1960-1980
Bud
1965 Pencil on paper
In the art room at school, probably about 14 years old.
Shoreham
1968 Oil on canvas
Trees near Shoreham
1970 Oil on canvas
Quitterie
1972 Oil on canvas 45 x 33.5 cm
Shoreham Garden
1972 Oil on canvas
Moving to Kent when I was 9 marked a change in sensibility. The rhythm of the landscape, the fold of the hills, was very different to Gloucestershire, where I lived for my first years. By chance we ended up in the village where Samuel Palmer, the 18th Century painter and engraver, lived and where he did his most famous work. We lived just opposite from the house where he worked and I think this made a difference also to my feeling about the landscape. Part of his circle was William Blake, a spiritual radical and revolutionary that added to the allure. This painting is probably the most complete expression of my feeling about the place at the time. It was done in the early 80’s in the garden of my childhood home in Shorham, looking out past the cherry blossom to the houses of the village and the terrace of the hill beyond.
Somehow in this painting I felt I managed to get a sense of a particular feeling for this landscape and for the sense of home; in the end it is really an expression of that quality of sense of home.
There is usually one bit of a painting that is a struggle and in this case it was the willow tree on the left, which I tried for ages to get right and is still not completely sorted out. However, the rest of it I was pleased with. It is partly the colour resonance and the internal relationships within the painting, but also a sense that I was able to articulate a particular point of view and a focus. It represents a sort of “tunnel vision” with the focus in the centre and the periphery more out of focus. This is a way of reflecting the actual experience of looking at something - my experience of looking at the landscape, as much as the landscape itself.
A key to finishing the painting was getting the colour of the sky right, which locks the whole colour resonance together. What I look for is that moment when the painting as a whole begins to vibrate with colour and meaning.
That’s the point at which it is finished. Also important in giving that sense of completeness are the internal linear relationships, say for instance how the branches of the cherry blossom link with the trees on the skyline in a way that is not obvious, but gives a sense of hidden structure (and thus meaning) beneath the surface.
Another key thing in this painting that I was pleased about, which I had been working towards for some time, was the liberation of colour from the “local colour” of the subject so that it could have a symbolic value. There is nothing particularly innovative about this, it had been done 80 years before by Matisse and the Fauves, but I felt that at least in this painting that I had managed it in my way and for my purposes. The painting says what it felt like to be a child in this family, this garden, this landscape and this home.
When around this time I went for the first time to Jerusalem, it was a beautiful thing that the rhythmic pitch of the valley between Jerusalem city and the Mount of Olives felt very similar to that of the Shoreham hills. Given the religious pre-occupations of Blake and Palmer this seemed like a nice coincidence and I did a number of drawings of the Mount of Olives valley to express this.
Self Portrait
1973 Oil on canvas
Africa
1974 Acrylic on board
I spent time in Dar-es-Salaam, Mvumi and Dodoma in Tanzania working in paediatrics and painting. Light, rhythm and motherhood, kind of sum it up. After work I would walk out into the red intense light of the bush, paint huts, hills and Baobab trees. One afternoon in shimmering heat, looking out over a piece of flat red ground with tree trunks, huts and some grass, there was a moment of dissolution when I saw and felt how I wanted to paint; immersed in colour which existed beside objects bounded by lines. This is very difficult to describe except to say I felt a clear sense of what I wanted to do with intense colour and line, a sense of dissolution in the landscape. This painting is my expression of this moment, done later on my return. It was a loadstone to where I went later with intense dematerialised colour and line (“Karkur” for instance). That absorbsion in colour is what I return to when I work. To put it another way, during that experience colour and my heart linked. Lines stated and contained. It was simmering hot.
Rhythm came from the movement of people, the music, the drumming, the grace of sinuous backs and the rhythm of the houses, built from crooked trees with dark enclosures in shadow. These rhythmic enclosures have carried over into many subsequent paintings, organising the space on the canvas.
Motherhood came in the form of work on the paediatric wards, watching the sway of mothers bringing in their children for care, usually after a walk of many miles through the bush; bringing in a starving, flushed or dehydrated, still or frightened looking baby. The graceful rhythm of care giving with the floppy listless child was the core of it. An extraordinary patience and total commitment to the child. The prolonged and intense wailing into the night when a child died – almost ritualised in a group of women together, but full of anguish for hours on end until they walked away together into the night.
I was transfixed by this and began to do drawings on the ward. An opportunity came to climb Kilimanjaro, but I turned it down because I didn’t want to leave this environment. Much flowed from this later into medicine, it kind of set my direction.
African Figure 2
1974 Pencil on paper
African Figure
1974 Pencil on paper
Dodoma Landscape
1974 Pencil on paper
After a day in the paediatric ward at Mvumi I would head out into the wild ochre landscape dotted with baobab trees…
Festival Drumming
1974 Pencil on paper
In a community open air festival, groups of women, drums between their thighs, faced each other in a circle, and drummed themselves and their audience into a deep trance…
Figure in House
1974 Pencil on paper
The rhythm of persons and architecture in wood
Heads
1974 Pencil on paper
Heads 2
1974 Pencil on paper
Heads 3
1974 Pencil on paper
Mother in Mvumi 2
1974 Pencil on paper
Mother in Mvumi
1974 Pencil on paper
Mothers, having often walked for a day or two with their sick babies to get there, entered the ward...
Portrait of Andy
1974 Oil on canvas
After university I saved some money working as a taxi driver and went to Paris for a few months to study at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere. My brother Andy came out to visit me for the Christmas and New Year and because we had no money he brought out some mince pies from our parents. It was a good time and I did this portrait of Andy in the flat in Montparnasse, quite influenced by Giacometti, who I felt very identified with at that time and whose studio had been just round the corner.
Chiltern Fall
1976 Oil on canvas
Trees in Wales
1976 Oil on canvas
Early on in our relationship, Ari and I took a holiday out in Pembrokeshire with some friends. On the way there driving in our red Citroen 2CV, I learned the words of my first (and only) song in Hebrew – “Eim Bahar hazavta even…….” (carving stone out of the mountain is not for nothing….out it we build the temple….). In Wales it poured with rain and I set off into the forest with Ari to paint. As the rain lashed and the wind blew - dramatically, like Turner lashed to the mast in a storm - I started to paint the trees. Ari held the easel behind the canvas to keep it all upright. Me, her, the wind, the painting – I had never met anyone before who would see the point of doing such a thing!
Trees in Aylesbury
1977 Acrylic on canvas
This is a further work as things got on towards winter in Aylesbury. It is the same theme of working out boundaries, distance, relatedness. The interesting thing about this was that the background was generated, abstracted, out of a woodland scene in order to articulate the space and relationship between the two trees and yet for me the main content of the work is the rhythm that was created in order to do that. In other words, the background becomes the main foreground content of the work. It carries the feeling generated as it were at the service of defining the space between the two trees. For me that background is the texture of life.
The flow vertically through the piece is pretty much unimpeded with the slightest horizontal horizon type line, telling the tale of the remains of what used to be a division.
Undergrowth
1977 Pencil on paper
A Lume Spento
1978 Pencil on paper
This collage was done, I think a little later, but is basically the same theme as managing relatedness and space. ‘A Lume Spento’ means ‘An Extinguishing Light’ - and is a reference to the title of Ezra Pound’s first book of poems. However it’s nothing to do with the content of these poems - I just loved the texture of the name.
Willow in Highbury
1978 Oil on canvas
This was quite definitely for me a “breakthrough” painting. Ari and I were living in the basement of a house in Cannonbury Park South, Islington. Out at the back of the house was a stream with a little park by it and that is where I did this painting over a number of months. What I was trying to do was to create a kind of abstracted version of what I saw, that would also allow me to liberate colour from context in a way that I had found myself able to do when I was in Africa. The work is also an effort to deal with reflection and mirroring and has something in it influenced by Mondrian’s early landscapes, where he abstracted objects (famously trees and water) in a way that I found incredibly exciting. It took me a long time to get to this image and in the way I treated some of the foliage there were the lessons of the earlier Aylesbury paintings.
The process of the painting was lovely and marked by one specific memory when a group of young children came up on my right on their bikes and looked at what I was doing. This is always a rather particular moment which is frequent when one paints outside, having this intimate, tentative, anxious process suddenly just open to public gaze, scrutiny (and imagined criticism) before it is ready.
“What’s that Mr…..”
“It’s a painting of that tree…”. Silence….”Oh…..What do you do then Mr are you an artist….?”
Always a moment of truth this one, how do I represent this activity to the world? I must have been far enough on with the painting at that moment and somehow confident enough… in any event I know at this time I was very preoccupied with just that question…..
”Yes I am, but my other real job is as a doctor….” “… Wow! You are a doctor and an artist…”.
There was a kind of glee or amazement or excitement in the way the little boy said that – or the fact that he actually said it – “doctor and artist” – something I had not heard myself or anyone else say before, the fact that he articulated that in a spontaneous way and actually with a sense of enjoying acceptance, that this was a possible thing to be, and the fact this came from a kid of 9 or so with a fresh face and innocent inquisitiveness and acceptance, stayed with me – the first acceptance of my identity, and from a child! They laughed with pleasure and rode off on their bikes.
I am fully aware of my limitations and that to dare to consider oneself an artist without the launching of oneself existentially on the trust of it, with the comfortable cushion of doctoring; made me (and makes me) completely humble and tentative about it all. Particularly as across the road in Highbury New Park lived my dear friend of that time, Paul Neagu, the Romanian sculptor, committed radical artist and often suffering for it, who responded to any angst about ‘art or medicine’ with “Just doing it will make it right". I did what the little boy said and
in retrospect I can only feel that it has been a gift and a blessing to do both things.
So at the time, anyway, by the stream looking at the Willow, it felt like something had crystallised in my identity and simultaneously it seems, I felt able to liberate some colour within the abstraction from the local (the Naples/Cadmium Yellow at the top and the Indian Red at the top middle and the serious Viridian Green to it’s left), these felt like liberations and I remember with absolute vividness of the final day, carrying the finished painting home, precious like a trophy, desperate not to smudge it, back to the flat with a sense of triumph, to show Ari. I remember some time soon after in the same spot by the same stream, walking with her purposefully to that spot after we knew we were going to have a baby and asking her to marry me there. The rest has flowed from there, from those colours.
Autumn Wood near Chequers
1979 Oil on canvas
This painting links most closely to ‘Willow in Highbury’ of a few years later and was a key painting done during the period I spent in Aylesbury for my first medical house job. Out there I was away from everything, away from London from Ari, from medical school, from family. It was a time of intense focus and exploration as well as loneliness. I went off out into the beech woods around Chequers during the intense autumn leaf fall and then approaching winter in November.
This is one of the paintings I did then, out in the woods, trying to bring together everything I had worked for.
The theme is the precise delineation of structure through trees, with the winter like a kind of expression of precise but gentle and energetic thought, along with the seething colour of the leaves below ground in the bottom part. I had done many kind of images like this before, trying to link subterranean, energetic life with the above ground air, a sense always of trying to allow free flowing energy outwards, to link different parts of the structure. In this painting I remember the crucial thing was to find lines of energy transfer that could liberate the bottom and connect the halves of the painting. The key moment was the point where I found the solution of splitting the main central tree trunk image into two, from the initial version of it which was a single trunk, which looked stupid. This decision to split the trunk and allow an articulation of the relationship between the two trunks and thus to the other trunks in the forest was the mechanism for allowing the energy transfer. It linked with other work I did at this time using this kind of double image. It is a bit pat to say it, but I think it is probably right that I was working with singleness versus relatedness here and the solution to the release of this energy within relationships in the painting was a turning point. The rhythms of the painting also have some relationship to my discovery of Beethoven’s late string quartets at this time.
Autumnal Tree in Shoreham
1979 Oil on canvas