A Los Gázquez favourite artist and favourite painting this time. Or at least one of them. Nash was a war artist serving on the Western Front in WW1. I found this quote from a letter to his wife whilst painting during the fighting at Ypres…

“I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

This painting ‘The Battle of Britain’, is from his stint as an official war artist in the WW2 and whilst the scene is of conflict and undoubted death there is a modernist poetry and rhythm painted in the ‘contrails’ of the aircraft.

Interestingly Nash was a member of the Artists Rifles a special forces regiment of the British Territorial Army. It was formed in 1859 as a volunteer light infantry unit, the regiment saw active service during the Boer War and WW1.  It did not serve outside Britain during WW2, as it was used as an officer training unit at that time. The regiment was disbanded in 1945. In 1947, it was re-established to resurrect the Special Air Services or SAS. Today, the full title of the Regiment is 21 Special Air Service Regiment (Artists) (Reserve). As a student I remember the memorial plaque to the Artists Rifles outside the Royal Academy. I’m not sure we would have been that brave.

There are many reasons to like an artist or an artist’s particular work and here is an example. I knew I was going to be an artist. I liked, as a young boy, the idea of being an artist. It wasn’t just about wanting to paint. So, at some point, I don’t remember precisely but probably in the 70′s, I watched a matinee on TV called ‘The Horses Mouth’. I wanted to watch it as I recognised the title from a Joyce Carey book in my burgeoning orange Penguin collection. I also liked the director Ronald Neame from films like ‘The Third Man’. This film was made in the late 50′s and starred Alec Guinness as an artist called Gulley Jimson. It’s totally cliched and a bit of a satirical comedy romp and I never quite got Alec Guinness’s exaggerated voice. Gulley is looking for the ‘perfect wall’ to paint…. (you can guess or look here). But what did get me were the paintings. To my aspirations to be an artist, but with little direction, they were awesome. Anyway, a few years later I tracked down the artist who made them and it was John Bratby. Bratby was a founder of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ movement of artists (like yesterday’s post, an artist from the age of austerity after the war) famed for their depiction of dreary domestic scenes. He fell out of favour when Pop Art came along which is a shame as I think the whole period fascinating. Little art which preceded this movement depicted so piercingly the banality of life and therefore the democratisation of common culture.

Los Gázquez favourite artist William Scott was born in Scotland of Scottish and Irish parents but travelled widely throughout Europe up until serving in the second world war. Like yours truly he won a scholarship to study at the  Royal Academy Schools in Piccadilly. For many years he was a senior painting tutor at the Bath Royal Academy. In 1953 he went to the USA and met the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and for a while became an abstract expressionist painter. However, after a while he reverted to his still life and European tradition of painting. The painting I’ve posted here, Still Life with Orange, is in fact an abstracted still life. We know this as the skillet or frying pan is a common theme running throughout all of his painting. We like this work in particular for it’s form and colour. I also get to use unpopular words like ‘juxtaposition’ to describe the balance of forms against each other. More importantly it represents a period in British art which I forever hope will become more popular again, the age of austerity after the war and the post war transition to affluence through, in part, great design.

Los Gázquez favourite artist Charles Tunnicliffe, illustrator, watercolour painter, etcher, wood engraver, oil painter and ‘scraper board’ expert. (do they still make scraper board) He was born in England but spent most of his life living on the Isle of Anglesey by the estuary in Malltraeth.  He predominantly illustrated wildlife, especially birds. However, if you do a Google image search you will find on the whole a more conventional illustrative form than this drawing of a Turtle Dove I have posted here. For us the paintings in this form are the extraordinary works. You would be accurate in describing them as anatomical as indeed they are but more than that they show a profound love of his subject. He paints them with a deeper intention than describing their plumage. When he turns the animal over to observe the inside  of a wing, for example, he is almost paying homage to it’s life form. Even the notes he makes on the edge of the paintings allude to a greater observation of the colours he observes. So whilst he illustrated things like Henry Williamson’s ‘Tarka the Otter’ or Brooke Bond tea cards the work we like is much more incisive and truly gets to the heart of his subject without the distraction of having to conform to external aesthetic values.

 
As we progress with this little sequence of posts I realise that I am quickly going to run out of superlatives to describe the artists we like so much. So I feel I need to clear the air before I progress. There is a word I loath unless it’s applied to an ancient temple of one creed or another and that’s ‘spiritual’! We are all entitled to express our beliefs and mine is profoundly aetheist. So let me say now, when I experience something like a great painting I am prepared to say (in the words of Richard Ford) that ‘the unseen exists and has qualities’. What those qualities are I can’t express so clearly but I’m not going to resort to the dubious and banal use of the word spiritual in this context.

So, John Sell Cotman.1782-1842 from Norwich, painter and printmaker principally of landscapes and marine scenes. We love in particular his watercolours. The technique (dry watercolour), the accuracy or precision and his palett. I would love to own one and each day marvel at his process, his medium specificity.

Los Gázquez favourite artist Italian Giorgio Morandi is probably better known for his still lives. However we favour his landscapes. Maybe, now living in a mediterranean climate like Morandi, we are better able to understand his subtle use of colour and his qualities of light. You get to notice things such as the lack of coincidence that the buildings are the same colour as the earth as they are built from the same materials. You notice that the greens are sage not sap. Viridian green and yellow ochre paint olive groves and garrigue. What we don’t share is his sense of existential nihilism. Growing up in fascist Italy in the early twentieth century clearly influenced his work yet without him we might not have had late twentieth centuries minimalism.

Welsh artist Kyffin Williams (in Welsh, pronounced Kuffin the way Dylan should be Dullan) has been a long favourite of ours. In part it’s because it’s a landscape we know so well. Having visited north Wales frequently throughout my life I am deeply familiar with those colours, that vernacular architecture. Williams wasn’t in any way progressive but he possibly had something that many of us do not possess, a profound love of his home and therefore a profound understanding of the landscape.

He was born in Llangefni from a ‘landed’ Anglesey family and went on to study at the Slade School of Art before teaching for many years at Highgate School. I think he could be considered Wale’s foremost 20th century artist. You can see many more of his painting in Oriel Ynys Mõn (Ynys Mõn is the Welsh for Anglesey and oriel gallery). I’m visiting the School of Art in Aberystwyth in February so I’ll be sure to check out to see if he has any paintings in their collection.

A Los Gázquez favourite… Ivon Hitchens an English painter who started exhibiting during the 1920s. His house was bombed in 1940 during World War II, at which point he moved to a caravan on a patch of woodland near Petworth in West Sussex. He worked there for the next forty years, gradually augmenting his caravan with a series of buildings.
Like a lot of artists of his generation he was very influenced by Braque and Picasso. However, later he became particularly well known for his own language of panoramic landscape paintings created from blocks of colour. Many a more contemporary artists owe him a debt of gratitude not least Howard Hodgkin and many others.
This painting is called ‘Divided Oak Tree, No. 2′ and belongs to the Tate.

A Los Gázquez favourite… Eric William Ravilious was an English painter, designer, book illustrator and wood engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs. He served as a war artist, and died when the aircraft he was on was lost off Iceland 1942.