Norman Ackroyd | Just Be A Poet by The Fine Art Society

Norman Ackroyd just be a poet

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The Fine Art Society 14 8 N EW B O N D STREET Âˇ LOND ON W1 S 2JT + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 gordon@thefineartsociety.com sara@thefineartsociety.com www.thefineartsociety.com

Norman Ackroyd just be a poet THE FINE ART SOCIETY · LONDON · 2016

NORMAN ACKROYD · JUST BE A P OET Gordon Cooke

DEDICATED TO MARGO DOLAN

Born in the first half of the Twentieth Century, the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Norman Ackroyd has been a working artist for 60 years and is one of the greatest exponents of landscape. He has remained steadfastly true to himself and his instincts to create a body of work like no other in his time. His knowledge of our islands, our coasts and particularly our remotest places is deep, encyclopaedic and probably unrivalled. When he was a student at the Royal College of Art the painter Cecil Collins urged him not to follow fashion. ‘You are a poet and there are very few about. Be single-minded. Just be a poet.’ Norman Ackroyd is inspired to his most powerful reflections on his native land by the extremes of Nature and the weather. Wild seas and the snow-covered earth are characteristic subjects. His total devotion to landscape has been unusual in his time, but so has his use of printmaking as his principal medium in a period when etching in black and white could scarcely have been less fashionable. Most of the artists of his generation who were attracted to printmaking in the 1960s wanted to use colour and turned to screenprinting. His working lifetime has coincided with a great flowering of printmaking as a whole and the foundation of studios and publishers throughout the world. His example and his enthusiastic support of prints as an art form have been of the greatest significance in the rise of interest in the medium in the past fifty years. And so it is apparent that Norman Ackroyd has found his own artistic path through his lifetime of nearly eighty years. The Royal Academy of Arts has been central to his career and the recognition he has earned, and one dealer has represented him for half his lifetime. Surprisingly this most British of artists, a Yorkshireman, born in Leeds, has enjoyed this long professional partnership with an American. Perhaps this is less surprising when one considers the widespread enthusiasm for art in the United States in the Twentieth Century and for works of true quality. Although Norman Ackroyd has a devoted following in Britain, there are also many collectors of his work in America. Most of these have been introduced to Norman’s work by Margo Dolan, whose gallery Dolan/Maxwell has shown his work since its inception in 1984, following their first encounter in 1971. This exhibition is a celebration of the artist but also of the creative partnership Norman and Margo have enjoyed over so many years. The works have largely been drawn from the past century and include some of his greatest expressions of Nature’s grandeur. [5 ]

THE LAST SURVIVING KING OF ELMET, OR WILDNESS REGAINED Andrew McNeillie Norman Ackroyd’s name has become for a broad public one synonymous with the British and Irish Isles and a particular form of artistic practice, at which he is the acclaimed modern master, a virtuoso, working at the outer limits, somewhere beyond the Ultima Thule of what might be done with light, air, water, acid, copper, ink and paper. (Latterly, too, we have become increasingly aware that he is also a master of watercolour.) There can be no better context in which to contemplate how far and wide he has travelled the sea-road of his vision than a retrospective show of this kind. It is exciting and a privilege to have the chance to say a few words about it all here, about the extraordinary phenomenon that is Ackroyd – that ‘force of Nature’, as his friend the great Scottish poet Douglas Dunn has called him. A butcher’s son, with an artistic mother, from very humble origins in South Leeds, and so a Yorkshireman, he is among those rare beings, like D. H. Lawrence, who lift our hearts by showing just how, given half a chance and an inspired work ethic, genius will out. What we call genius is nothing of the sort without obsession, focus, and hard work. That Norman Ackroyd is obsessed and driven, though in a most genial way, is obvious. And his focus, that all-important element, is as the expression goes ‘out of this world’. He sees straight into and seizes things instantaneously as from mid-air, transmuting onto paper and into art what’s always fleeting before eye and mind: the sea, sea-light, the sky in all its weathers, forms in nature and place, things waiting to be found and made new, if you are a seer, if you are an artist. It has often been said, and was said of him early on when he was a student at the Royal College of Art, that he is a visual poet. It is the recent and contemporary poets that spring to mind for me whenever I come to dwell on the nature of his achievement. I think at once of the Irishman Richard Murphy whose first collection Sailing to an Island (1963) seemed to set the tone for a new generation of ‘islomaniacs’ –myself among them. (The poet Hugh MacDiarmid, a great islanddweller and wilderness-haunter, preferred the term ‘nesomania’, from the Greek.) I think too, of course, of Douglas Dunn, author of St Kilda’s Parliament (1981), with whom Ackroyd has collaborated so profoundly in A Line in the Water (2009), to make one of the most beautiful books I own. I think of Seamus Heaney. Nor should I neglect the archipelagic prose writers. Tim Robinson and Robert Macfarlane are Wildness regained: Norman Ackroyd painting from a boat off Barra in the Hebrides, 2016. Photograph by Jocelyne van den Bosschew

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also acutely of the story. As is my own magazine Archipelago to which Ackroyd is major, regular contributor. All this amounts to saying the obvious: that we associate Norman Ackroyd with the wilder edges of the archipelago, the far coasts and islands. But like the swallow, the cuckoo and the corncrake, the shearwater and petrel, he is a migrant bird in these places, a bird of passage, rather than a resident. He travels out from his work-place in the urban heart of the metropolis. He doesn’t inhabit a studio so much as a workshop, a place somehow redolent of the Industrial Revolution, and its Northern history, with its heavy machinery, its wheels and levers, its metals and acids, its sense about it of a vital past still put to use, integrated into the present. It is I think illuminating to bear this matter in mind. Not only does it speak to Ackroyd’s urban, working-class origins, the environment in which he feels most ‘at home’, it should also prompt us to recognise that for him ‘Britain’ itself is not only where he lives and belongs, it is also an island. It is not a mainland. He is of an island people. He takes his stand upon it, like stout Cortez above the Pacific in Keats’s poem. In this respect, and now with the death of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, with whose vision Ackroyd’s own has much in common, I like to call him the last surviving King of Elmet. It is from that vital vantage point high up in Yorkshire that he likes to describe the arc of the archipelago, from Muckle Flugga (where long ago and literally, he saw the light, in a far-flung Damscene moment), round to Dursey Head, to Bishops Rock and on, via Brancaster Roads and the Farnes, back again to Orkney. Not the monarch but the maker of all he surveys and has given to us, in our need to know and acknowledge where we belong and what we come from. The trouble with the visual arts is that you cannot talk about them in their own language. They move on silence and give pause to speech. The achievement of any artist is within the integrity of the individual work, in its innovation, its absolute moment, brought and held together in the process of its making, in the dynamic of its emergence or ‘continual arrival’, to borrow an idea from another important archipelagic poet, W. S. Graham. To generalise across the work of a lifetime is to risk doing that work no good service. But there is a general question here, in the case of Norman Ackroyd’s

oeuvre, that insists by its very nature that we broach it. Usually I’m inclined to distrust the idea of an extended artistic ‘project’. It often refers to something more voulu than organically compelled and what metal it began with soon beats so thin you can see right through to the idea behind it. A huge artistic project is however what Ackroyd has bequeathed us. It is tempting to regard it as record. But works of art, poems and paintings, are not made ‘for the record’ with the exception of some civic and public genres. At any rate, they are not documents. Documentary might be a work of art but documents are the stuff of evidence merely, the materials of the historian, not concerned with aesthetic value. But suppose for the sake of it we refer to Ackroyd’s achievement, as something on a huge scale, that is ‘for the record’? What is it recording? What has it recorded, except the artistic vision of a man with a passion for islands, coasts, the high seas, places apparently without people in them? I see it differently. I see the whole as a large orchestral piece – sea-music – and I see its importance as a ‘collection’ as that rare thing, the major expression of a zeitgeist, of the spirit of an age in which the majority of people ‘belong’ nowhere, having been uprooted by history. Today, what happened to so many in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Enclosure and Clearance, is now propelled into new dimensions by the next such development, the Digital Revolution. Now many people sense their loss, yet it is in the majority of cases the loss of something that personally they never had. Nor is it about Eden, or Paradise Lost, still less Regained. It is more what I think both Norman Ackroyd and Ted Hughes tell us all about. It is about Wildness Lost, and Wildness Regained, by the highest means of art.

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ANDREW McNEILLIE is the author of An Aran Keening (2001) and the founding editor and publisher of Archipelago in the pages of which work by Norman Ackroyd is regularly reproduced.

1 Belfast Airport, 1978 Etching · edition of 90 14 x 16¼ in · 35.5 x 41.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 161

2 Early Morning Rain, 1978 Etching · edition of 40 16¼ x 15¼ in · 41.5 x 39.7 cm

3 Itchen Rainbow, 1981 Aquatint · edition of 90 12½ x 13¼ in · 31.8 x 34 cm Reference: Ackroyd 226

4 Woolstone Down, 1981 Etching · edition of 90 13⅜ x 18½ in · 34 x 47 cm Reference: Ackroyd 204

6 Avenue, 1983 Etching · edition of 20 3¾ x 4¾ in · 9.5 x 12 cm Reference: Ackroyd 265

5 Beckford Pond, 1982 Etching · edition of 150 16½ x 16⅜ in · 42 x 41.6 cm Reference: Ackroyd 238

7 Castle Ditches, 1985 Etching 5½ x 7¾ in · 14 x 19.7 cm Reference: Ackroyd 302

8 Arran Rainbow, 1986 Etching · edition of 50 4¾ x 6⅜ in · 12.1 x 16.2 cm Reference: Ackroyd 312

9 Holy Island, Arran, 1985 Watercolour 26¾ x 35¼ in · 27 x 35 cm

Leeds, 1985 Watercolour 12 x 10½ in · 30.7 x 26.5 cm

11 Scottish Landscape – Four Greys, 1985 Watercolour 10¾ x 15 in · 27.2 x 37.9 cm

Still Pool, 1985 Etching 6⅛ x 4⅝ in · 15.5 cm x 11.7 cm Reference: Ackroyd 298

Ballater at Dawn, 1986 Sugarlift · edition of 90 21½ x 19½ in · 54.5 x 49.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 314

Holy Island-Arran, 1986 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 90 15½ x 21½ in · 39.7 x 54.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 308

Skellig Rock, Co. Kerry, 1988 Etching · edition of 90 15½ x 20½ in · 39.4 x 52.1 cm Reference: Ackroyd 339

St Kilda, 1989 Etching · edition of 30 4½ x 5¾ in · 11.4 x 14.6 cm Reference: Ackroyd 340

Little Skellig Rock, Co. Kerry, 1988 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 90 1913⁄16 x 1515⁄16 in · 50.7 x 39 cm Reference: Ackroyd 339

Burham Beeches, 1990 Watercolour 4 x 5½ in · 10.2 x 14 cm

Daybreak at Crockery Hill, 1990 Etching · edition of 90 5¾ x 7¼ in · 14.6 x 18.4 cm Reference: Ackroyd 352

Windrush Fragment, 1990 Etching · not editioned 6 x 4¼ in · 15.2 x 10.8 cm Reference: Ackroyd 356

22 Old Wardour Pool, 1992 Etching · edition of 90 6 x 6½ in · 15.2 x 16.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 375

20 Daybreak near Swinbrook, 1991 Etching · edition of 90 5¼ x 7¾ in · 13.3 x 18.4 cm Reference: Ackroyd 364

23 Holbeck – Leeds, 1991 Sugarlift aquatint and soft-ground etching · edition of 90 22¾ x 20¼ in · 58 x 51.2 cm Reference: Ackroyd 368

24 Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire, 1992 Hand-coloured etching · edition of 90 23½ x 29½ in · 59.7 x 74.9 cm Reference: Ackroyd 373

25 Windrush Afternoon, 1991 Etching · edition of 90 17 x 22¼ in · 43.2 x 56.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 361

26 Summer Isles – Wester Ross, 1992 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 90 16¾ x 18⅜ in · 41.5 x 46.6 cm Reference: Ackroyd 372

27 Loch Broom from Achiltibuie, 1993 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 90 13¾ x 19¼ in · 34.7 x 48.9 cm Reference: Ackroyd 391

28 On Twyford Down – Deacon Hill, 1993 Etching · edition of 90 6¼ x 10¼ in · 15.9 x 26 cm Reference: Ackroyd 386

29 South Cadbury Hill, 1993 Etching · edition of 50 21¾ x 13½ in · 55.2 x 34.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 383

30 Wastwater, 1994 Etching · edition of 90 6 x 8 in · 15.2 x 20.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 397

The Great Glen, 1993 Aquatint · edition of 90 16¼ x 23¾ in · 41 x 60.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 385

32 Near Offa’s Dyke, Radnor, 1994

Etching · edition of 90 5½ x 8¼ in · 14 x 21 cm Reference: Ackroyd 404

33 Petworth Park, 1994 Etching · edition of 90 7½ x 11¾ in · 19 x 29.8 cm Reference: Ackroyd 401

34 Autumn Morning, Bransdale, 1994 Etching · edition of 90 29¾ x 23½ in · 75.6 x 59.7 cm Reference: Ackroyd 395

35 From Loughros Point – Donegal, 1995 Etching · edition of 90 7 x 10¼ in · 17.8 x 26 cm Reference: Ackroyd 409

36 Great Blasket Sound, 1995 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 60 22 x 17¾ in · 55.7 x 45.2 cm Reference: Ackroyd 414

37 Bowness on Windermere, 1996

Etching · edition of 90 8 x 10¾ in · 20.3 x 27.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 422

38 Killibegs, Co. Donegal, 1996 Etching · edition of 30 4 x 5¾ in · 10.2 x 14.6 Reference: Ackroyd 420

39 Near Burnsall, Wharfedale, 1996 Etching · edition of 90 7 x 10¼ in · 17.8 x 26 cm Reference: Ackroyd 421

40 Windermere on 27 January 1996

Etching printed on two sheets · edition of 25 35 x 50 in · 89 x 127 cm Reference: Ackroyd 424

Snowstorm at Cartmel Fell, 1996 Sugarlift aquatint · edition of 90 34 x 24½ in · 86.3 x 62.2 cm Reference: Ackroyd 430

42 From Slea Head – The Great Basket – Co. Kerry, 2000 Aquatint · edition of 90 26¼ x 21¼ in · 66.6 x 54 cm Reference: Ackroyd 490

43 Snow at Coniston, 1998 Monotype 24 x 18⅛ in · 61 x 46 cm

44 Northern Landscape III, 1999 Monotype 25½ x 20 in · 64.8 x 50.8 cm

45 Kilkieran Bay

Co. Galway (Golam Head), 2000 Aquatint printed on two sheets · edition of 60 31¾ x 47 in · 80.6 x 119.4 cm Reference: Ackroyd 49

46 Killala Bay, 2000 Watercolour 7 x 8¾ in · 17.5 x 22.1 cm

47 Inishturk, 2003 Watercolour with oil pastel 5⅝ x 10 in · 14.3 x 25.4 cm

48 Balmoral Forest –

Loch Muick, 2002 Etching · edition of 90 24 x 35½ in · 61 x 90 cm Reference: Ackroyd 514

49 Kilcoe Castle, Co. Cork, 2003 Watercolour 6 x 9 in · 15.2 x 22.9 cm

50 Hardraw Force, North Yorkshire, 2005 Watercolour 26 x 19¼ in · 66 x 48.9 cm

Killary, 2005 Watercolour 5¼ x 11½ in · 13.3 x 29.2 cm

52 Raasay, 2005 Watercolour 8¾ x 18½ in · 22.2 x 47 cm

53 Loch Awe, Argyll, 2006 Watercolour 16 x 26 in · 40.6 x 66 cm

54 Loch Awe in Winter, 2006 Etching · edition of 90 16¼ x 26½ in · 41.3 x 67.3 cm Reference: Ackroyd 553

55 The Sound of Jura, 8 July 2006 Watercolour 14¾ x 22¼ in · 37.5 x 56.5 cm

56 Clare Island, 2009 Watercolour 7¼ x 11¼ in · 18.4 x 28.6 cm

From Sutton Bank – Vale of York, 2009 Etching · edition of 90 image and sheet 19½ x 30½ in Reference: Ackroyd 592

58 A Suffolk Mere, 2002 Etching · edition of 90 18¾ x 15½ in · 47.6 x 39.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 517

59 Cartmel in February –Windermere, 2012 Etching · edition of 90 19⅜ x 30½ in · 49 x 77.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 635

60 Roareim Flannan, 2011 Watercolour 8⅞ x 13 in · 22.5 x 33 cm

Flannan Islands, 2012 Etching · edition of 90 19½ x 30 in · 49.5 x 76 cm Reference: Ackroyd 636

62 Windermere Gummers How, 2012 Watercolour 9 x 12¾ in · 22.9 x 32.4 cm

63 St Kilda: Gleann Mor, 2012 Watercolour 8¾ x 12¾ in · 22.3 x 32.6 cm

Norman Ackroyd Biography

1938 Born Leeds 1956–61 Leeds College of Art 1961–64 Royal College of Art, London 1988 Elected Royal Academician 1994 Appointed Professor of Etching, University of the Arts 2000 Elected Senior Fellow, Royal College of Art 2007 Awarded a CBE for services to engraving and printing 2013 Broadcast of BBC documentary in the series What do artists do all day? MURAL COMMISSIONS 1986 West Indian Cultural Centre, Haringey, London N22 1990 Lloyds Bank Technology Centre, Park Street, London SE1 1991 Tetrapak, Heathrow 1992 Freshfields, Fleet Street, London EC4

64 Shiant Garbh-Eilean, 2010 Etching · edition of 90 19¼ x 30½ in · 48.8 x 77.5 cm Reference: Ackroyd 614

1993 British Airways, Birmingham International Airport, Eurohub 2000 The Great Hall, British Embassy, Moscow

Published Sets 2003 Lazard, Stratton Street, London W1 (external) 2008 Great Portland Estates, Wells / Mortimer Street, London W1 (external) 2010 Galapagos, Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge for the Study of Plant Development, (external). SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTONS Albertina Museum, Vienna Art Institute of Chicago Arts Council of Great Britain British Council British Museum, London Cleveland Museum of Art Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Musée d’Art Histoire, Geneva Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington DC National Gallery of Canada National Gallery of Norway National Gallery of Scotland National Gallery of South Africa Queensland Art Gallery Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle Stedelijk, Amsterdam Tate Gallery, London Utah Museum of Fine Art and numerous museums and art galleries in the United Kingdom

Norman Ackroyd sketching, 2016 Photographs by Jocelyne van den Bosschew

Sets of etchings, published in limited editions, have been a regular part of Norman Ackroyd’s working practice for over thirty-five years. Each describes a journey in a particular area and the thirty-five sets comprise a singular record of both beautiful and remote places in the British Isles, Ireland and, in 2010, the Galapagos Islands. Below is the full list: Skellig Revisited, 2015 Saltburn to Flamborough, 2014 Donegal Bay, 2013 Shetland, 2012 Beyond Cape Wrath, 2011 Galapagos, 2010 St Kilda Revisited, 2010 Random Journeys, 2009 Malin, 2008 Shannon, 2007 From Cuilin to Kintyre, 2006 The Furthest Lands, 2005 Brancaster Roads, 2004 High Islands, 2003 From Skellig to Skibbereen, 2002 Oilean Arann, 2001 On Blacksod Bay, 2000 A Song for Ireland, 1998 10 Etchings, 1997 Orkney, 1996 From Trevose Head to Tintegal, 1995 Co. Mayo, 1994 Travels with Copper & Wax, 1993 North, South, East, West, 1992 Summer Isles, 1991 Windrush, 1990 St Kilda the Furthest Land, 1989 Pictish Coast, 1988 The Western Shore, 1987 Further Travels with Copper & Zinc, 1986 Ackroyd & Images, 1986 Travels with Copper & Zinc, 1983 Itchen Water, 1982 A Cumberland Journey, 1981 Landscapes and Figures, 1973

The Fine Art Society 148 NEW BOND STR EET · LO N D O N W1 S 2JT + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 gordon@thefineartsociety.com sara@thefineartsociety.com www.thefineartsociety.com

Published by The Fine Art Society for the exhibition Norman Ackroyd: just be a poet held at 148 New Bond Street, London W1, from 9 to 30 November 2016.

I S BN 9 78 1 9 0 7052 7 1 2 Catalogue © The Fine Art Society Images © Norman Ackroyd Introduction © Andrew McNeillie All rights reserved Cover: detail from Windermere on 27 January 1996 [cat.40] Inside cover: enlarged details from Clare Island, 2009 [cat.56] Frontispiece: detail from St Kilda: Gleann Mor, 2012 [cat.63] Designed and typeset in Austin by Dalrymple Printed in Belgium by Albe De Coker

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