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| Graham Crowley |
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Familiar Ground Graham Crowley practices a form of landscape painting which is all about the energies of colour and the valencies of surface and impasto. His principal subject is Rineen, on the west coast of Ireland, which encompasses field and forest, hill and lane, valley, estuary and scattered dwellings. Crowley spends a good portion of the year there, and observes it in many moods. Yet although Rineen is the pretext for these paintings, their subject is just as much the history of painting and a contemporary painter's relationship with it. In one very important respect, Crowley's paintings are meditations on what it is to be a painter at the beginning of the 21st century. There are two basic types of picture in this new exhibition - the impasto paintings, which are about the world of appearances, and the wet into wet, alla prima paintings (together with the glazed compressed charcoal drawings), which deal with the nature of memory. The compressed charcoal drawings have a very special and separate identity, but still belong to the larger sub-group. Their technique is somewhat different, however, the drawing being coated with resin to seal it, and thereafter glazed. (Look, for instance, at the gorgeous blue curtain which hazes Blue Fields.) The alla prima technique is bold. A fine example is Moonlight, the largest painting of this group. The weft and warp of its construction, the grain of its surface, make it look a little like textile or tapestry. But the really striking aspect of the painting is its assured freedom of brushstroke. Crowley is painting at the top of his skill, with an authority beyond anything he has demonstrated in the past. (And behind him stands a considerable achievement.) Again, Campsite has the same warp and weft, but also features passages of silver paint, with metal particles suspended in the resin, to locate some of the tents. Here are the igloo and ridge tent, and a tent behind a tree. Elsewhere, the inclusion of a skip - a nice touch of verisimilitude - looks (with instinctive wit) very much like a frame-tent upside down. A third alla prima example is The end of the season, in which Crowley pinpoints with heartless accuracy the stains on the bleached grass, where departed tents once were pitched. It's late afternoon, yellow light. It's the end of the day at close of season. The actual painting is made with deliberate coarseness and economy. The surface articulation of TV aerials and telephone wires helps define the space, but the painting is really a dashing arrangement of three greens - cinnabar green and sap green, hot and sweaty on top, with cadmium green pale underneath. It's another witty picture, and a virtuoso piece of orchestration. Crowley's recent interest in campsites is a development and extension of his interest in the dotting of houses through a landscape. It's all to do with settlement and dispersal - the patterns of habitation, both temporary and permanent. The disposition of house or tent is carefully layered on to the colourfields and linearities which make up the landscape. The colour accents marking the position of gable-end or tent-roof are semi-opaque, the pastel tints (all cadmium colours) containing an admixture of white to make them appear to float on the surface of the picture. In this and a dozen other ways, figure and ground are confused - you're never quite sure whether it is the inside or the outside of a mark upon which the invented light in these paintings actually falls. With an impasto, Crowley begins with some very diagrammatic drawing on board or canvas, then begins to build up the textured ground. He uses photographs for reference, to get his bearings. The rendered, prickly, slightly pebble-dashed surface that ensues has a special significance for Crowley, and enhances not only the object-hood of the painting, but the concreteness of the depiction. Over this surface, different colours are dragged or wiped or washed. The actual process of painting is sequential, and thus has an element of the mechanical to it, in common with most methods of colour printing. (His painting method is thus one reason why Crowley has such admiration for the radical landscape etchings of Hercules Seghers (1589/90 - c1635), who was to influence Rembrandt so crucially.) A Crowley impasto is constructed in distinct phases which have their own internal logic. Crowley has been including flies and moths in his paintings for some time now, registered as blips and blobs of white in the country lanes or fields, or in the forefront of the flower paintings. This impulse towards a semi-grotesque naturalism of detail is balanced by the increased size and prominence of the blobs in the new work, which render them almost abstract or haphazard, to be read as a deliberate interruption of the paint surface; yet the work is still based in observation, for flies loom much larger in one's peripheral vision than they do when seen straight on. As marks in the picture they thus have a dual role, to identify and to complicate the literal space. In some of these images, it's possible to discern a kinship with 1950s Festival of Britain textiles - cushion covers, for instance, or tile patterns. The landscape on the cover of this publication is one such example. The scratchy autumnal tints of Forest Rineen offer quite a different interpretation if compared with one of the impasto paintings. This merely reinforces the impression of range and variety which this exhibition contains: in a very real sense, Crowley is presenting a Group Show of his own work, highlighting the different aspects of his current painting production. As he works, Crowley is all the time conscious of a very specific
body of other people's paintings. These are not necessarily his
all-time favourite top dozen artists, but they are the ones he
finds most useful when painting these landscapes: Some are better known than others, while certain inspirations - such as Rembrandt's etchings - are too self-evident to be mentioned. (A covert reference that I sensed was to Edward Ardizzone, particularly in the alla prima paintings.) An interesting example is Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who was affiliated to the Luminists and painted what Robert Hughes calls 'Western Superviews', composite scenes of atmospheric grandeur, incorporating America's sense of Manifest Destiny, the longing westward. To some extent, he, like Crowley, reinvented what he saw, reinvented it as what people wanted to see. How idealized is Crowley's vision of rural seclusion? Well, it includes the scarring of the countryside by camp sites, and the disfigurement of sylvan settings by tastelessly painted houses. Here is none of the rhetoric nor the 'sublime histrionics' (Hughes again) of Albert Bierstadt. But there is a shared sense of the panoramic, qualified in Crowley's case by a sociological curiosity which tends to err in favour of fact rather than fiction. As he says 'I cannot cope with likeness', which is why he doesn't paint portraits. 'With landscape you cannot put the tree in the wrong place.' This implies that all Crowley's landscapes are to some extent reinvented, or at the very least reinterpreted. The editing takes place before the brushstoke meets the painting. Yet at other times, he will remark that the reason why an image is so hallucinogenic, is that it's 'as if one is seeing every tree properly all the time'. In other words, Crowley is playing here with the nature of perception - with what we actually physically see, and with what we expect to see. Also, with what we don't miss when it's not there. The issue of how to paint distance in landscape relates to Crowley's understanding of the landscape backgrounds in Italian quattrocento painting. These new images are light-powered, as if made in another medium, such as film. (Cinemascope?) 'Shadows are as important as the things that cast them in these paintings', comments Crowley. The shadows do not appear in the impasto underpainting, but are put in later to work against it. Crowley, in his disdain for the rules, sometimes even paints the shadow first, then the thing that casts it. Look at the intensely green painting Bureen (a bureen, incidentally, is a lane). It is actually composed of three colours: cobalt violet with cinnabar green, and then sap green over it. Even the sky is green. The other main element in the picture is the latticework surface, the dense structure of twigs and grasses that Crowley has built up at the impasto stage. Between these two extremes, of colour and linearity, there hovers a haze or hazes: of heat, perhaps, or seasonal atmospherics, in palest blue and warm brown. And the long intense shadows. This is an image from the world of the imagination, internalized, reflective, and in some senses more of a self-portrait than a straightforward depiction of landscape. It is at once a statement from the inner life of the painter and a comment on the history of landscape painting. Artists try to make sense of the world, and they use every strategy that is available to them. There is an honesty to Crowley's approach which is utterly beguiling. The immediacy of his brushmarks is unedited: rarely can we detect where it has been cleaned up. Crowley is painting for himself, for the sheer joy of transmitting some of the odd beauty of the world onto canvas or board through the medium of oil paint. The results have a beauty of their own: whether of luscious swirls of impasto (as in The top of the estuary), of remarkable colour shifts through mauve, lilac, rose and daffodil (such as you find in The Priest's Leap), or of an exceptional fluidity of mark and gesture, of structure and invention (as in There are no Orange Houses 2). In these luminous and intelligent paintings, Graham Crowley has reached new heights through the spontaneous deployment of modest and ordinary marks, and through the thoughtful consideration of texture and colour. Painting is back, and so is beauty.
Andrew Lambirth |
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