement. ‘There is also that thing of the human skull looking like it is smiling. I’m not sure what it is in us that sees that; perhaps just the bone structure, because of the way it underpins it all. But I’ve always thought they looked like they were smiling.’

For all their ghoulishness, he is right: arranged as they are, in nooks and niches opposite one another, many of them propped up rather than reclining, they do

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share a kind of macabre air of casual conviviality: like market stallholders, orators in a public gallery, or regulars at the local trattoria bickering over their afternoon libations.

But as I talk more with Wilkinson about the compositions, and as we go together

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through their reproductions in the book, it becomes clear he does not simply find these figures amusing, nor that he is insensitive to their gruesomeness; that he sees an extraordinary beauty in their textures, the various impresses and distresses of time, the gradual waning of colour and identity

from body to body. Rather, they seem to him almost like they are alive. For every print, there is a story in his head; a little private vignette, between an imagined life and a spectre of death. He is the mediator, between their world and ours; salvaging their stories from evanescence.

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cover image: detail, John Farrington, The Fox II, oil on board, 2012

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