HUMPHREY OCEAN

Night Saab 2005 gouache on paper 40 x 46.5cm

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appraisal of Smith’s account, Michael Fried sees this experience as emblematic of the ‘war going on between theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial.’ 23 Ocean’s art is made in quite a different context, and the critical debate about ‘art and objecthood’ initiated by Fried’s essay is more relevant to the New York School of the 1960s than it is to Ocean. Nevertheless, it is perhaps revealing to think of Ocean’s paintings of suburban scenes glimpsed from a passing car in terms of Fried’s defence of an art that carries conviction instantaneously through the richly congruent relationship of parts to a whole, where meaning is created through the work’s syntax being grasped as immediately present. While the component parts of Ocean’s suburban scenes are not special in themselves, and their realism puts them beyond the pale for strict advocates of abstract art, each painting articulates a physical sense of belonging in the moment that attains to Fried’s insight that ‘presentness is grace.’

If Smith’s drive along an empty, unfinished road provoked a meditation on the limits of art, Ocean’s south London commute produced an encounter with unexpected beauty. A particularly significant view through the windscreen occurred on the regular journey home from his studio in Monika Kinley’s garden, when Ocean glimpsed cherry trees full of blossom in the corner of a typical suburban street. His reactions were immediate if as yet unformed: ‘There was that housing block… What is it that appeals to me? My God that is beautiful.’ What appealed was the colour and geometry of the scene that evoked Ocean’s love for the work of Josef Albers (1888-1976), the fragility of the blossom, and a precise shade of pink. This particular combination of elements, each quite commonplace, formed a particular Gestalt. In a comparable way to Albers’ Homage to the Square works, it was the syntactical relation of the parts that produced meaning. The gradual conviction, that a picture could be made from the repeated experience of driving past the block with the cherry blossom, developed over several years, beginning with a first sketch in 1994. So the initial impression was followed up by further visits to the site, since the success of the sketch meant that Ocean now had to take it on as a painting, which involved drawings, colour notes and photographs: although a somewhat less thoroughgoing preparatory process than that for Lord Volvo and his Estate. The diligent pursuit of detail, however, only served to distance the work as it developed from that first all-important perception.

Growing frustrated and angry with the painting, Ocean began to erase his detailed work, painting over it with a fluid grey-green wash – only to find that this accidentally achieved the effect he had been striving for. This represented a critical moment for the artist: a necessary letting-go, an element of ‘not caring so much’, allowing the hand the freedom to move unconsciously to approximate the mind’s perception. In this discovery, he was experiencing for himself what other artists had learnt before him. For example, the ancient Greek artist Protogenes (4th century BC), who was meticulous and detailed in his approach to painting, grew annoyed at his failure to represent the foam on a dog’s mouth in his picture of Ialysus, the founder of Rhodes: … the foam appeared to be painted, not to be the natural product of the animal’s mouth; vexed and tormented, as he wanted his picture to contain the truth and not merely a near-truth, he had several times rubbed off the paint and used another brush, quite unable to satisfy himself. Finally, he fell into a rage with his art because it was perceptible, and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him, and the sponge restored the colours he had removed, in the way that his anxiety had wished them to appear, and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture! 24 In modern times, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), a very different painter to Ocean, described the surprising ‘revelation’ prompting a work of art, which derives from the ‘thing

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from which one gets a sensation’, and also the enigma contained in its realisation. Similarly, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) wrote of his work’s origin in ‘consciousness, the shock of feeling and memory’, stating that ‘in art, it is only reactions that count. It’s not a matter of painting life. It’s a matter of giving life to painting.’ 25 These sentiments are close to Ocean’s own way of thinking, that ‘the things that I paint make their mark, make me feel something, and it’s that feeling I’m trying to paint.’ 26 When a work is true to the artist’s reaction, it successfully communicates that sensation and then ‘Art picks you up and puts you down in a new place.’ The resulting painting, Cherry Blossom (opposite), therefore, records the struggle to recover a reaction experienced at a certain velocity from a moving car. It also represents a significant shift in the artist’s method of working, an acceptance that achieving a likeness is not so much about exercising conscious control in rendering detailed appearances as it is a matter of conveying truth to feeling. In this way ‘Cherry Blossom opened things up.’ In retrospect, the painting seems to mark a turning point, bringing to an end a period of thinking and marking time, following the success of Lord Volvo and his Estate, when Ocean was simply ‘making art that fitted with my idea of making art.’

Around the time of Cherry Blossom, signs of reworking in a ‘looser’ mode appear on some of Ocean’s paintings – Return from Big Mouth is one example. Another is William Blake (p.79), a painting of a modern block of council flats on the corner of Wood Vale and Forest Hill Road in south London. Here the initial detailed rendering of the building has been overpainted with areas of broadly brushed and thin paint creating a screen of grey, green, ochre and pink patches over the façade. As a consequence, areas of blurred and sharp focus are now distinguished across the painting’s surface: an effect that, perhaps, more closely corresponds to the experience of vision, where the eye moves or drifts from one point of fixation to another, and where phenomena do not appear all at once to be equally detailed across the visual field. In William Blake the eye is led into the composition by the gently sloping descent of the railings in the foreground, and is then nudged upwards by successive clouds of colour across the building’s exterior, until it comes to rest on the balcony at the upper-left corner. Here the quiet exaltation of a particular home occurs through its vivid depiction; one domestic unit distinguished by its clarity from others in the repetitive sequence of modular dwellings within the building.

The title – William Blake – is an allusion to the fact that unremarkable housing blocks are often given names with romantic associations that can appear at odds with their prosaic reality (Blake himself lived in Lambeth in the heroically named Hercules Buildings). The title also refers to the fact that the building’s site is near Peckham Rye where the young William Blake experienced his first visions. In fact, in Blake’s time it would have been part of the common. As Alexander Gilchrist put it in his 1863 biography of the poet and artist: On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his ‘first vision’. Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.27 Possibly Blake’s vision was one of blossom? The illustration that accompanies his poem ‘The Blossom’ in Songs of Innocence certainly depicts angels disporting themselves among the branches of a flame-like tree.28 Interestingly, in using the title William Blake, Ocean is ‘naming the picture, rather than just the flats.’ This is not to imply that Cherry Blossom or William Blake are Ocean’s equivalent of Blake’s mystic vision. Only that the process of working on a painting involves discovery as much as it does perceptual recovery. The block of flats in William Blake, for example, is one of four built where Honor Oak Station had been until its closure in 1954.

Ocean later found out that Honor Oak’s neighbouring stop on the same line was painted in 1871 by the impressionist Camille Pissarro. The line was the Crystal Palace and South London Junction

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Cherry Blossom 1997 oil on canvas 107 x 134cm

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Railway, Pissarro was living in Norwood during the Franco-Prussian War, and the painting (now in the Courtauld Institute Gallery) is Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (below). So this decision to pursue a revelatory reaction and paint an obscure corner of south London led Ocean to make connections with two artistic predecessors who both took inspiration from London’s suburbs.

Pissarro, in painting views of his immediate surroundings in Sydenham, Dulwich and Norwood, was also responding to the affect that the English artists Constable and Turner had on him – both of whom had worked outside the studio, basing their pictures directly on their reactions to specific scenes. Constable, in particular, focused on his local neighbourhood, recording locations familiar to him around the River Stour in the border region between Essex and Suffolk, and writing to his friend John Fisher in 1821 that ‘I should paint my own places best – painting is but another word for feeling.’ 29 Time and familiarity have endowed Constable’s paintings of this locale with a ‘picturesque’ quality that puts them among the canonical masterpieces of British art. However, at the time of their making, places like Flatford Mill and Flatford Lock were unremarkable features of a developing industrial economy, simple stations on a transport network frequented by working people – the ‘navigable river’ of Constable’s title for Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) (1816, Tate). The uncompromising modernity of Constable’s decision not to imitate the classical Italian views of Claude (c.1605-82, an artist he greatly admired) now has to be recovered directly in front of the pictures, whose impassioned brushwork conveys the sentiments aroused by specific if ordinary places. This effect is communicated most clearly by Constable’s oil sketches, made rapidly on the spot, but with unerring accuracy – for example, Flatford Lock from a Lock on the Stour in the Victoria and Albert Museum (c.1811, p49), or, indeed, in those made in suburban London of unremarkable houses and clumps of trees, like The Grove, or Admiral’s House, Hampstead (1821-22, Victoria

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich 1871 oil on canvas 44.5 x 72.5cm Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

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Windshield 2009 gouache on paper 38.4 x 56cm

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Bend 2010 gouache on paper 52 x 65cm Private collection

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Weaver 2018 gouache on paper 46 x 35cm Private collection

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Magnitude 2017 gouache and ink on paper 32 x 48cm Private collection

Ripple 2017 ink on paper 32 x 48cm

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A21 2015 gouache on paper 40 x 51cm

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