Derrick Greaves: The Pleasures of Drawing - 2005

£5.00

Publication accompanying an exhibition of one of Britain's most important figurative artists of the last half century. This book explores the range of the artist's drawings, from working studies to large-scale collages on canvas.

TEXT EXTRACT:

Derrick Greaves: The Pleasures of Drawing
James Hyman

In 1969 Derrick Greaves produced a highly finished drawing that encapsulated the way that he was reformulating his visual language and also pointed the way forward. A manifesto picture that has remained with the artist ever since, this work is exhibited here for the first time. Entitled The Pleasures of Drawing (1969) , the picture is the most finished of a series of works showing an easel with a picture on it and can be read as a surrogate self-portrait, the easel standing in for the artist and a bird in flight representing painting as an act of liberation.

The Pleasures of Painting also plays games. It plays formal games with the parameters of the canvas and the transparency of forms, but also games with what is real and what is imagined. Is what is represented a bird that flies past or is it a picture of a bird? The conceit is shared with Magritte’s paintings of a canvas before a window and Braque’s atelier paintings, with their interpenetrating forms and leitmotif of a bird in flight. Yet in its linear emphasis the work also exemplifies the concerns of Derrick Greaves. For, whether drawing or painting, Greaves places a strong emphasis on the animation of line, pictorial flatness and visual wit. Indeed it is not surprising to discover that drawing has always been central not just to Greaves’s practice as an artist but to his life: he has remarked that drawing is as natural as breathing or getting up in the morning and also described it as ‘a kind of fix’.

The multiple levels on which this drawing operates is common to many of the works in this exhibition, for these are pictures which often derive their strength from the bringing together of opposing forces. In Bird and Vase (Diptych) (1971) the artist is concerned with movement and stasis and also with presence and absence. Are we shown a vase and a bird as the title suggests, or merely their shadows? The flatness of the forms and the fact that the shape of the bird directly relates to a large painting Shadow of a Bird on a Road (1971), suggest that, for all its monumentality, what is depicted is a shadow rather than the bird itself and this encourages us to read the lipped vase as similarly lacking in substance. Complicating this is the relative substantiality of the charcoal ground, which has been so worked and scratched into, that it has a greater materiality than the things depicted.

The flattening of form well illustrates Greaves’s rejection of modeling and the illusionistic creation of volume and weight. Indeed it is drawing and specifically linear drawing, rather than light and shade, that is at the heart of this work anticipating the linearity and lightness of his later work with its interpenetration of forms and use of transparency. Adolescent Plant (1984) reveals the monumentality that this allows. In common with many of Greaves’s drawings the work has the presence of a painting, facilitated by the scale of the thing represented, the emphatic use of the foreground, the large size of the work and the use of a ground of collage laid on canvas. This scale may be traced back to Greaves’s formative years as an apprentice sign painter, whilst the desire to give the ground its own presence may be traced back to his two years in Italy on an Abbey Major scholarship. Whilst there Greaves visited the Campo Santo in Pisa where the frescos were being restored and was able to see, first hand, the pentimenti. This under-drawing, although rough, showed how even at a relatively late stage alterations were being made in response to the surface on which the fresco was being painted.

Similarly, responding to a Medieval Tree of Jesse in the church opposite his home in Norfolk, Greaves suggests that ‘the directions of the tendrils are due to the bumps on the wall forcing the hand of the painter to be responsive and more inventive than he would have been otherwise.’

This existing concern with the use of the ground to help dictate form gained new impetus in 19xx when there was a major flood at Greaves’s studio in a converted chapel in Woburn. Water pipes burst and for four days, while the artist was away, water poured down the walls, destroying years of prints and drawings. When Greaves returned to the deluge, wall paper was pealing from the walls and after the shock of the devastation Greaves realized that this pealed lining paper might be salvageable. Covering some old paintings in fragments of this paper, Greaves embarked on a series of drawings on a scale he had never previously attempted. The tension between the informality of the collage and the formality of the drawn line would have implications, not only for Greaves’s practice as a draftsman, but also as a painter.

Greaves developed a new diagrammatic way of drawing that was informal and chancy. In Adolescent Plant the ground is no mere background but has an active presence. The lyrical precision of the drawn line of the plant and plant pot contrasts with the emphatic, more staccato line created by the joins of the collage, creating a tension between representation and abstraction. Moreover the coexistence of different types of line also illustrates the way in which recent works have allowed for the coexistence of different visual languages with different elements rendered in distinct, and separate styles.

In drawings and paintings inspired by a working visit to Israel, Greaves felt challenged by the enormity of responding to the country. Staying at a kibbutz in the Negev desert that specialized in alternative technology, Greaves was struck both by the potential of this barren land and by the sense of threat as fighter planes roared overhead. The resulting Negev paintings, explore ways of reconstructing an experience that had a strong emotional dimension. Such dualism is evident in Negev Leafless Bush, in which the colours and scale are those of the desert and the bush is appropriately parched. Yet despite the sparseness, the over-all impression is one of grandeur.

In the - Green Room - Study (1982/1984) there is a similar psychological underpinning. The line is firm and the structure tight, emphasised by the euclydian right angle created by the woman’s powder compact but ambiguity adds another dimension. The title suggests we are back stage as does the mask, which partially or completely covers the woman’s face, but perhaps the clue is the compact that she holds, suggesting that what we see may be the image of the woman reflected in her mirror. As such the mask’s function to conceal is inverted to suggest instead the revelation of character. The mask reflects the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us, the back stage setting further emphasizing this theme of artifice and disguise to suggest the ways in which we may mask our true selves.

In more recent works a setting is not always so apparent as Greaves often isolates objects, recalling his teenage years as a sign painter, painting marmite pots and Raleigh bicycles. In Japanese Shoes, the shoes stand in for the whole costume and indeed for the figure, for they appear to take a stride on their own, a rare instance of the artist using perspective to break the flatness. In other works this isolation of the object gives them an emblematic, even heraldic quality, as in recent pictures of a coffee jug. These began as a depiction of a coffee pot on a shelf and partly in remembrance of a café in Belsize Park in London, Greaves also included a decorative cross pattern derived from its tiled walls. Eventually, as Greaves deconstructed the coffee pot he felt able to leave out the situating shelf and the decorative tiles, reconstructing the jug, as though from a model, to create a new schematic form: ‘the structure was pushed through a sieve of the mind and remade as a painting, as something which could not be remade in reality’. Such boldness was a breakthrough, leading to recent works that similarly reinvent form.

This is especially apparent in recent drawings made as studies for a series of new paintings entitled Shangri-La. Greaves had previously painted works inspired by world events, including a painting of a bloody rose and knife, which alluded to the Vietnam War, and in the run up to the recent Iraq war felt moved to respond. But perhaps in acknowledgement of the limitations of painting as direct political invention, what Greaves painted was an escape. Just as Matisse spent the World Wars painting luxuriant studio interiors and lush landscapes, so Greaves produced an epic series of idylls. A working drawing, Two Trees (2002), reveals both Greaves’s precision (the squaring up of the drawing for transfer onto canvas) and his openness to chance (the border of the drawing became a border in the painting, framing the picture like a camera viewfinder and turning the image into a glorified holiday snap).

Similarly in Exotic Bird (2002) the line is apparently loose whilst also being extremely precise. A dancing line stops for a moment to trace the long beak and rounded belly of a bird. Although differing in its proportions, Exotic Bird, relates to two small paintings, sharing their elegance. The extended line from top to bottom helps create a space in which the artist places a circle, at once tracing the beak, neck and eye of a bird and being two lines and a circle.

In the epic Rope Trick (2004) the line is again precise yet abstract, giving a clue to the humble origins of many of Greaves’s pictures. Paradoxically, despite the epic dimensions, Greaves’s large-scale works often have their origins in the most casual of doodles made on small yellow post-it notes. Often dream images, these post-it notes are stuck to a studio wall as a possible source of imagery. In Rope Trick all is movement: a line twists and turns, dancing with an inner life, the possibilities apparently limitless.

Indeed whether using collage on canvas or flat areas of acrylic paint, the marks of the artist are rarely visible on the grounds of his drawings and paintings. The result is work that derives much of its impact from Greaves’s highly personal use of colour and the responsibility he gives to line to convey meaning. But ultimately, perhaps what is so exciting is the way that Greaves succeeds in making work that is economic appear rich in possibilities, and lines which are so spare attain a lyricism. For the artist, the results may be ‘hard-won’ and the aim one of clarity, but for the viewer, what Greaves achieves in the most successful of these works is a joyful ‘Mozartian lightness’.