Everyman

Bud

1965 Pencil on paper

In the art room at school, probably about 14 years old.

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.

Heads

1974 Pencil on paper

Heads 2

1974 Pencil on paper

Heads 3

1974 Pencil on paper

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cornfield in Central Italy

1998 Acrylic on board

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.

Visual Field

2002 Oil on canvas

Rachel gave me this fabulously shaped canvas during her A Level art year and I used it to make this picture. It is based on space, vision and perspective. I had got interested in perspective looking at Piero Della Francesca and wanted to try and deal with receding space.

In part this painting is a way of exploring shifts in perspective through the visual field. The simple form of single viewpoint perspective gives a nice uncomplicated description of receding space to a single vanishing point into which objects can be put in a simple way like into a box. It’s a very powerful idea. However, we the way we actually experience space in real life is much more complex than this: since our viewpoint is constantly changing as we move through space. In a sense we create a new ‘vanishing point’ for ourselves every millisecond, every time our eyes move. These multiple vanishing points actually furnish our visual world and our experience of being.

This painting tries to use this fact. So the simple distant vanishing point on the horizon (the yellow tree) is generated using classical perspective, but as the eye moves towards the near distance, each shift downwards generates a new point of recession – and these flatten as the eye moves down a vertical axis from the distant tree. As I look down directly at the foreground, towards the ground beneath my feet, the perspective explodes as it becomes totally flattened and generates a very different charge. This is what happens at the bottom of the painting.

The same thing happens although less dramatically as one looks to left or right of the vertical….

The painting is structured around this armature, but the use of colour contains the emotional content, which also shifts towards the foreground.

Advancing Bush

2003 Oil on canvas

An image of a striking bush in our garden. The idea of this was the dynamic of of the bush advancing on the converging paths in the foreground and the perspective back to the house in the back.

Sunrise at Stia

2004 Acrylic on board

For Pete

2008 Pencil on paper

I was on a skiing trip in January 2008 when I received a message one afternoon that Pete had developed a secondary spread of his kidney cancer. The next morning, I just had no appetite to go out on the slopes and I went down to the village, picked up a cheap drawing pad and a biro and went off into the snow. These drawings are the product of that day, drawings of scrubby bushes against the white snow.