A Crisis of Brilliance

The title of this post is not a reference to myself (!) but the title of a book by David Boyd Haycock about five artists who were fellow students at The Slade before the first war and how the events of the war shaped their work and lives. I read it shortly after returning from France and found it enhanced my understanding of the artistic milieux of that time considerably.

The five artists were, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington.

I knew quite a bit about Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash whose work has always interested me but the others were unknown to me. The most interesting thing was how much they all corresponded with each other. I wondered at the impact of the first showings in England of the Post Impressionist work on our Art establishment. It seemed like the five young artists were all cautiously deciding how to respond to these new French ideas and were very conscious of working out whether they were valid or not. There were other art movements, such as the Italian Futurists trying to seduce them from the true path of English art; whatever that was they were all unknowingly defining it.

The book portrayed a country with the masses seeking a greater voice in the wake of industrialisation but the Establishment nevertheless holding onto power to the extent that young men flocked to the call of the recruiting sergeants in their thousands. The acceptance of things as they were meant that new ideas were seen as a threat and this was the same in Art.

The five artists were the brightest talents of their generation, 'Les Jeunnes' as they were dubbed and the war changed them all. Even Stanley Spencer felt that his best paintings had been done before 1914, others like Nevinson did their best work as a war artist whilst Nash's war work was only occasionally equalled after the war.

There is a lovely excerpt from Spencer's letters about him sitting in a trench waiting to go over the top with the painting 'Swan Upping' sitting in his bedroom at home unfinished and him speculating as to how the NCO would respond to his plea to be excused from duty on account of a painting that needed finishing back home.

I revisited Spencers paintings and admired the draughtsmanship which whilst naive is incredibly precise and felt a need to strengthen my own drawing skills. I will do a drawing module after this print module.

Drawn by Spencer's work and with some time available on a bank holiday due to my collatype blocks being still wet with PVA, I took the opportunity to visit Cookham. I wandered round the village and went into the Stanley Spencer museum which had a lot of his drawings from the Clyde shipyards which were incredibly valuable and informative to look at. I spoke to the elderly lady on the desk who had known one of his daughters and I noted the name of his older brother Sydney on the village war memorial.

And as I paused outside his old house my mind went back to the graveyards in Belgium and France and I wondered at a world that existed without the knowledge of so much death.

War graves and battlefields

In May 2011 I went on a tour of the World War I war graves and battlefields of Northern France and Belgium. I had always wanted to visit these sites again after driving through northern France with my parents as a boy, on camping holidays and noticing the incongruity of the many cemeteries in an otherwise sparsely populated rural landscape. I remember thinking there were more graves than people.

My aim was to sketch and paint my way through the tour, taking photos, recording thoughts and emotions and then bring it all back home to see what I felt. The sketch book has become a sort of travelogue which is an interesting visual record but the emotional impact on me has a caused deep reflection that I'm not sure how to respond to with my art, but respond I will.

I won't record every detail of the tour but I will record two snippets. When I get my sketchbook back from my tutor I will also upload some of the sketches I did so that you can see how they relate to my subsequent work.

On the first full day we toured the battlefields of the Somme, Thiepval, Delville Wood and most movingly Newfoundland Park. Newfoundland park covers 84 acres of original trenches so you can imagine what it must have been like on 1st July 1916 when the first Battalion of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment advanced forward down the falling ground of no mans land towards the German trenches (still there) less than 100 meters away. 10 minutes before the advance the huge Hawthorn Mine with 40,000 lbs of ammonal explosive had been blown about 1 km away (read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes for details of the mines) . The commander of this sector thought that blowing the mine 10 minutes before the plan would be a good idea but in fact it merely alerted the Germans to the attack and of the 801 Newfoundlanders who went into attack only 68 were not killed or wounded.

This single action is seared into the Newfoundland consciousness, the park is maintained by the Canadian government for whom it is a national monument and the canadian students who act as guides consider it a great honour to be selected for the job. The impact on the small community of Newfoundland which is basically a bit of rock near Canada where there were more moose than people would have been devastating. God knows why they were even fighting in a war half a world away.

I hadn't realised how much this experience had affected me until later that evening when I was chatting over a beer with a guide from another tour. As the evening wore on he began to open up about his experiences with the Paratroop Regiment during the Falklands War and I mentioned that one of my school friends had been killed with the Marines at Goose Green. When I told him what I knew about Lawrence's death he said he had known him and started telling me details such as who his commanding officer was and what it was like. I hadn't thought about Lawrence for several years and this chance evocation of the past caused the floodgates to open and I was overcome by suppressed emotion to the point where I had to make hurried apologies and retire suddenly to my room. Luckily I didn't meet the ex soldier at breakfast the next morning.

The second 'snippet' was our visit to Langemarck which is the cemetery for the German soldiers who fought in that area. It affected me because of the very different style to the allied cemeteries in the area.

The cemetery is surrounded by walls and a moat with pollarded willows that punch the air in defiance or stand like mutilated limbs which ever takes your fancy. It is in two parts. In the first part are the graves of 10,143 men of which 3,836 are unknown and then immediately through the entrance is the mass grave or Kameradengrab of 24,917 men with 86 bronze pillars bearing their names. On the far side of the cemetery stand four brooding statues, the figures of their mourning comrades, small isolated clusters of crosses break the surface of the ground beneath the loft of oak trees like mushrooms on the forest floor.

In the second part of the cemetery, beyond the oak trees and three large concrete bunkers are the graves of a further 9,475 men. The total number of bodies, in this thoughtful representation of the life cycle of the forest is 44,292 and I found the imagery of 44,292 leaves falling to the ground to mould and give new life poignant and dark and in stark contrast to the antiseptically neat rows of white headstones in the allied cemeteries.

So a lot to think about all in all.

Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers Exhibition - Bankside

I went to the Bankside gallery next to the Tate for the annual exhibition of the Printmakers Society. It was much better than last year, although my appreciation of printing is possibly deeper having spent a year trying to do it myself. What I found most interesting was the fact that I was drawn to colourful relief prints rather than etchings or engravings and in particular the ones using an imaginative approach to the subject rather than being purely representative.

The only exception to my prejudice against etchings was 'A Glimpse of St Paul's which was a view of St Paul's through the silver birches outside the Tate with the millenium bridge in between. Some of the birches were warm orange and deep red with muted greys and yellows in the distance.

Another favourite was 'Missionary Plant and Pumpkin' by Carol E. Walkin which was a linocut an used muted warm greys and bright orange to depict the pumpkin. The missionary plant used a flat green but the shapes of the leaves were interesting as was the negative space.

Gail Brodholt also did some lovely linocuts of London. I bought these cards by her which show flowing lines and and an interesting palette which capture the emotion of the subject matter with their; cold blues, lime green and orange using heavy purple and black to pull it all together.

There were some interesting and originally composed linocuts of the city sky line by Janet Brooke and some colourful almost abstract woodcut and stencil prints by Peter Green.

Project 10 - Appraisal 16.5.11

I chose to do a relief print of a large acrylic painting I had done some years ago (see smaller picture) and combine it with the image of the Uffington White horse which I felt would work well as a wood cut. I had really enjoyed working with wood cuts as a progression from lino in the experimental mark making section of this course.

I planned to do a 4 colour reduction wood cut A3 size. The wood cut would be used to depict the distant hills and horse with a framework of hedges surrounding the various fields. I then planned to use a different block exploiting a different textural characteristic for every field. This seemed like a good idea at the time but proved to be a time consuming and ambitious project with 12 separate blocks to prepare, register and print.

The time consuming bit was not the cutting of the large woodblock, which I did from a beautiful piece of beech laminate, but letting every print dry before printing from the next block.I did a series of 5 in total and each one has its own characteristics. The one I finally chose to mount was chosen mainly because the registration is better than the others and there are less finger smudges and stray bits of unwanted ink.

I wanted to convey the feeling of an ancient chalk landscape with the white horse in the distance and a chalk road taking the viewers eye through the texturally interesting landscape. I achieved this. The composition works well and whereas the original painting had no focal point at the end of the track, the white horse provided this in the print. I liked the sinuous line of the track and hedges and I particularly liked some of the shapes of the fields which were interesting in their own right.

It was surprising how inventive one can get when looking for interesting textures to print and my favourite was the reverse of a piece if lino using the coarse hessian to get the effect of a ploughed field. Other things I used were bits of rough cut timber and pieces of card painted onto with a hog hair brush.

Again, planning well with colour notes and experimental prints and drawings made the whole thing more successful but some of my failings included not keeping my hands clean and in poor registration. My printing technique is getting better but I really need to be more meticulous with the process and make sure the ink only goes where it is supposed to!

Whilst I am relieved that this final project in the relief printing part of the course is over I had hoped that my print might have a certain atmosphere but alas it doesn't. The quality of 'atmosphere' I am looking for is not there because the tonal values are not quite correct, the darks are too dark and the range of tones too wide. Had I kept to a lower tonal and chromatic key I might have achieved the effect I was looking for.

On the whole I like relief printmaking and particularly like working with wood.