Old And New Places: David Shutt Paintings by Felix & Spear

Old And New Places David Shutt Paintings

13 Oct — 7 Nov 2021

Felix & Spear, 71 St Mary’s Road, London W5 5RG

felixandspear.com

Old and New Places

I spent much of my childhood in Snowdonia and in adulthood kept a studio there for 35 years both during my student years and subsequently painting in the Arenigs and the region of Dinas Emrys north of Beddgelert. Dinas Emrys is an iron age hill fort and must have been a centre of Celtic Druidism. But it was not culturally isolated. Archaeologists unearthed artefacts from ancient and classical Greece so trade and cultural interchange must have occurred. I think the poems of Taliesin and other bards must have been performed there whilst they were still a purely oral tradition. Whilst I was painting there recently (before Covid) a new translation of The Book of Taliesin was published by Gwynedd Lewis and Rowan Williams. Unfortunately, they took it as an opportunity to take a swipe at Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” without, it seems, having read it with any care. They say Graves’ Theory of the Tree Alphabet is quite wrong, quoting Marged Haycock (whose earlier translation they are indebted to), because the first letters of the trees names in early Medieval Welsh do not square with Graves’ theory. In fact Graves does not attribute the letters to Welsh of any kind but to Greek of about the C5th BC. Graves would not make such an appalling mistake; he is one of the greatest cultural scholars of the last century. I think their real problem is that Graves makes a strongly worded and clear case of western Christianity's rejection of Jesus as in the Orphic Priest-King tradition. This would make him a sacred King, who suffered death as a sacrifice and as an ordinary human being. In fact, his divinity was only established by a vote at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD as an integral part of the holy trinity.

In any event, Dinas Emrys is a magical place: from the ruins of the great hall on top of the hill fort we can look down to the level where a pool is which would seem to be the one the dragons emerged from to do battle. Merlin is said to have interpreted this battle as that between the Welsh (red dragon) with the Saxon (white dragon) as they emerged from the pool and is supposed to have made prophesies as to their fate. I have painted extensively in this location and its approaches. The designation Dinas is a marker of locations associated with the Tuatha De Danaan who were a confederacy of Celtic tribes, who were driven north and west across Europe via Greece and settled in the western Celtic heartlands. Gwynedd and the area I lived and worked in is such a heartland and from childhood my growing awareness of natural beauty comes from that landscape. The Treweryn is the river on which I learned to fly fish in its upper reaches which I found to give great lessons in natural awareness. It isn’t just the flow of the river but also the life cycle of the insect, wind direction and strength, weather cycles, its rocks and trees and overhanging foliage. The stretch I became intimate with, mostly through living less than half a mile away and painting there, used to get a European Union Grant, because its rare flowers and ancient woodland are unchanged since the ice-age. The Treweryn headwaters flow from an unmistakeably ice-age landscape with a feed valley with the characteristic U-shaped profile with lateral and terminal moraines from the melted glaciers. The massive boulders often in the river bed itself make it a very interesting and diverse environment, with confluences and divisions in the flow. There are slower stretches with pools and the massive changes in rainfall typical of western landscapes make each day unique. That means one must frequently have a number of pictures on the go and one has to start each day almost reinventing a picture in progress. However, there are continuities and what one is really driving at is some sense of what is always there. One knows it to be an altogether ancient landscape and its people have become increasingly sparse but some are still engaged in old farming practices. A neighbour could mend a sheep’s broken leg with grasses and splints, which would last just as long as the leg took to mend and fall off naturally in some remote part of the mountain. It is good to see that new people are taking up the challenge of this remote existence, and I carry on painting there as much as I can.

Over the years I have become increasingly interested in Mediterranean light which led to my acquiring a studio in Greece. The light remained more or less constant for half the year, through summer, which was a completely new experience, and I was able to paint morning and afternoon pictures in a much more continuous way, day after day. The plane tree pictures are painted in The Devil’s Gorge (the Devil being the God Pan,

one of the oldest Greek deities) near Trizinia. Plane trees, in such a dramatic environment, as old and wild as they are, made them a magnificent subject and over a 10-year period I spent most of my time painting them. The olive orchards were equally new to me and there was for both kinds of tree such distinct drama and character in their vigorous growth. At the time I had no idea that these trees were actually linked through their root systems and mycelial connections. They can interchange information by chemical signals, for example, put out greater amounts of bitter tannin if being predated by goats and signal their neighbours to do the same. The goats have to move on to feed much further afield. I have seen this happen as goats are herded up the gorge for the day. The plane trees are about 30 metres apart, consistently, so that must be about the optimal communication distance. If a tree loses a branch, or is otherwise injured, it is helped by flows of sugars and nutrients by its neighbours. There is often a very strong anabatic or katabatic wind up or down the gorge so this happens with a degree of regularity. This is not confined to single species: there are mature cypresses and small evergreen oaks and these trees can sustain or be sustained by their neighbours as a result of the different seasonal responses, giving each species distinct periods of strengths and energy in their window of growth.

This is an ancient wooded environment. There are paths, storage pits and a bridge which is at least 2,000 years old. At the mouth of the gorge, as the river debouches onto the plain, (where the olive orchard was painted) is the Sanctuary of Hippolytus. He was Theseus’ son, and nearby is a boulder under which Theseus’ father placed his sandals and sword. When Theseus was old enough to lift the rock to extract them, he was to join his father in Athens (where he ruled). This would be in the Mycenaean bronze age so the environment is truly ancient, the trees fully matured by several generations, and the whole natural environment breathes in a totally unified way.

The English Garden pictures were mostly painted following a group of transcriptions after Titian and Delacroix and other artists. Additionally, I was deeply struck by ideas about Cezanne’s paintings of rocks and the Bibemus Quarry, which didn’t get shown at The Royal Academy, because of Covid. I looked up as many of the paintings I had missed as I could, and became immersed in them, following the excellent catalogue which was published for the show. I knew many of them over the years previously, but some of them were completely unknown to me, being in private American collections. I cannot say precisely what the effect of the transcriptions or thinking in isolation about Cezanne (as a result of Covid lockdowns), without being able to see the originals, might have been. But I certainly made the garden pictures in a very different way to how I would have painted them without these experiences.

My partner Sarah has completely redesigned the garden in recent years and has jackhammered out the chalk substrate to make a pond, which features in some of the pictures. The subjects of the paintings from the steps can be seen from inside, through a glass wall from the kitchen which extends that space with flowers that are particularly colourful and varied. They make a very vital set of colour harmonies and I did think of Delacroix and Cezanne and their distinct manners of painting and chromatic ranges, in my pictures.

David Shutt 2021

Large Bole of a Plane Tree Oil on canvas 145 x 185 cm

Olive Orchard Oil on canvas 70 x 100 cm

The Slopes of Dinas Emrys Oil on canvas 77 x 106 cm

Path to Dinas Emrys Oil on canvas 77 x 106 cm

Drovers Bridge Oil on canvas 47 x 60 cm

Confluence of Afon Treweryn Oil on canvas 89 x 144 cm

Arenig Fawr From Llyn Celyn Oil on canvas 40 x 60 cm

Water Lily Oil on canvas 60 x 60 cm

Small Water Lily Oil on panel 36 x 49 cm

Three Steps Oil on canvas 89 x 112 cm

Agapanthus, Nasturshams and Geraniums Oil on canvas 40 x 54 cm

Poppies and Purple Loosestrife Oil on canvas 30 x 45 cm

In the Sun Oil on panel 36.5 x 59 cm

Plane Tree, The Big Branch Oil on canvas 122 x 152.5 cm

About David Shutt

The single most formative influence on David Shutt's life was visiting L S Lowry at his house, which was near his family home, a number of times around 1960 as a schoolboy. The large “Ebbw Vale” painting was in progress on the main easel in his front room. It was Lowry who first made David Shutt aware that one could be an artist and encouraged him to bring some of his paintings to his house and talked to him about them.

Born in West Kirby, The Wirral, in 1945, David Shutt followed Lowry's advice and applied to do the Manchester Foundation Course (1964) and was taught by Adrian Henri who was his tutor. Henri was very supportive, but Shutt was particularly predisposed by Lowry to respond to the aesthetics of the Euston Road School whose ex-teachers and pupils he met as an undergraduate at Leeds University (1968) in Quentin Bell and Lawrence Gowing and as a post-graduate in William Coldstream and Euan Uglow at the Slade (1979). It was there Shutt also met Patrick George and Patrick Symons, both substantial influences on his work. The most particular and focussed teaching he experienced however was from Norman Norris.

After leaving the Slade, Shutt became a visiting tutor at a number of London art schools but continued to work from the figure in a studio made available for ten years at the then London College of Printing at the Elephant and Castle. Euan Uglow used to call in on his way to the Slade every week and look at Shutt's current painting.

It was from Patrick Symons and his extraordinarily personal approach to art education that Shutt was able to apply to his own work and teaching, which led to him becoming Head of the Art and Design Department at Canterbury Christ Church University. The need to develop his own work and continuing professional practice as an artist were homogeneously welded together: the one informed the other which eventually led to him resigning in order to devote all his time to painting.

Shutt moved to Greece and lived there for ten years, devoting himself fully to his practice. He has recently spent increasingly more time in the UK, in Cornwall and Kent.

One person exhibitions 1984 Brunel University Gallery 1985 The Axis Database: Featured One Person Digital Exhibition 1986 Leeds University Gallery 1986 High Wycombe Gallery 1987 Histon Gallery, Cambridge 1991 Nimbus Gallery, Liverpool Hope University College 1992 Emmanuel College Gallery, Cambridge 1993 The Exhibition Hall, Senate House, Liverpool University 1993 The University of the Arts, London Galleries 1997 Harper College Gallery, Chicago, USA

1999 Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead 2002 Jill Yakas Gallery, Athens 2002 Hellenic Centre, London 2005 The Centre of Hellenic Tradition, Athens, Greece 2006 The Pegasus Gallery, Plaka, Athens 2007 Jill Yakas Gallery, Athens 2017 Lands of Goddess and Myth, Felix & Spear, London 2018 Recent Paintings: Trees, Felix & Spear, London 2021 Old And New Places, Felix & Spear, London

Selected group exhibitions 1970s/80s Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; 1982 Hayward Annual ‘British Drawing’, London; 1985 National Portrait Gallery Imperial Tobacco Award; 1988 Beaumaris Arts Festival – first prize; 1980s/90s Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales Open Art Show, Manchester Acad of Fine Art Ann Exhib, Manchester City Art Gallery, Royal Academy Summer Show, London; 1999 The Importance of Drawing, Canterbury City Art Gallery, Kent; 1990s/00s The Sydney Cooper Gallery Exhibitions, Canterbury; 1990sPres The London Group Exhibitions, London and Europe; 2009 The Municipal City Art Gallery, Corinth, Greece; 2017 The London Group: Viewpoints, Felix and Spear, London; 2017 Summer Show, Felix and Spear, London

Public collections Leeds University, Leeds; The Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead; Harper College, Chicago; London College of Communications, London; Deutsche Bank (from Grimshaw Associates) (stolen), London; Emmanuel College Cambridge; East Kent Health Authority; Canterbury Heritage Museum; Contemporary Arts Society of Wales, National Collection of Wales, Cardiff; Municipal Workshop Printmaking Collection, Neapolis, Thessalonika, Greece

Works in private collections throughout Europe, USA, Australia, Japan and South Africa

Felix & Spear

71 St Mary's Road, London W5 5RG

felixandspear.com