THEMES AND CORNWALL

Every painting is subject/theme on the one hand and how exactly it is painted, what techniques and so on, on the other. 

My themes are mostly from the ancient world; my favourite modern painters, whom I follow to some extent in borrowing their techniques and idioms, are largely mid-20th century painters based in Cornwall.  I don’t know whether that is solely because I have lived in Cornwall for the past 30 years.  Would they still have influenced me so much if I had been in Italy, say, or America?  I suspect they would not have and that I would have found other mentors. 

Anyway, three of the painters I admire – not uncritically, I must add, as I don’t have time at all for some of their work – are Roger Hilton, Ben Nicholson and William Scott.  They were all essentially domestic painters, reflecting, I think, the domestic scale of Cornwall and Cornish life.  They looked for lasting truths in painting and sometimes came close to finding it. 

I love Hilton’s honest scratchy quirkiness, William Scott’s series of abstracted still lives and Nicholson’s early faux naïf paintings and his mid-career ventures into pure abstraction.  And his drawings and etchings, of course, these were great right through his life.

I have found when I visit the Islington Art Fair in January, or the Summer Show at the Royal College of Art in September, that when a painting several stands away catches my eye as I walk down one of the aisles, nine times out of ten it is by one of these artists.  They stand out where other paintings fade into their surroundings.  Every time this happens I am confirmed in my view that here is good painting, so go where they have gone, if you can.

It often happens nowadays that I look through photos of earlier work of my own and there is a painting that sets me off again down a path that I have travelled before.  This has been true of the ‘Iliad’ theme, the ‘Sheba’s road to Jerusalem’ theme, which has reappeared transformed and transmogrified many times now, and of some other paintings. 

So when I am at a loss, I go first to my own past work in the hope of renewed inspiration and a kick-start.  It is now the best source of new work for me.

I have said that many if not most of my paintings are on themes from the ancient world. Paradoxically this may be because I am essentially ignorant about it, about the classical Greeks, the Sumerians, the Queen of Sheba and so on.  Ignorant, yes, but the countervailing advantage is that my mind is open, no preconceptions, and I can roam where my imagination takes me.  I am not much interested in the literal truth but I am very interested in making a telling image. 

I am not a classical scholar like my father was, or really knowledgeable about ancient mythology, as my wife is.  But I find that the old Greek and Biblical and mythical stories are stronger and meatier than most of what happens these days. 

I also find the two Great Wars inspiring, because I see them as truly heroic times and events, when men were larger than life and superhuman and death-defying, not bureaucrats or merchants for instance.  These wars were on an epic scale – with life and death in the balance across the whole world, for countries as well as for individuals – involving awesome destruction and tremendous effort, terrible pain, great sacrifice and courage and all those heroic things one associates so readily with, for example, the Trojan war and the fractious and unpredictable gods on Olympus.

Weren’t the atom bombs worthy of Hephaestus or Zeus at their most destructive?  They were appalling bolts from the sky that shattered the dastardly enemy and brought instant victory and salvation to those possessing them.  Straight out of the ancient myths.  The gods were there. 

I think a lot about the gods.