Between the Granite and the Strandline Jonathan S Hooper
Between the Granite and the Strandline Jonathan S Hooper
All paintings are available for sale on receipt of this catalogue
9 Bury Street St James’s London TELEPHONE:
SW1Y
020 7930 9293 EMAIL: info@theninebritishart.co.uk WEBSITE: www.theninebritishart.co.uk
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Polaroid photographs are an important adjunct to my practice as a painter. They act not only as source material, or artefacts in their own right, but also as a constant reminder of the analogue process and its facility for chance. Although the inputs that influence Polaroid photographs are to an extent controllable, the final image does not fully acquise to the will of the photographer. Painting is much the same. It is a collaboration between the painter and their materials. [JSH]
Looking Out Jonathan S Hooper
Born in the ancient parish St Tudy, I grew up in the space between the wind-carved tors of North Cornwall’s moors and the cliffs and bays of its Atlantic Ocean coast – between the granite and the strandline.1 Almost an island, Cornwall forms the most south-westerly reaches of mainland Britain. Cornwall is an elemental place steeped in myth and legend; the stories it tells itself. Cornwall is a place where certainties are blurred in salt-laden ocean breezes and clear distinctions become mere approximations. It is a place where weather and landscape merge into one agitated whole.
as to say that my relationship with landscape is much more about the intangible than the measurable and is perhaps even defined by the invisible, the sensed, and the imagined. As a consequence, I see my challenge as an artist being to redefine and represent the concept of emptiness; the space in between; the space beyond the words of writers and equations of science; “the nothing that is”. Landscape is not passive, and should not be passively observed. The same might equally apply to paintings of landscape. It is my view that paintings can, indeed should, reflect back our agency as active constituents of landscape and make demands on us accordingly. Although outwardly resolved and settled, when observed closely over time, landscape emits a sense of relentless change and is full of competing forces. With this in mind, my work seeks to record the constant negotiation between the processes of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. Change is a function of time and landscape registers time in all its scales, from the ephemeral to the seemingly eternal. Landscape also exhibits repeating markers of time; markers perhaps exemplified by the seasons or the rolling ocean waves which, like echoes, make and remake themselves into infinity.
The 18th century ecologist Gilbert White stated that “the weather of a [place] is undoubtedly part of its natural history” and in doing so he was asserting that weather and landscape, and the human story lived out within them, are inextricable. There can be few locations that support White’s certainty more forcefully than Cornwall, exposed as it is to the untrammelled might of the Atlantic Ocean and its weather systems. For the inhabitants of this determinedly independent promontory, their fortunes – indeed their very existence – has depended on an acute understanding of the natural history of place. The characteristic lattice of high stone hedges; the staggered harbour walls; the abandoned mine In the latter half of the 1950s, the internationally workings and myriad shipwrecks now fragments of renowned Cornish artist Peter Lanyon [1918-1964] memories; the remnants of bronze age villages and began to produce work that he would describe as field systems, and even earlier ceremonial sites; all “weather paintings”. One day in 1956 whilst walking these testify to this survival story, this natural history. on the beach at Perranporth, a few miles from his It is out of the complex geometry, history and home in Carbis Bay, Lanyon watched three gliders atmospherics of Cornwall, this outwardly permanent soaring above the cliffs to the west. He took this scene yet highly provisional land, that my work as a painter and painted “High Ground” [1956]. This painting emerges, and against which it should be viewed. combined the solid with the evanescent and contained For me landscape is not simply land, sea and air but the strong diagonal that would go on to become a is arguably more about what separates and connects central compositional feature of his later work; these headline elements. Although my work depicts “the diagonal lifts me from the ground into the sky… solidity and structure – form and force – it is every bit I saw three gliders over a cliff and decided to go up as much about empty space. In fact, I would go as far there myself,” wrote Lanyon. 1
Strandline is the archaic term for shoreline, but also refers to the line of deposition left by a retreating tide and in this sense is a marker of the lunar cycle.
of a post-war mission to reconstruct our relationship The gliders that Lanyon had observed belonged to with landscape, using the techniques and matériel the Cornish Gliding Club (CGC) which was formed of abstract art. In and around the club in those early in 1955 by a small group of ex-RAF fliers. It was days, conversations about post-modernist theories not until 1959 that Peter Lanyon eventually joined and the semiotics and practice of painting mingled the gliding club and followed his diagonal into the with the language and mechanisms of flight. skies. My father Harry Hooper, who was a founder member and later the Chairman of the club, would In flight, glider pilots are engaged in a continual be one of Lanyon’s instructors. It is quite likely that process of mapping three-dimensional space. my father was piloting one of the gliders that Lanyon They overlay the tangible, two-dimensional view of had observed on that day in 1956. This was a moment landscape with a complex matrix of invisible, sensory, that not only heralded an evolutionary step in Peter even subjective inputs. All of these inputs, measurable Lanyon’s painting practice, providing him with the and otherwise, are assembled into something that “new ways of experiencing landscape” that he sought, is as much a predictive, anticipatory tool as it is but would influence the evolution of abstract painting a statement of how things are. Rather like the more generally. Rebbellib 3 of early Marshall Island navigators, these maps only truly exist in the individual imagination, My father’s commitment to the CGC would prove evolutionary for me. I took my first steps at the airfield making them mutable and highly personal abstractions of space and time. when Lanyon himself, rather impulsively, deposited me on the peritrack by the clubhouse as he set off to recover an incoming glider. The airfield was a place of seemingly infinite horizons and it was here, on this exposed clifftop, perhaps more than anywhere else, that I would begin to forge my relationship with Cornwall’s enigmatic natural history. It was here that I even began to explore the paradox between the essential interiority of this relationship and what I see as the imperative for the artist to stand on the outside looking out. In the twenty years following the end of World War II, the CGC fermented its pioneering spirit, becoming a hub for adventurers from a multitude of disciplines and backgrounds. Peter Lanyon was not the only artist at the club with the Scottish painter, and fellow resident of West Penwith, Alan Davie joining just a year later. Davie would also become a gliding pupil of my father’s and another regular visitor to our family home in St Tudy.2 Both Lanyon and Davie were part 2
Painting, too, is a form of map-making. Rather more accurately, I see painting as a form of wayfinding, the process prior to map-making. Wayfinding is the essential mystery of how we navigate the world. It is a combination of science and poetry; a combination of the learnt and the innate. In terms of my own practice I will, on occasion, construct my own versions of Rebbellib. These abstract three-dimensional charts enable me to organise and resolve my observations and experiences on to a two-dimensional painting surface. The finished painting might then be considered as the final step in a more metaphysical endeavour. Meteorology, literally “the study of things high in the air”, could be considered the art of looking up. My father was one of the CGC’s more dedicated practitioners of this art. He would even be the first to identify and record a wave cloud formation that develops above the moors near Rough Tor during rare periods of persistent north-easterly winds.
On one occasion Davie made an unannounced visit to the Hooper house when, attempting a cross country gliding challenge, he lost height and lift and was forced into a field-landing on the outskirts of St Tudy.
3 Rebbellib were the abstract stick charts constructed by traditional seafarers of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia. Representing ocean swells and currents at different times of the year along with their relationship with the island archipelagos, they were unique to an individual navigator. As such, not only did they describe the geometry of physical space and time but they also represent the memories and experience of their maker.
Flyers would come to Cornwall from far and wide to seek out this elusive phenomenon, an area of strong, smooth and relatively static lift, and it became known in gliding circles as “Hooper’s Wave”. Wave forms feature in much of my work, sometimes referenced in the titles of paintings such as “Waveform: Orange and Grey” or the developing “Rough Tor Wave” series. Waves are visible and audible manifestations of the physical environment however, less obviously, waves create the shadows and echoes that suggest form through absence. Waves are my foundational forms. Waves are to me what cylinders, spheres and cones were to Paul Cezanne or cubic and rectilinear elements were to Braque, Picasso and others. So pivotal have they become that I use the term “Waveism” to describe my evolving theory of painting and representation. Cornwall is a land of layers: the rock and mineral strata cut through and exploited by long- abandoned mine workings, or revealed in wave-carved cliff faces; the balancing and slumping granite blocks stacked up on eroding tors; clouds ordered in ranks on advancing weather fronts, ribbons of colour borrowed from the setting sun; the coruscating bands of ocean waves, narrowing and merging towards the horizon. Layers and waves share much in common. Both register time as they progress, accumulate, and decay. They are ubiquitous and have become commonly used metaphorical devices: waves of emotion; layers of history. They are the forces that impel us and the structures on which, and within which, we live out our lives.
in my paintings are contrived to disrupt the familiar signifiers of land, sea and air, creating complex surfaces that can be at once ambiguous and resolved. My paintings blur and deconstruct the distinctions between the most recognisable elements of landscape. Edges are key to this deconstruction process. Borders, boundaries, edges are contingent and provisional. These are the grey areas, the areas where the equations of science break down, where knowledge wavers and the potential for new discovery begins. Science inhabits the space between “why” and “is” which, I would argue, is the same space that is occupied by art. However, where science is preoccupied with bridging the gap between “why” and “is”, art – particularly abstract art – is free from the constraints of direct meaning and explanation. Art has a responsibility to go beyond the edge and venture into the ambiguous, uncultivated and previously uncharted regions. I do not see edges as clear lines of demarcation but instead view them as zones of transition. Japanese Zen Buddhist aesthetics has a term wabi-sabi which is essentially the appreciation of transience, imperfection and incompleteness. Because of what I see as their essential ambivalence, edges might be regarded as possessing wabi-sabi and the incomplete outer margins of my paintings are a register of this ambivalence.
I typically refer to my paintings as Edgescapes, and this is in part a comment on the essential liminality of the narrow and exposed Cornish peninsula. More than this, however, it is a challenge to direct The layering of paint is, in part, a metaphor for the meaning and to the constraints of traditional laying down of memories. Each new layer of paint, terminology such as “landscape” or “seascape”. each new memory, builds on the colour and texture The acclaimed Cornish poet Charles Causley [1917of those that precede it and substantiates those that 2003] loosened these constraints in poems such as follow. Layers that are obscured or only partially “The Seasons in North Cornwall”. Using his revealed; layers worn away, their original intensity distinctive voice, Causley conjures allusions to time now only a memory. Moments of clarity slightly and place that locate us within a landscape that is beyond our grasp; glimpses of the familiar in a matrix enigmatic and equivocal, yet still deceptively accessible. that is amorphous, fluid and diffuse; echoes from the Just as poets can challenge the conventions and past, drifting, combining and fading, perhaps barely complacency of language, so artists can challenge perceptible but still always there. The criss-crossing the orthodoxies of visual representation. and interweaving waves of texture, colour and form
When considering the British artists of the 1950s and early 1960s, the art critic Lawrence Alloway found himself frustrated by their retention of direct landscape references. He was uncompromising in his views and saw Cornwall as particularly vulnerable to what he considered to be anachronistic, even oppressive, sentimentalism. Alloway would champion Peter Lanyon, and others in the St Ives group, who he saw as detaching themselves from the restrictions of representation, embracing complexity and uncertainty in their pursuit of a new landscape paradigm. The principal concern of my painting is the individuated experience of landscape, and the ontological consequences that can flow from this. My work might be seen on the arc that, arguably, begins with Turner and passes through the likes of Peter Lanyon, as it does not dwell on pure observation. Important as observation is, my paintings attempt to utilise the full range of sensory and phenomenological inputs. I think of landscape as “tuned space” and this alludes to the temporal, resonance of place; the multi-factorial harmonics of a location. I combine the immutable structures of landscape – identifiable, knowable, describable – with the unmeasurable, fugitive vibrations of memory, change and doubt. As such, I am interested in subsuming notions of the collectively apprehensible into something profoundly personal. My paintings are undeniably about landscape but are also about a broader discussion about meaning and ambiguity. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who used art as a vector for many of his ideas, asserted that identity derives from difference, with difference revealing itself through repetition. Repetition is key to my practice and I produce works that are often variations on a theme or improvisations around and away from a familiar tune. This approach to painting closely mirrors my engagement with specific locations; the essence and nuance of place only being revealed through repeated visits. I typically adopt “portrait” or square format for my paintings and this too is a comment on traditional notions of how landscape should be viewed.
Formats are merely conventions and, in turn, conventions are impositions that often go unchallenged. The “landscape/portrait” formats for pictorial representation are conventions that emanated from the earliest days of photography. Landscape, itself, has no ordained scale or orientation, nor does it prescribe an orthodox way of apprehending it. Selecting something other than “landscape” format for my work is not just a rejection of an arbitrary convention but more a device through which to reflect landscape back at the viewer. An upright or square image frames the space occupied by the viewer every bit as much as defining the space represented in, or occupied by, the work. To paraphrase the preface of Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology, the height of landscape is a measure of man. The time spent at the CGC and in the company of the notable figures that populated the landscape of my formative years, was undoubtedly highly influential. Despite all of these charismatic inputs however, I recall particularly how, as a very young boy, I was fascinated by an old workshop door encrusted with layers and spatters of paint and suffused with the aromatics of turpentine and linseed oil. The paint had built up over generations as tradesmen cleaned out their brushes at the end of their working days. I created worlds from the smallest moments in the folds and contours of these cracked, chipped and abraded paint layers, with my imagination allowing the abstract shapes, colours and textures to become something other. This overlooked and neglected door was a cipher, a diagonal to the otherwise unseen, and revealed the ineffable power of paint. Without fully apprehending any of this at the time, the workshop door, combined with the esoteric conversations that swirled around those early years, undoubtedly catalysed my own map-making process. Accumulating knowledge of my environment, and being encouraged to do so in ways that looked beyond the immediately apprehensible, I was collecting and collating the elements that I would later use to produce my paintings. In other words, I was taking up my position in landscape.
Jonathan S Hooper at The Nine British Art
CAT
1 Solid Air No 20
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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2 Garrow Farm: Winter Storm Passing
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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4 Light Echoes No 4
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins) CAT
3 Light Echoes No 3
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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5 Light Echoes No 5
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
installation detail: Cat 3–5, Light Echoes No 3, 4 & 5, with Cat 21 in background
Cat 6 Growan (detail)
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6 Growan
signed, titled and dated 2019/20 verso oil on panel 80 x 60 cms (31½ x 23½ ins) framed: 83 x 63 cms (32½ x 24½ ins)
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7 Summer Moor Meadows
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil on panel 91 x 61 cms (36 x 24 ins) framed: 94 x 64 cms (37 x 25 ins)
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8 Gorse Storm: Treswallock Downs
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil on canvas 120 x 150 cms (47 x 59 ins) framed: 122 x 152 cms (48 x 60 ins)
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9 September
signed, titled and dated 2019 verso oil on panel 60 x 50 cms (23½ x 19½ ins) framed: 63 x 53 cms (24½ x 20½ ins)
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10 Emblance Downs: Autumn
signed, titled and dated 2019 verso oil on panel 60 x 50 cms (23½ x 19½ ins) framed: 63 x 53 cms (24½ x 20½ ins)
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11 Light Echoes No 6
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
installation detail: above Cat 12 – 15 (right to left) background, Cat 17 & 18
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12 Monochrome No 1
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil and resin on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins) CAT
13 Monochrome No 2
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil and resin on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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14 Monochrome No 3
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil and resin on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins) CAT
15 Monochrome No 4
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil and resin on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16 Tremeer
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 61 x 51 cms (24 x 20 ins) framed: 64 x 54 cms (25 x 21 ins)
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17 High Moor: Autumn
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 51 x 51 cms (20 x 20 ins) framed: 54 x 54 cms (21 x 21 ins)
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18 Lanlavery Rock
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 51 x 51 cms (20 x 20 ins) framed: 54 x 54 cms (21 x 21 ins)
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19 Leskernick Fields No 2
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 70 x 100 cms (27½ x 39½ ins) framed: 73 x 103 cms (28½ x 40½ ins)
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20 Hawk's Tor Gradient
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 61 x 51 cms (24 x 20 ins) framed: 64 x 54 cms (25 x 21 ins)
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21 Moor Path: Approaching Storm signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 61 x 51 cms (24 x 20 ins) framed: 64 x 54 cms (25 x 21 ins)
GALLERY INSTALL SHOT YET TO BE AGREED BUT POSSIBLY OF PREVIOUS PAIR OBLIQUE ANGLE AND DETAIL OR LARGE FOLLWOING WORK AT AN ANGLE
Cat 21 Moor Path: Approaching Storm (detail)
Cat 22 Rough Tor Wave No 4 (detail)
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22 Rough Tor Wave No 4
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil on canvas 120 x 150 cms (47 x 59 ins) framed: 122 x 152 cms (48 x 60 ins)
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23 Headland No 10
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil, wax and resin on board 122 x 61 cms (48 x 24 ins) framed: 125 x 64 cms (49 x 25 ins)
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24 Granite Moor
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 100 x 70 cms (39½ x 27½ ins) framed: 103 x 73 cms (40½ x 28½ ins)
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25 Granite Mist: Buttern Hill
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil on canvas 120 x 150 cms (47 x 59 ins) framed: 122 x 152 cms (48 x 60 ins)
Cat 25 Granite Mist: Buttern Hill (detail)
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26 Headland No 11
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil, wax and resin on panel 122 x 61 cms (48 x 24 ins) framed: 125 x 64 cms (49 x 25 ins)
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27 Headland No 12
signed, titled and dated 2021 verso oil, wax and resin on panel 122 x 61 cms (48 x 24 ins) framed: 125 x 64 cms (49 x 25 ins)
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27
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28 Pathway: Grey, Orange
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 41 x 41 cms (16 x 16 ins) framed: 44 x 44 cms (17 x 17 ins)
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29 Rough Tor Summit: Summer Storm
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 61 x 51 cms (24 x 20 ins) framed: 64 x 54 cms (25 x 21 ins)
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30 Crowdy Mist
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 51 x 51 cms (20 x 20 ins) framed: 54 x 54 cms (21 x 21 ins)
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31 High Moor: Spring
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 50 x 50 cms (19½ x 19½ ins) framed: 53 x 53 cms (20½ x 20½ ins)
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32 High Moor: Summer
signed, titled and dated 2020 verso oil on panel 51 x 51 cms (20 x 20 ins) framed: 54 x 54 cms (21 x 21 ins)
The Seasons in North Cornwall O Spring has set off her green fuses Down by the Tamar today, And careless, like tide-marks, the hedges, Are bursting with almond and may. Here lie I waiting for old summer, A red face and straw-coloured hair has he: I shall meet him on the road from Marazion And the Mediterranean Sea. September has flung a spray of rooks On the sea-chart of the sky, The tall shipmasts crack in the forest And the banners of autumn fly. My room is a bright glass cabin, All Cornwall thunders at my door, And the white ships of winter lie In the sea-roads of the moor.
Charles Causley
Between the Granite and the Strandline Jonathan S Hooper Published in Spring 2022 The Nine British Art ISBN 978-1-9995993-9-3 The Nine British Art 9 Bury Street St James’s London sw1Y 6AB Telephone: 020 7930 9293 Email: info@theninebritishart.co.uk www.theninebritishart.co.uk © The Nine British Art 2022 ‘The Seasons in North Cornwall’ from Collected Poems 1951-2000 by Charles Causley, published by Picador; reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates. With thanks to the Charles Causley Trust. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without first seeking the written permission of the copyright holders and of the publisher. Photography: Paul Tucker Photography Design: Alan Ward @ www.axisgraphicdesign.co.uk Print: Graphius, Ghent
Front cover: CAT 1 Solid Air No 20 Back cover: CAT 2 Garrow Farm: Winter Storm Passing
9 Bury Street St James’s London TELEPHONE:
SW1Y
020 7930 9293 EMAIL: info@theninebritishart.co.uk WEBSITE: www.theninebritishart.co.uk
6AB