Landscape part 3

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Laura Knight - 1877 – 1970

Remarks:

Dame Laura Knight is famous for her paintings of women working in factories during the Second World War.
She also produced a series of landscapes in the 1930s set on the coastline of Cornwall showing women looking down from cliffs at the sea.
There is a sense in these paintings that the women somehow dominate the landscape, there is also a recollection of the figures of Caspar David Friedrich: seen from behind contemplating the work of God in and an mediated relationship with the divine in Friedrich's case. In pictures by Knight, it could be that there is now an an unmediated relationship for a self assertive feminine identity and its relationship to the natural world.
The paintings are made in what can now be seen as a very straightforward, almost illustrative form of naturalism.
For example, the painting of 'Lamorna Cove' shows two houses in the top left corner above a curving bay of white stones. This is almost picture postcard perfect.
The main focus of the painting is the surface of the water of the bay with the light reflecting and refracting over the broken floor of the stones.
Waves and stones make ripples in the water and a constantly shifting, faceted surface which Knight replicates through direct dabs of pure colour.
She uses a palette of two or three different greens set against burnt sienna and some burned umber underpainting.
There are also highlights of pale orange which are complemented by a range of mid to dark toned purple.
In the later landscape entitled 'Sundown' of 1947, she uses a technique which seems indebted to photography.
The sun sets behind the hills, and as it does so, light is caught in the eye of the viewer, however, this seems to be light which is formed through a camera lens.
The effects of the glare and flare of the sun's light is highly reminiscent of the mechanical lens of the camera.
It is interesting to compare the work of Dame Laura Knight against that of Willem de Kooning.
The landscape 'Sundown' was painted around the same time that de Kooning began to produce his 'all over' abstract black-and-white paintings.
Looking at the work of Dame Laura Knight, the viewer could be forgiven for not understanding that the 20th century had taken place, still less, that America have been discovered and had formed a new rationale and logic for painting that was completely formed in the new century.
This new American logic of painting was quickly moving beyond the traditional European easel painting towards wall-sized abstract images, made without reference to observed scenes.
Against this, Knight looks bizarrely out of date. Is it fair and appropriate to compare and criticise in this way?

Richard Diebenkorn 1922 – 1993

Remarks:

Richard Diebenkorn was an interesting artist who was happy to change focus and approach and to move from abstraction, through to figuration, and then back to abstraction again.
In the 1960s he produced several landscapes which are amongst his most accomplished paintings.
In these works, areas of colour are built up in layers with simplistic mark making and loose brushwork which allow previous colours to shine through.
Sometimes the paint is applied quite loosely and in thin coverings so that previous colours literally show through.
For example, red-brown is often massed underneath flat greens so that the green colour is modulated and anchored into space. (On its own, large areas of green can be difficult to control and can float off the surface of pictures).
Sometimes, in Diebenkorn's work, painting is applied in a patchy style so that areas underneath show through in an uninterrupted fashion, and sometimes, thick paint is applied over the top to cancel out or nullify earlier layers.
Very often, Richard Diebenkorn painted over areas with thick paint in white or light tones to provide a finishing effect. These strokes are clear to see but are more blended into finished shapes.
Generally, there is a robust and workmanlike finish to these paintings which can seem "unflashy" or even down to earth and humdrum in terms of the way the paint is applied.
Diebenkorn seems to be making the point that his paint handling is not concerned with showing off or presenting itself as a brilliant display like the fine fencing work of a master swordsman, rather instead, he is presenting it as an open and honest job of work.
The viewer can see how he has made the painting: the stages of production are clearly visible and easy to understand; the application of paint is steady but again, easy to decode and understand.
The space in the paintings is often squashed, foreshortened and compressed and the emphasis everywhere is placed on simple abstract shapes.
These paintings replicate the most important aspects of modern art in that the centre of the painting is made intricate part of the painting.
The centre is the most busy, with diagonal, chopped up and interlocking shapes.
The outer edges of the painting are formed with bigger shapes which are calmer and more sedate, and these echo the edges of the picture.
Typically, and in Diebenkorn's case, modern pictures move from the speed of the centre of the painting to a slower and larger frequency as the image moves outwards and then stops at the edges of the painting.
In this respect, these paintings appear composed, calm and harmonious. There is a static sense about them.

Joan Eardley 1921 – 1963

Remarks:

Joan Eardley was a self-taught woman artist who worked through the middle years of the 20th century and who lived in Scotland.
In her paintings, there is always a worked up finish to the picture.
There is always a sense of the range of painting techniques being combined together to make one image which is continuous and contained.
Although she used various different applications of paint, all the parts joined together to make one image.
She used different scaled brushes and layers of paint with thick and thin contours.
She mixed different painting effects such as wet on wet, scrambling, mixing of colour on the surface in impasto (thick paint) techniques.
The range of painting effects are confident and assured and often have a somewhat decorative quality to them.
The most built up and detailed elements of the painting can appear jewel like and indeed, sometimes look like jewellery.
Small and thick in encrusted areas of paint are built up to provide a detailed area of focus.
As the viewer looks beyond these details, the other values of the painting, become more apparent and the blocks of colour which determine space become more understandable as carefully composed structures and areas of the painting.

Patrick George 1923 – 2016

Patrick George was part of the Euston Road School and worked under the influence of William Coldstream at Camberwell School of Art and then The Slide School of Art
All of these artists and schools of art were concerned with making traditional genres of paintings (landscape, portrait, still life) that took the ideas of Paul Cezanne as a basis for development and mixed them with an English form of observational drawing.
English observational drawing is based on looking and using measuring to establish points of reference which can then be joined through linear drawing.
With this measuring system, shapes can be determined accurately and then painted in in relation to one another so that the painting can be built up, bit by bit and piece by piece to find the whole picture.
The subsystem is a little like the equivalent in maths of using trigonometry to find angles and lengths of triangles. If you know one angle and one length, you can find the others.
In this form of painting, if you establish one value (a length, an angle) you can use it to measure out other values. For example, something like 'The width of this hill is three times the width of the tree at its base etc'.
Because the emphasis is on drawing and the accuracy of the Drawing the role of colour is somewhat secondary and less important.
Colours are muted and applied in thin washes and layers to be built up through the drawing - sometimes, colour seems to be the mere blocking out of areas of the drawing.
The subject is chosen as a balanced composition which is composed and calm. The atmosphere is tranquil or even depleted.
There are traces of human activity in the landscape but there are no active people working or moving.
Everything has the stillness and solidity of sculpture.
Modern installations of form and agricultural machinery or electrical pylons can be seen but they are neutralised as simply more visual elements that can be measured out and delineated in relationship to the other visual elements of the painting.
The difference between this kind of painting as a project and the work of Paul Cezanne is that Paul Cezanne was forging an entirely new language and new way of working with painting that pointed on towards the later and important developments of modern art in general and cubism in particular.
Cezanne struggled and worried over details and passages his paintings - for him every painting was a 'leap into the unknown'.
For the late Twentieth Century English painters like Coldstream, Uglow and George, everything is already known and the painting is predetermined before it is painted.
When it is finished, its appearance is entirely as expected.

Dennis Creffield - 1931 – 2018

Dennis Creffield was something of an eccentric artist who studied under David Bomberg at the Borough polytechnic in London in the 1950s and who taught in Canterbury and Brighton in the 1980s.
In the 1980s Creffield made a drawing tour of the cathedrals of England which was very successful and which culminated in a big exhibition of his charcoal drawings at the South bank in London.
Earlier on, he had made paintings whilst living in London.
These paintings began by using a muted palette that owes something to the later work of David Bomberg and also to the reduced palette of Cubist artists who realised that they would have to bring the colour values of their paintings down as they used drawing to fragment and chop up their images.
In the 'View from Greenwich' Creffield works over the surface of the painting and divides it into separate and interlocking shapes which are then built up further in highly wrought and laboriously worked layers and strokes of paint.
There are a range of different scaled and applied strokes made with different brushes and sometimes paint is scraped off and then applied again with a palette knife.
David Bomberg has talked about 'the spirit in the mass' as being a value in the material world that artists could respond to and work from in their painting.
Creffield creates a strict procession of space with a clear foreground at the bottom of the painting and then moves through the mid space to the background which is at the top of the painting.
Although the viewer can't clearly separate and identify the various buildings which must form the view, it is clear that there is a crowded view, a jumble of architecture which is receding into the distance.
Repeating elements and hard edges to some of the shapes suggest architectural forms and repeating arrangements of light and dark masses help to create the suggestion of structures and masses which are illuminated from a single light sources.
The painting is busy and restless and in its sense of passion through areas of vision via the intricacies and labour of painting, it recalls the work of de Kooning and the idea of 'the slipping glimpser'.