1980-2000
Across the Valley
1980 Oil on canvas
This was also done in Swaledale on that trip. Quicker and more sketchy, done in an hour or so, but I was pleased with it as a quick complete rapid thought. The painting looks across the valley and with fields to hillside beyond and is bisected by a horizontal line two thirds up that represented a river. I remember particularly painting the hill at the top of the painting and feeling an unusual sense of fluency, with my mind really disconnected from the painting act, having some kind of intense sequence of thoughts that I can’t quite remember the content of, but meanwhile the painting going on as if it were unconsciously or automatically beneath thinking and a sense of wonderful freedom and liberation and fluency in being in that state of mind.
I was also pleased with this painting in the sense that it reproduces a very common theme from earlier work, which was a division between a two thirds bottom space and a one third roughly top space in paintings, within the early work, very much a sense of disconnection between the two parts which certainly mapped onto linking emotion and intellect or feeling impulse and its expression in the world; important to me throughout my 20’s and which, in a way, symbolically this painting was part of a release from; that is because here the link between the bottom and the top is pretty porous and fluid and dynamic. I was also very pleased with the colours that I made for the hills and the coherent feeling of the piece.
Drystone Wall
1980 Pencil on paper
The Keynes had a house perched on a hillside in Swaledale in Yorkshire and Ari and I went up there a few times. On one occasion I stayed there afterwards on my own for a week or so - an important time. The house was quite spartan and remote, pretty lonely. I did a number of things there, one of which was to build a drystone wall (or at least a 2 metre section of it). I was doing a microbiology course that involved a lot of looking down the microscope at cells. I discovered that a drystone wall is a beautiful structure, which is very like a lipid bi-layer in a cell wall; a three layer structure with two outer structural elements and a middle porous filling. The wall is built freestanding, interlocking and balancing with the weight of stones locking in the structure with big heavy foundation stones at the bottom, building up the sides with complementary bricks slotting together and occasional through-stones joining the two walls as they grow. Down the middle is a filling layer of smaller stones and rubble to lock the structure in. The top capped with transverse slabs sealing the top against the weather and holding the walls united. The wonderful thing was the internal geometry and poetry of the freestanding wall that needed no cement, and was extraordinarily robust. There are other cross-associations too to biology and medicine…this kind of cell like shape occurs at different levels of organisation in the body – so in a related series of drawings of the carpal bones in the hand I was abstracting and developing a visual language that spoke to my sense of organicity, emotion and flow.
Life on Earth
1980 Pencil on paper
Swaledale
1980 Oil on canvas
This was the main painting that I did in Swaledale, alongside the drystone wall drawing, but spent a long time after my return trying to complete. This painting was an attempt to do the same thing as the drystone wall drawing, but in paint and using colour interaction in an abstract way. What I was aiming for was influenced by Kandinsky, but also a whole load of other influences, like Matisse. It’s built around cell-like elements of colour and visually this was helped by the pattern of the drystone walls on the Yorkshire fells. It aimed to be the most abstracted landscape I could do at the time and manage all sorts of issues around dealing with space as well as emotion. Although the body of the painting, that is the fields and colours in the centre and to the right foreground, came very quickly and easily out there painting in front of the landscape, dodging rain showers; the rest of it, the sky and resolving the space on the left of the painting, took me ages afterwards and is still only partially resolved. The form on the left is supposed to be a representation of the edge of the canvas that I am painting and putting that in was a way of trying to resolve the problem of space, where the receding space to the left dropped off the left edge of the painting and completely unbalanced it. The sky needed to be both receding in its place, but very present and the Yorkshire skies are very strong. The engine of the painting and the colours and feeling of the fields on the hill absolutely represents my turbulent energy at the time. I remember driving back down the A1 to London on a glorious blustery day feeling glad of what I had done and happy to be going home.
Totes Meer after Paul Nash
1990 Pencil on paper
Portrait of Adam
1993 Pencil on paper
Portrait of Benji
1993 Pencil on paper
Karkur
1995 Acrylic on canvas
We went to Karkur, Israel, in the mid 1990’s, on one of our many trips there as a family, to stay in the house of Dinah’s grandfather, one of the first settlers in northern Israel. This trip was remarkable in many ways, for the heat, for the pleasure we had together, for the texture of Israel and its people on the turn towards the crescendo-ing anxiety of the late ‘90s; and for a sense of the richness of the history of the place and of the people that was stimulated by staying at the house in Karkur and getting familiar with the history of Dinah’s grandfather. He had been one of the early settlers who had come from a comfortable job in London to make Alyiah in a mosquito infested swamp in the middle of Israel. A passionate sense of duty and conviction it must have been to take them there.
Many died early on from malaria and it was a pioneers narrative. He became a central figure in that early community and it came to feel a privilege to stay in his house and see some of his archives which were stored there.
As was the pattern on all of these family holidays at that time, I used to get up very early, tip-toeing around not to wake anyone, making some coffee on the stove and as silently as I could, get out into the vine-covered courtyard at the back of the house to paint for a few hours before everyone woke up. This was magical time for being so early and in some sense, secret and stolen time; and a delight that I could preserve this as well as doing all the other family things. There was a beautiful rhythm about these holidays and Ari would get up also quietly a little later and paint as well.
So it was during this secret time that I made this painting of the early morning light in the vine-covered courtyard, a step on the way to always trying to be more fluent, abstract, open and radically true with what was there. To be bound by the discipline of being in front of a subject with changing light every day, but through that very repetition to find an image of the real. I felt I got somewhere close to that with this painting, but it is also viewed with the awareness of its context; the view out through the vines on this courtyard was over to the shed in the garden where the memoirs were kept of this extraordinary man in his community and period, all in the middle east sunlight. There is something about the passion of the journey that he took and the leadership he showed within his community and the historic resonance of all this that touched me and is imbued in the light of the painting and my memory.
In style, I just wanted to get as abstracted as possible, while keeping true to the subject. That balance between the freedom and daring of the abstraction are but held within what is true to the scene is a core aspect of this work. Partly it is how much can I get away with while keeping within the rules, but it also feels like how much truth can I get? You might well say, "well why stick with the rules at all” - keeping facing a real subject with all the frustrations and anxieties of the change in the light, the wind, the movement. I have tried doing just straight abstractions, but it ends up with a loss of potency. For me this tension between maximal expression within the constraints of something external is a fundamental part of the process. I am hardly alone in this, of course – I am working in a long tradition of people who have abstracted landscape and held the tension in this way, from Cezanne, to Kandinsky, to Matisse, to Deibenkorn, to Nicholson, to Hodgkin. One of my loadstone books by Philip Rawson, called Drawing (OUP 1969), speaks about this tension and the heart of art in terms of the need to have a “topic” against which the style can operate and create meaning. He considers that total abstraction is really impossible and would be vacuous.
Artists who deal in pure abstraction usually organise it around a different kind of topic, sometimes a theoretical routine (see my essay on Noel Foster), or on some kind of internal imaginary topic (for instance Hodgkin with memory traces of events that were important to him). In other words, style has to be “about something”. This tendency is really characteristic of high modernism and perhaps the best example would be James Joyce. In “Ulysses” and particularly in “Finnegan’s Wake” he creates a kind of abstracted language that gets as far away from the external topic as he can – and indeed often seems completely to break into incoherence - before you realise that actually that is not the case. The notebooks for Finnegan’s Wake show how Joyce would start with a fairly realistic description of a scene or an event and would gradually break this down into his wildly abstracted and abstruse language forms, which makes the surface of his prose so difficult to read and the whole thing a kind of challenge to go from the surface disruption to the inner and original meaning. Why do this? Well, in Joyce's case, and also in what I'm trying, to open up a language of expression that starts, and remains anchored in, a common reality but through this dissolving becomes open up to all sorts of other possibilities too – across space and time, into innermost personal feeling, across shared experience.
Freud had great metaphors for this in terms of the spatial architecture of mind; from ego functioning interacting with the external real world, to archaic id functioning, operating on different rules of space time, in a generative flux underneath and within experience.
So an easy way to put this in those terms is a language that allows some of the id process to mix with ego functioning to enliven it like compost, but still keeping a “coherent hold on reality”……But that is rather theoretical and it is not quite the experience of doing the work. I prefer to speak more in terms of the feeling of authentic expression. When the paintings work, it is when the colour resonance between the elements vibrates in such a way as to make a different level of aesthetic reality. When doing it, it doesn’t feel arbitrary at all; the tiniest manipulation of shade, colour, shape gets it right in the sense that the whole takes off, as I felt when I first did the drawing of the elderflower, age 14.
This holiday was also notable for me for a decision made in this courtyard, sitting in front of those vines, to launch in and commit to the development of my attachment instrument the MCAST, which was a leap of faith and adventure which felt like going over the rapids on the Zambezi with Pete and which led to years of detailed work to develop the manual, the coding and the validation with Charlie and Ruth and of which we are just, this year celebrating the 15th anniversary.
Betemeralp
1996 Acrylic on canvas
Religio Medici 1 - “Is not this the heat....”
1996 Pencil on paper
Religio Medici 2 - "...this gentle ventilation.”
1996 Pencil on paper
Religio Medici 3 - “...nor light though he dwelt in the body of the sun”
1996 Pencil on paper
Cornfield in Central Italy
1998 Acrylic on board
Landscape with Church (Church in Gascony)
1998 Acrylic on board 60 x 80 cm
Drumbeg in Assynt
1999 Acrylic on board
Ariella and I did a trip up to Assynt, an extraordinary part of the western highlands, dominated by the magical presence of the mountain Suilven. One morning I just got up there and did this in an hour of activity with acrylic.