David Inshaw Naked
David Inshaw Naked Paintings and Works on Paper
20 Cork Street, London W1S 3H L +44 (0)20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com
David Inshaw: Naked Andrew Lambirth
Although primarily known and feted as a landscape painter, David Inshaw has always painted people too. Sometimes in portraits, but he prefers figure painting, and, more specifically, the female nude. Inshaw likes women, their company and physical presence, and has led a richly layered emotional life in pursuit of them. As he says: ‘Women are a mystery. I’ve been looking for the right one for a long time. I’ve not found her yet.’ But they are integral to his work: he draws inspiration for his art from his feelings about women and his relationships with them. Not so much in a direct autobiographical sense, but in terms of finding in his experiences an energy to be released through his paintings. ‘It’s not just to do with looking at something beautiful, it’s also to do with a celebration of the person,’ he says. One commentator observed that nudes for Inshaw are to be experienced spiritually as well as physically. And writing about Samuel Palmer, Geoffrey Grigson identified his yearning for ‘the soul of beauty through the forms of matter’; the phrase is equally appropriate when applied to Inshaw’s quest. This is one side of the argument. However, the sacred must be balanced by the profane, and it is revealing who Inshaw admires amongst the Old Masters on this wavelength. He loves Rubens’ great painting, Helena Fourment in a Fur Wrap (c1636-8), and calls it ‘one of the sexiest pictures ever painted’. Other painters of the figure important to him are Balthus and especially Stanley Spencer. The discerning viewer may identify echoes of these painters in Inshaw’s work, but his very particular artistic personality remains strikingly original.
Helena Fourment in a Fur Wrap, c1636-8 by Peter Paul Rubens, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
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Beatrice Phillpotts 1983-2004 Oil on canvas 69 × 48 in /175 × 122 cm
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Inshaw drew his first nude at Beckenham Art School when he was a teenager. Arriving there in 1959, he was just sixteen years old, and he and his class-mates had been looking forward to learning life drawing. ‘We all thought we’d have a lovely young girl to draw, but we got Mrs Yardley, a 65-year-old Australian woman with huge breasts who would go to sleep when she was posing,’ recalls Inshaw. ‘We also had Quentin Crisp. The boys had to sit at the front when he was the model, even though he wore a posing pouch which was always dirty. I once followed him down Bromley High Street. He had blue hair, was wearing a cape and carried a silver-headed cane. The 47 bus drew up and the driver shouted: “Oy look: it’s the Queen of the Fairies!” Quick as a flash, Quentin replied: “I command you to disappear.”’ At the Royal Academy, to which Inshaw graduated in 1963, all students had to do a term of life drawing to prove their abilities. (The first works here are drawings from this period.) When art school came to an end in 1966, Inshaw took a job teaching art and moved to Bristol. At this point he was doing large text-based paintings which owed a lot to Pop art. Emblazoned with slogans such as Kiss Kiss Kiss or Yes Yes (referring to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses), they are considerably more sexually overt than the nudes he was to paint later. In 1969, reviewing Inshaw’s first solo exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, The Guardian likened his work to contemporary Pop music — ‘the same distilled sexuality and nostalgia for lost love’.
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But this was not the mood or feeling that Inshaw wanted to cultivate. Under the combined influences of the West country, the writing of Thomas Hardy and his new friend Alf Stockham, who had joined the staff at Bristol in 1968, Inshaw returned to painting the figure, often in a landscape context. It was a revelatory period of self-discovery. ‘To me art is an extension of personality and you’ve got to find your personality in order to begin to paint’, he said later. And writing at the time about his choice of subjects: ‘I like ordinary everyday situations best. My experience produced the images and sets them out on the canvas; the spectator provides the story.’ This last phrase is key to any understanding of Inshaw’s work. Hardy wrote of the visionary essence of woman as being full of ‘actualised poetry’, and although this is a quality Inshaw aims to transmit through his canvases, explicit narrative is not. There are stories here but they are left deliberately ambiguous, to allow spectators to read themselves into the paintings. This intimate involvement creates an unusual intensity of response in viewers, and helps to account for the lasting popularity of Inshaw’s images. He has frequently painted friends as models, Corinne Shefford being the first to pose nude for him in 1968. The drawing depicts her seated with her left leg up and her head sunk between her shoulders; not at all glamorous but very real. She also appears as the naked figure giving an
idea of scale in the pencil drawing Study for The Badminton Game. The following year Inshaw painted the beautiful and substantial oil Gillian and a Light Summer Breeze (1973), which was bought by Julie Andrews and is now in America. This painting was closely based on a photograph of his muse Gillian Pollard, one of the models for The Badminton Game (1972), that quintessential Inshaw painting and early masterpiece now in the Tate. (See the publication David Inshaw Photographs, Redfern Gallery, 2022, p36.) The Seventies were rich and productive years for Inshaw, and to this period belong such complex figure paintings as The Letter (1977), loaded with significance and hidden meanings, and compellingly direct drawings such as Robin Lambert (1978), who became his first wife in August 1979. In the face of the growing tide of Abstraction and Conceptual art, a group of like-minded artists including David Inshaw and Peter Blake founded The Brotherhood of Ruralists in 1975 to promote figurative painting and the living tradition of English Romantic art. The Brotherhood’s strategies and endeavours occupied much of Inshaw’s life and energy until he left in 1983. While Inshaw was still a member in the early 1980s, the Ruralists had to decide on a new project and he said ‘Let’s all do nudes!’, a suggestion which was greeted with considerable enthusiasm. The resulting six same-size paintings, by Peter Blake, Ann Arnold, Graham Arnold, Annie Ovenden and Graham Ovenden, as well as Inshaw himself, were included
in Blake’s 1983 Tate retrospective. It was typical of Peter Blake’s generosity that space in his solo exhibition should be given up to the work of his friends and contemporaries, and indicative of the importance that the Ruralist group held for him. The Ruralists, with the characteristic combination of humour and seriousness noted by their historian, Nicholas Usherwood, called this project ‘The Definitive Nude’. Nothing less for them. For his contribution, which was exhibited as work in progress, Inshaw painted a full-length nude portrait of Beatrice Phillpotts, the writer and art critic, whom he had met at a Private View in Brighton with Blake and his daughter. ‘I wrote to her and asked if she would be my nude’, Inshaw recalls. ‘She didn’t write back and I thought I’d blown it. Then I got a letter out of the blue saying she’d been away all summer in Greece and she’d love to do it.’ In the painting, Beatrice is shown looking off to the left, perhaps into her memory, but she is certainly distanced from whatever significance can be read into the rest of the image. Around her is an immaculately painted and lavishly coloured room, an ebullient setting for so self-contained and contemplative an expression. Clearly there are layers of meaning here, which we may read or ignore, or simply not notice, depending on our individual degrees of interest and awareness. The resulting canvas is one of the finest figure paintings of Inshaw’s career, though perhaps not
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Life Drawing 1963 Pencil on paper 13 × 12¾ in / 33 × 32.5 cm
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Life Drawing 1963 Pencil on paper 10 × 7 in / 25.5 × 18 cm
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Life Drawing 1963 Pencil on paper 10½ × 9 in / 26.5 × 23 cm
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Corinne 1968 Pencil on paper 9½ × 10½ in / 24 × 26.5 cm
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exactly definitive. It can also be interpreted as a coded self-portrait, for the model holds by the neck a fox fur stole, its muzzle deliberately almost on a level with her mons pubis. The two shapes form a visual rhyme, and it has been suggested that the fox represents the artist, all of which adds to the wit of the situation. This symbolism is compounded by the imagery of the Alfred Wallis painting in the background: masculine lighthouse and bosomy sails. Blind Man’s Buff I (1983) is an indoors version of a subject that Inshaw was already investigating in a different setting: a beautiful English garden, full of topiary and flowering trees, in the painting entitled The Game of Blind Man’s Buff (1983-4). (There’s also a detailed drawing for this, dated 1982.) Concurrently, then, the indoors Blind Man’s Buff, with its four nearly life-size figures in a narrow space, was exploring flesh and hair tones and texture in a far more intimate way. Poised as if arrested in a dance, the figures overlapping but not touching, this is an encounter electric with possibility. All four figures are attentive and utterly concentrated on the game. Although a highly sensual rendition of female flesh, it is more ritualistic and hallucinatory than actual. There is another version, Blind Man’s Buff II, painted in 1984, which focuses rather more claustrophobically on the interplay of figures, adding a fifth model and cropping the scene at top and bottom, making it a kind of frieze of bodies.
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Fiona, a magnificent full-length pencil drawing from 1985, was originally intended to be merely the scaffolding for a painting, which is why it was carried out on canvas. But when Inshaw registered the quality of what he had achieved, he decided that work should be arrested and the underdrawing preserved. ‘I became obsessed with that sort of mark-making with very hard pencils,’ he recalled. ‘Those smudgy bits were done through shading with the side of the pencil.’ Although this looks like a drawing made from life, it was actually worked on from photographs and memory, and features the model Fiona James reclining fulllength on the grass of the Marlborough Downs. Sharon (1986-90) is another seemingly unfinished painting, in which only the outline of the figure has been drawn in. It was such a marvellous beginning that Inshaw decided ‘it was never going to get any better’, so he stopped painting and never commenced the real work of discovering the figure through paint. To all intents and purposes this is a drawing, but one done in paint, rather than graphite or charcoal. Although it is left in a state of ‘unfinish’, Inshaw nevertheless came back to the painting/drawing and worked on it some more, improving it no doubt, but unable initially to leave it alone. Victoria (2003) was one of the few paintings here worked on from life. As Inshaw says: ‘I just sat her down and painted it.’ Two of the paintings
Denise 1971 Pencil on paper 12 × 10 in / 30.5 × 25.5 cm
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Robin Lambert 1978 Pencil on paper 18½ × 25 in /47 × 63.5 cm
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Fiona 1985 Pencil on canvas 55½ × 32¼ in /141 × 82 cm
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Louise 1985/2012 Pencil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 60 × 60 cm
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of Shelagh Popham were also done in this way, Shelagh I and Shelagh III. By contrast, the two paintings of Louise on the Jetty, both made in 2019, were constructed in the studio from separate photographs of the figure and the landscape setting, the smaller painting featuring the model wearing a rather fetching green beret. Finally, the two paintings Marcia (2013) and Louise (2014), were begun from life and finished with the help of photographs. In Marcia and the Swans (2009), apart from the impressively sculptural forms of the model’s body, the chief point of interest is the two-pronged approach of a pair of swans, heads feeding underwater, necks starkly prominent. The phallic implication is inescapable, but less of a threat than a joke. Visually, the effect is strange as well as witty, and any Carry On vulgarity is kept well in check. In fact, the connotations are if anything more classical than popular: Leda and the Swan. There’s also a clear reference to Stanley Spencer’s painting Swan Upping at Cookham (1915-9), a depiction of an annual event on the Thames in which cygnets are weighed, measured and ringed, to determine whether they belong to a livery company or the Crown. Marcia looks insouciantly up at the viewer, hands on hips, totally in command of the situation. Sarah on the Cliffs (2010-13) has a Dorset setting, this particular littoral being at Burton Bradstock, very near West Bay at Bridport, one of Inshaw’s
favourite seaside destinations. Initially, this painting was intended to be about the beginning of the world and Eve naming the birds. (There exists a fine drawing for it, with a modern-looking Eve mobbed by birds.) In this initial interpretation, Sarah would have been surrounded by hovering birds. But Inshaw’s ideas changed as the picture developed, and once he had painted Sarah with her medieval cast of features and her very distinctive hand gestures, he discovered that this was the painting he wanted to make. The birds never got a look in. (The painting was, however, exhibited with the title Eve, West Bay, at Sladers Yard in the autumn of 2013.) But there is one slightly uncanny element in this memorable image: smoke is coming out of the cliff-face, a motif borrowed from Hieronymous Bosch. Why? Inshaw is silent on the subject. Not everything can be explained. In mid-decade, Inshaw was stricken by doubts and grew uncertain of his way forward. His old friend Peter Blake visited the studio at this time and Inshaw admitted to being ‘a bit stuck’. Blake responded with sound advice: ‘Paint an allegory, you can do what you like if you call it an allegory’. So Inshaw embarked on a large symbolic beach scene, which was swiftly followed by another. Both employ a mixture of direct observation and quotation from Old Master paintings, seamlessly blended in images of considerable distinction. The past fortifies and informs the present: in Allegory I (2014-15), the man removing his shirt near the
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centre of the painting is based on a similar figure in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (c1448-50) in the National Gallery. In Allegory II (2015), the parti-coloured figure in an all-in-one suit is borrowed from Bruegel’s painting The Flight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), in Vienna. These borrowings add layers of resonance to Inshaw’s paintings, as do the black sails in Allegory I. Generally speaking, black sails signify pirate ships, but also refer to the Greek myth of Theseus, in which he returned home under a black sail and his father Aegeus committed suicide. Tragically, Theseus had forgotten that he had promised to hoist a white sail to signal that he was still alive. Bruegel’s jester is an altogether more positive figure, though potentially sinister (think of the dwarf in Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now). Also in Allegory II there are two low-flying Chinook helicopters, armoured and potentially threatening, but Inshaw loves aircraft and paints them frequently. Living near the MOD training areas on Salisbury Plain provides a ready source of models, and he delights in this military presence in the skies. Despite their art historical references, both these allegories remain very much beach pictures, and, as such, expressions of the British in full holiday mode. There has always been a slight
Donald McGill seaside postcard sauciness to Inshaw’s celebration of nudity, a definite Carry On flavour, a mixture of earth goddess and music hall, which finds full expression in these images. Allegory I began with an image of two children running down to the sea, seen and photographed at Weymouth, which forms the moving hub of the painting around which the rest was constructed. Really it’s a coming-together of a number of separate incidents but Inshaw makes them fuse together and work as a whole. Lovers, bathers, holidaymakers dancing or reading or just soaking up the sun, there’s excitement, colour and pleasure in abundance, but with a tinge too of something darker. The man with a big hat and dark glasses on the extreme left is a direct quote from Edward Burra’s Rye Landscape with Figure (1947), a menacing and slightly macabre presence who might here signify Death. Allegory II is perhaps not so dark, but the black dog is ominous and the group of nude figures at far right (the half-cloaked one also like a Bosch peasant) are clearly worried by the Chinooks. The other people on the beach are oblivious to anything but their own concerns and enjoyment, except the foreground nude caught bending who, in an earlier version of the painting, looked us directly in the eyes with a mixture of outrage and interest, though now her face is obscured
Sharon 1986-1990 Oil on canvas 60 × 51 in / 152.5 × 129.5 cm
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9. Raven 1970 8 × 11 in / 20.32 × 27.94 cm
Mother and Child 1988 Oil on canvas 22½ × 21 in / 57 × 53 cm
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by hair. (She was inspired by another Bosch painting.) Neither of these grand allegorical machines came easily, each was re-worked and re-composed until the image acquired that inevitability that indicates it is finished. The orchestration of forms was a complex task, but was finally achieved through a series of changes: moving figures, robing or disrobing them, eliminating anything not strictly necessary. This pair of paintings sums up brilliantly a particular strand of Inshaw’s art. Three small, intimate, informal paintings done in 2020 exemplify another aspect of Inshaw’s figure work: Sarah Eve Simmons, Julia in Amsterdam and Sharon. All three are painted retrospectively, in other words, from memory and photographs. None of these women featured in Inshaw’s life at the time, all belonging to an earlier era. This is typical of his approach. He mulls over an idea for a painting, or remembers a pose he has photographed, then searches through his archive of photos until he finds what he needs. Then the raw material is translated into a painted image, the act of rendering it into paint transforming it still more. Memory and imagination play their part: the photos are only ever a starting point, not a source to be literally transcribed. There is something of Sickert in the paintings of Sarah Eve Simmons and Julia in Amsterdam, while the back view of Sharon summons up the enchanted stillness of the Danish painter
Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). I’m thinking of such masterpieces of tranquillity as Interior (1899) in the National Gallery, which depicts the artist’s wife seen from behind, or Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back (c1904), in the Randers Museum in Denmark. Hammershøi summons extraordinary concentration and intensity to his designs, cool and analytical in shades of oatmeal and grey. In these back-of-the-head portraits the nape of the neck assumes great importance, and in Hammershøi’s renditions the hair is fastened up to reveal it. For all the quietness of these paintings there is also tenderness and eroticism, a touch of human warmth. In Inshaw’s painting of Sharon the hair falls down and caresses her neck and the top of her back. This serene image is all about nuance and the art of saying much through restricted means. By contrast, Sarah Eve Simmons stands parallel to the picture plane, her head turned into profile, her hands on her hips. But this is a relaxed stance, not a confrontational one. Again the hair is important, here cascading over and between her breasts. The paint application is very immediate and thinly worked, Inshaw relying on his typically warm underpainting to supply much of the skin tone. This painting is more declarative in its lines, but no less beguiling. Meanwhile, Julia in Amsterdam is all arrested spontaneity: the model caught looking over her shoulder in reverie, holding a lipstick in her left hand, her body gathered in a turn it would be uncomfortable to maintain. Thus is the camera
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a useful tool, to catch the immediacy of those telling moments that a more lengthy pose cannot achieve. Inshaw admires Sickert, and though he is not amongst the artist’s absolute favourites, he has often derived inspiration from Sickert’s energy and directness. In his early paintings, Inshaw also used the same squaring up method that Sickert used: the traditional process of making a detailed drawing and then transferring it, measured square by measured square, to the painting. Although Inshaw allowed himself a degree of freedom in the painthandling, the painting was substantially the same as the drawing. In later years, beginning in the 1980s, Inshaw’s style broadened and he no longer squared up from drawings, but, again like Sickert, used photographs to discover his compositions. Julia in a Hat, also painted in 2020, belongs to the same group of delightfully informal figure paintings. Naked apart from her hat, Julia turns into profile away from the artist (and away from the viewer) toward a landscape painting hanging behind her. (This is an early painting Inshaw owns by Ruralist associate John Morley, of his grandfather’s garden.) The twisting of her body produces an intriguing diagonal movement across the canvas and gives the composition a liveliness and dynamism it might otherwise not possess. Like the other three paintings in this group, the palette is restrained to green-greys and browns. On Inshaw’s palette are ranged Raw Sienna, Terre
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Verte, Naples Yellow and Raw Umber (Green Shade), along with an ultramarine, a cobalt and Venetian Red. He calls it an Italian palette, the same colours used by the great Renaissance painters such as Piero or Masaccio. Shelagh in the Garden (2021) revisits the Welsh kitchen garden of Inshaw’s second wife, Shelagh Popham, and takes for its genesis a photograph of her in a bikini. (The painting also refers back to an earlier canvas featuring Shelagh, called Figure in the Garden, of 1989, with its characteristic blueish haze of borage and the green-blue of onion blades.) Although she subsequently posed entirely unclothed in the garden, he found the bikini photo richer in associations and enjoyed the formal challenge of removing the bikini from his image. The very particular blue of the borage plants seems to suggest an emotional key to the painting, as does the picture space, compressed against the boundary hedge, but freed as the eye moves to the field beyond. More revealing of Inshaw’s studio practice is the time taken to finish a painting — for instance, Two Women Dancing on a Beach, which extended over nine years, from 1993 to 2002. When a painting is exhibited in a commercial context, it must be in a state to be seen and sold, but if it returns to the artist afterwards, he can of course do with it as he likes. (He explains: ‘You see the faults when a picture is in a different situation.’) Very often Inshaw is impelled to repaint and improve
his pictures, editing and changing poses, colours, contents. Sometimes this process can go on for years, with more than one incarnation of a painting being exhibited. He talks candidly of this habit of returning to a painting and ‘fiddling’ with it, but when I ask him how he knows a painting is finished, he replies rather bleakly: ‘You don’t, they never are done.’
would not have been working on these paintings continuously throughout these long periods, but rather in short concentrated bursts. He tends to think a great deal about his past paintings and how they might be improved, in between working on new ones; letting the older works lie fallow for a while is evidently an incentive to revisit them critically.
Other pictures to have undergone the long haul are Bloody Julia (Buoyancy), which was started in 2004 but not finished until 2012, and Marcia and Tent, again worked from photographs, begun in 2007 but not resolved until 2020. In that painting he decided to put an entrance in the tent behind the model, then added guy ropes, and worked more on the river and the sky. ‘I just tidied it up really,’ he says modestly. But by far the longest gestation was undergone by Beatrice Phillpots, which was begun in 1983 but didn’t achieve its present state until 2004. Inshaw comments: ‘For a long time there was a problem with the legs, I think. Eventually I resolved it. And something around her ribs that I smoothed out a bit.’
Two Women Dancing on a Beach is set in a real place in Pembrokeshire, though the figures are invented and their pose is based on a photo by that great pioneer of photographic studies of motion, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Inshaw visited the beach, near Strumble Head, and being much struck by its combination of cliffs, sand and boulders, took a number of photographs there. The painting’s development is interesting to recount. Exhibited as Two Women Dancing a Waltz on a Beach in Pembrokeshire in his solo exhibition at Theo Waddington Fine Art in 1995, there are several major differences to be discerned when comparing the catalogue illustration to the painting we have today. For example, the face of the figure on the right was hidden then behind the swinging bell of her dancing partner’s hair. Her own hair had a touch of red and she gazed off to the left. Her figure was more angular than it became, but the biggest change, aside from the alteration in the rocks on the right hand side, was the complete obliteration of a rather grand sandcastle below those rocks.
He describes these and other emendations as little changes that only he would notice. All the time he is striving to make his paintings better, but he has long been teased about this reluctance to finish. Some of his friends actually signed the back of The Game of Blind Man’s Buff (1983-4) asserting that it was finished, in an attempt to stop him tinkering with it. Of course it should be noted that Inshaw
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Shelagh I 1990 Oil on canvas 8½ × 7½ in / 21.5 × 19 cm
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Shelagh II 1990 Oil on canvas 12 × 14 in / 30 × 35 cm
Shelagh III 1991 Oil on canvas 17¾ × 20 in / 45 × 50 cm
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In the picture Inshaw finished re-painting in 2002, both models have differently-hued and slightly wilder hair, and both are more curvaceous and decidedly less girlish than before. Looking at their more womanly contours, it’s almost as if they have grown up with the painting. Thus it can be seen how an image develops and is refined, and that although it is not uncommon for paintings to be related by subject, Inshaw is more likely to continue revising a picture than to paint another version of it.
his nude paintings were portraits or ideas about the figure, allegories, or simply intended as erotic pictures, he replied: ‘Like the landscapes, they’re constructs. I manipulate things. They’re a bit of everything: allegory, eroticism, ideal; but also reality. There are things about the figures that I find real and which I put in — colours and shapes. They’re not totally idealised. I like the reality of a figure and the way your mind works on that reality and extends it or develops it. I try to do that in a painting.’
Sometimes his passion for revision can result in the loss of a perfectly good, even exceptional, image. He regrets the overpainting of Wiltshire Landscape (1984), which featured a solitary figure (modelled by Fiona James) lying on the downs, surrounded by some very evocatively painted downland. Feeling for some reason he can no longer explain, dissatisfied, instead of leaving it as it was, he went on with it, and peopled the canvas with a picnic party, which altered the whole mood and tenor of the work. The originality of the first version was lost, and though a perfectly agreeable painting resulted (Wiltshire Landscape, 1985), it was not the painting he remembers and still misses. But such regrets are luckily few. Inshaw feels his ‘fiddling’ pays dividends more often than not.
His women are voluptuous and often naughtylooking, well aware, and in command of, their sexuality. They are sometimes provocative but usually decorous, and they pose teasingly, revelling in their sensuality. Beauty is incidental rather than a conscious aim. ‘If people find things beautiful, that’s fine, but I don’t set out to do beauty. I set out to discover something for myself — about the scene, about the person, about the place. But I never think about beauty.’ Not thinking about it, he nevertheless manages to achieve it with heartening regularity.
Although he paints individuals, with highly specific characteristics, Inshaw is always aiming at something deeper and more general: the archetypal and universal. When I asked him if
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Inshaw dwells upon the past, re-living past events and past loves, coming to terms with passion and its fall-out. Often he paints his best pictures of the women in his life long after they have departed, when time has allowed some perspective on the loss and heart-break. Hurt is less acute, and the once loved or once hated may be contemplated with a certain detachment. Thus, although his relationship with Julia Stapleton took place in the
1980s (he was with her for a brief period, 1985-8), she crops up to very good effect in some powerful paintings of the 2000s. There are, for instance, two versions of a witty image about buoyancy and sea bathing: one with the model wearing a hat and with her eyes closed and an enigmatic smile on her lips, the other more confrontational, with eyes open in a saucy look, but paradoxically less physically revealing. Inshaw refers to the first painting, entitled Bloody Julia (Buoyancy), as ‘Low Tide’ and Buoyant, which was actually painted first in 2002, as ‘High Tide’, because more of Julia’s curves are covered up. In his early work, the female principle took the form of girls and young women. In his maturity, Inshaw has preferred a more generously endowed physical type, occasionally verging on the pneumatic. Although he was hailed in 1973 as a ‘New British Realist’, he is in fact a visionary Romantic in the great tradition of British Romanticism, and this is crucial to any real understanding of his work. All his pictures, whether landscape or figure painting or portrait, are a celebration of the visible world and his joyous response to it. As he has said: ‘It’s not about reality; it’s trying to make the experience of the person looking at the painting meaningful.’ Romanticism emphasises the subjective and imaginative, the individual and personal, the irrational and spontaneous, the emotional and transcendental. All these are characteristics of Inshaw’s work.
His figure painting belongs in a long tradition of punning and double entendre, reaching back to the fool and jester of medieval times and Shakespeare’s bawdy, coming up to date with music hall humour around the turn of the 20th century, and approaching our own time through variety performances. It’s the kind of thing that would be entirely familiar to say Max Miller or Ken Dodd, and most certainly to the Carry On team. Thus, when we look at the painting of Rosie, standing proudly naked against a view of Bristol where she lives, the humour is deliberately punning. ‘Bristols’ are 1960s rhyming slang for female breasts, but the humour is only one aspect of a bold painting that is a celebration not just of physical attributes but of a personality as well. Inshaw’s interpretation of the world draws upon manifestations of the real and the ideal, but of the imagination too. He often paints a state between dreaming and waking, a world slightly separated from everyday existence. A dozen years ago, he discovered a note he’d written in a sketchbook around 1970: ‘between sadness and joy, wonder and despair, dreaming and waking.’ There exists his ideal. He has said his aim is: ‘To isolate in time and space things that would normally disappear under the impact of everyday values and events.’ And: ‘I do paint moments, but I want them to be endless. Timeless.’ Some of his finest moments are paintings of naked women. Devizes: February-April 2022
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Two Woman Dancing on a Beach, 1993-2002 Oil on canvas 40 × 40 in / 102 × 102 cm
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Francesca (Mermaid) 2002-03 Oil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 50 × 50 cm
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Helen with Wine 2002-06 Oil on canvas 36½ × 36½ in / 93 × 93 cm
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Victoria 2003 Oil on canvas 12 × 10 in / 30 × 25 cm
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Helen 2003 Oil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 50 × 50 cm
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Bloody Julia (Buoyancy) 2004-12 Oil on canvas 24 × 24 in / 61 × 61 cm
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Marcia and Tent 2007-20 Oil on canvas 23½ × 23½ in / 60 × 60 cm
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Marcia and the Swans 2009 Oil on canvas 40 × 40 in / 101 × 101 cm
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Sarah on the Cliffs 2010 -13 Oil on canvas 50 × 60 in / 127 × 152.5 cm
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Rosie 2011 Oil on canvas 24 × 24 in / 61 × 61 cm
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Marcia 2013 Oil on canvas 24 × 16 in / 60 × 41 cm
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Louise 2014 Oil on canvas 14 × 18 in / 35.5 × 45 cm
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Allegory I 2014-15 Oil on canvas 60 × 60 in / 152.4 × 152.4 cm
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Allegory II 2015 Oil on canvas 60 × 60 in / 152.4 × 152.4 cm
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Louise on the Jetty I 2019 Oil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 50 × 50 cm
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Louise on the Jetty II 2019 Oil on canvas 46 × 46 in / 117 × 117 cm
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Julia in a Hat 2020 Oil on board 12½ × 12½ in / 32 × 32 cm
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Sarah 2020 Oil on board 8 × 8 in / 20 × 20 cm
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Julia in Amsterdam 2020 Oil on board 8 × 8 in / 20 × 20 cm
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Sharon 2020 Oil on board 8 × 8 in / 20 × 20 cm
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Sarah 2020 Oil on board 12½ × 12½ in / 32 × 32 cm
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Blindfold Woman 2021 Oil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 50 × 50 cm
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Shelagh in the Garden 2021 Oil on canvas 36 × 36 in / 91.5 × 91.5 cm
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Trying on the Hat 2022 Oil on canvas 20 × 20 in / 50 × 50 cm
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Figure in a Cloak 2022 Oil on canvas 46 × 46 in / 117 × 117 cm
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Adam and Eve 2022 Oil on canvas 36 × 36 in / 91.5 × 91.5 cm
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Collage 2022 44 × 44 in / 112 × 112 cm
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Solo Exhibitions
Group Exhibitions
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2020
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Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol Dartington Hall, Totnes Arnolfini Gallery Bristol Waddington Galleries, London Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (photographs) Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (paintings and drawings) Royal Pavilion Art Gallery, Brighton Park Street Gallery, Bristol (drawings) Waddington Galleries, London Waddington Galleries, London Devizes Museum, Wiltshire (paintings and etchings) Nishimura Gallery, Tokyo Waddington Galleries, London Devizes Museum, Wiltshire Theo Waddington Fine Art Ltd, London The Old School Gallery, Bleddfa, Powys Theo Waddington Fine Art Ltd, London Chapel Row Gallery, Bath Chapel Row Gallery, Bath RWA Bristol - Friends and Influences Agnews, London Narborough Hall, Norfolk Sladers’ Yard Gallery, West Bay, Dorset The Millinery Works, London Fine Art Society, London Sladers’ Yard Gallery, West Bay, Dorset Fine Art Society, London A Vision of Landscape, The Redfern Gallery, London David Inshaw: Looking Back, Looking Forward, The British Art Fair, curated by Andrew Lambirth, David Inshaw and The Redfern Galley, London David Inshaw, Recent Paintings, Sladers' Yard, West Bay, Dorset
1970 1971
1972 1973 1974
1974-1975 1975 1976 1977 1979 1980 1981
1982
Young Contemporaries, London Young Contemporaries, RBA Galleries, London Royal Academy of Arts Bicentenary Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London John Dee, John Howlin, David Inshaw, Barry Martin, Arts Council exhibition, Serpentine Gallery, London Art Spectrum South, Arts Council touring exhibition touring to City Art Gallery, Southampton; Folkestone Art Centre, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Bath Festival Exhibition, Festival Gallery, Bath ICA Summer Studios, London John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool An Element of Landscape, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Arts Council touring exhibition Critic’s Choice, Arthur Tooth & Sons London Peter Blake’s Choice, Festival Gallery, Bath The Recollections, Cheltenham Art Gallery, South West Arts, Touring Exhibition Bath Festival Exhibition, Festival Gallery, Bath Summer Exhibition (Brotherhood of Ruralists first exhibition as a group) Royal Academy of Arts, London The Brotherhood of Ruralists, Festival Gallery, Bath The Brotherhood of Ruralists, Charleston Festival, Sussex The Brotherhood of Ruralists Ophelia Exhibition, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge The Brotherhood of Ruralists, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol touring to Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Camden Arts Centre, London Photographs 1957-1981: Martin Axon, David Inshaw, Graham Ovenden, Plymouth Arts Centre touring to Park Street, Bristol; Sutton Library, Suffolk The Harveys Collection, ICA London, Arnolfini, Bristol
Television Films 1983 1986 1988 1989 1991-2004 2008
2009 2010 2015
2016
2017
2019
The Definitive Nude (Peter Blake’s Retrospective with the Ruralists) Tate Gallery, London Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London Mother and Child, Lefevre Gallery, London Farm Field and Fantasy, Bishops Palace, Chichester The Secret Garden, Bleddfa Trust, Knighton, Wales Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts London Ancient Landscapes: Pastoral Visions, Southampton City Art Gallery touring to The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Falmouth Art Gallery Royal Academy Summer Exhibition RWA, Bristol Andrew Lambirth: A Critic’s Choice, Browse & Darby, London The Landscape in Art 1690 -1998 – British Artists in the Tate Collection, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil Wessex Places, Wiltshire Museum Dream Visions, Sladers Yard, West Bay The Arborealists, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington The Romantic Thread in British Art, Southampton City Art Gallery A Wessex Scene, Messums Wiltshire British Art: Ancient Landscapes, The Salisbury Museum Night and Light and the Half Light, Sladers Yard, West Bay Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art, 1692-2019, Royal West of England Academy
1974
1975 1977 1984
2005 2012
Private Landscapes, directed by Keith Sheather, produced by John Carlaw, BBC Bristol Gallery, produced by ACH Smith, HTV Summer with the Brotherhood, produced and directed by John Read, BBC (London) Between Dreaming and Waking, in collaboration with Geoffrey Haydon, BBC Arena A Picture of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby, BBC Hidden Pictures, BBC
Public Collections Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Bristol Museum & Art Gallery British Council British Museum, London The Government Art Collection The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Tyne and Wear Museums, Sunderland Tate Wiltshire Museum Publications Bonjour Mr Inshaw, Poems by Peter Robinson, Paintings by David Inshaw, published 2019 by The Two Rivers Press David Inshaw by Andrew Lambirth, published 2015 by Unicorn Press
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Catalogue © The Redfern Gallery, 2022 Works © David Inshaw Essay © Andrew Lambirth Photography: Peter J Stone Photography Design: Graham Rees Design Print: Gomer Press Published to coincide with the Exhibition
David Inshaw Naked Paintings and Works on Paper 15 June – 15 July 2022 Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2022 ISBN: 978-0-948460-92-0 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.
Front cover:
Two Woman Dancing on a Beach, 1993-2002 illustrated on page 29 Inside front cover:
Robin Lambert, 1972 (detail) illustrated on page 13 Inside back cover:
Louise, 1985/2012 (detail) illustrated on page 16
20 Cork Street, London W1S 3H L +44 (0)20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com
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