George Large - Exhibition Catalogue 2015

George Large A Place Apart

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Catalogue ÂŁ10

George Large A Place Apart

David Whiting

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George Large A Place Apart Looking at the art of George Large, one thinks of a very particular English figurative tradition, one which goes back to Blake, and a little later to pictures like Work by Ford Madox Brown.

Then to the First World War and the futuristic semi-mechanised figures of Nevinson and Roberts and the other-worldly images of Stanley Spencer, a particular hero of Large’s.

Other painters spring to mind; Edward Burra, the East Anglian-based David Carr, and further afield, Fernand Léger. These painters conveyed in their different ways a muscularity, even a monumentality, both in terms of bold energised figures and boldness of composition. These artists, and most recently George Large, have worked with structures that give a dynamic to the whole depiction, one of mental and physical purpose. Large’s characters are often driven, people totally focussed on the task in hand. It is as if something of Léger’s ‘mechanical paradise’, as Robert Hughes called it, has taken root in temperate English soil and the warmer air of Malta, but one which is deeply humanised and given a strong sense of theatre in backwater town, country and coast.

There is a Neo-Romantic strain here too. His vigorous preparatory sketches have shades of Minton and Craxton, and he remains a faithful student of life drawing. We find it too in his sense of place, whether it be in a Suffolk boat-

yard, a street scene in Malta or the bay at Staithes. There is an inextricable link between location and the activity that animates it, though in more recent work Large has focussed principally on the figures, his voluminously sculpted bodies taking up most of the picture. But the sense of locality is always there, a part of Large’s poetry. He found it first in Stanley Spencer’s Cookham, a powerful link between figures and their environment, scenes which could take on, in Spencer’s case, epic connotations. That Berkshire village was Spencer’s Eden, a setting in which he relived Biblical dramas. It was a place of love and redemption, but the serpent in the garden was never far away, a world sometimes tinged with darkness. In George Large’s reenactments, there is the same quality of anxiety.

Many of his earlier pictures have a drama akin to the haunted narratives of Carel Weight.

Think of Large’s group of paintings set in 1990s Uppingham. A dark rainy scene in the town, with figures exiting hurriedly at bottom right, could be the aftermath of a murder. In another the subject of foreground road workers, their bodies typically and uncomfortably convoluted, is strangely at odds with the sleepy town behind. From the outset Large saw the extraordinary in the familiar, the remarkable in the commonplace. In Large’s universe everything takes on a prismatic luminosity, not

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just in terms of colouring (whether in oil or his

pointed to the truths that Large’s exag-

generally preferred watercolour), but in the clarity of his forms and the rigour of his complex structuring. His love of incorporated still-life, whether of fishing nets, tools, groups of oil cans, garden bric-a-brac, particularly seen in this earlier work, is actually very far from ‘still’.

The paraphernalia in a George Large becomes part of its incident and synergy. Large notices

gerations of bodily form convey. This sharp observer extracts what he needs. Seeing such contortions in shape and movement in everyday life is about another kind of vision.

The rest of us tend to see the human frame and its space more conventionally, almost as if we have forgotten how to look. Large sees the actual drama of the body, a myriad of bending

what the rest of us miss. The assorted things and detritus to be found in builder’s yards and dockyards, garages and high street emporiums is something to abstract and reorganise (and for those who want a real insight into George Large’s compositional methods, do watch Charles Mapleston’s evocative Goldmark film; Trust Me, I’m an Artist). But such concerns go beyond the purely formal. He has a clear affection for the rhythms and decorative aspects of what surrounds us, qualities he replicates in intricate layouts, a kind of planar control of each element, a structural order. On one level his images are about intersections of shape and colour, perspective often flattened so that each component, including his crisp use of light and shadow, is of equal importance across the spread of the picture plane.This is a kind of distillation of form, an abstract storytelling, that goes back to painters like Piero della Francesca.

and flexing limbs, with elongations and inflations which are in fact truer to life. A picture of a boatyard is centrally dominated by a bending man who is wheel changing, the prominent profile of his dark trousered backside an unlikely star of the composition, while the patterned tread of a tire seen endon is a foreground dominant. A foreshortened fishing boat and vehicle cab take up the wings, further components in Large’s cleverly balanced pyramidal design, one by which he achieves a strong pictorial unity.

The characteristically spatial compression adds to the sense of intrigue, the density of narrative, all part of the pictorial distortion which is such a Large hallmark. Other commentators have

Yet these pictures are not just exercises in organisation. They have potent stories to tell, in part about the dynamic contact between figures and the tasks they perform. Most are focussed on what they do, absorbed in the action, facial expressions frowning, even grimacing. Sometimes they look detached, heads placed at distorted angles (echoes of Picasso and Chagall?), away from the motion of their hands. Just as Large has homed in on his figures in recent years, so our attention concentrates more on the harmonies and tensions between them. The psychological

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1

Boatyard II oil on canvas, 1989, 54.5 x 36 cm

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2

Rooftop Workers oil on canvas, 1996, 60 x 76 cm

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frisson has increased, at its most evident when characters appear locked in mortal combat over some apparently prosaic task. There is a clear subtext, a tense undercurrent in George Large’s world. Something is clearly afoot. An everyday theme, such as that of rooftop builders, turns into something much darker.

Bodily expressions are aggressive, the hands are clenched and the faces contorted. The light in the deserted square below resembles moonlight on an empty stage set. The shadows are ominously long; one cast on a distant roof by a gable end and chimney is sinister indeed, all adding up to a typically enigmatic scene. In another picture, garage mechanics working on a vehicle are sucked into a dense machinery of tools and undercarriage. Their figures become robotic and automaton, the crammed spacing pushing out the oxygen. The garage is a frenetic and highly charged place.

Humdrum tasks turn into Herculean challenges in Large’s Vorticist-like depictions.

Then there is his gentler lyricism, the softer fluidity. Women sprawled languidly on a bed or people picking berries. There is a particularly beautiful image of figures with doves, another with crows, birds and people touchingly intertwined. Let us not forget his affectionate humour, an intrinsic part of his take on modern

life. Think of the image of competitive speed knitters with their balls of wool. In one painting a legion of colonising crabs is threatening to envelop the figures, in another there is a spread of lively decorous frogs. (Large is so adept at conveying the quirky essence of our fellow creatures). Very memorable are those characters about to gorge on their fenestrations of chips, and what about those folk struggling to float under their weight of tattoos? Another opportunity for Large to celebrate the unsung ornament that surrounds us. Again, it is his humanity that strikes home, but even where there is visual wit, his outlook is still tinged with something uncanny.

George Large is the most astute watcher of our shared experience, of the exotica of the ordinary, of hidden worlds on rooftops, in shops, allotments and front rooms. After viewing a George Large exhibition we realise that there is no such thing as prosaic, and we are likely to look a bit deeper beneath the apparently innocuous surface of things.

He weaves his insights into rich figurative tapestries, a realm with which we may be superficially familiar, but which is re-made in his imagination, a place apart.

David Whiting, August 2015

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opposite

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Mechanics watercolour, 2015, 46 x 68.5 cm

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Wall Repairs (detail) watercolour, 2009, 56 x 56 cm

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Grenadiers oil on canvas, 1997, 49 x 60 cm

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Horticulturists oil on canvas, 2002, 48 x 74 cm

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Underground watercolour, 1995, 41 x 61 cm

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Felixstowe Boatyard oil on canvas, 2002, 77 x 90 cm

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Fishermen watercolour, 2007, 38.5 x 29 cm

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10 Picking Berries watercolour, 2015, 68 x 45.5 cm

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opposite

11 Crab Men (detail) watercolour, 2014, 65 x 47.5 cm

12 Scrapyard watercolour, 2008, 36.5 x 60 cm

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13 Garage Workers I watercolour, 2007, 40 x 68.5 cm

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14 Gardeners watercolour and gouache, 2010, 95 x 73 cm

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15 Fishermen II oil on board, 87 x 87 cm

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16 Jewels of Malta watercolour, 2013, 49 x 68 cm

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17 Wash Day watercolour, 2014, 46 x 68 cm

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18 Frogs watercolour, 2014, 68.5x 45.5 cm

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opposite

19 Crow Men watercolour, 2012, 50 x 62 cm

20 Fish and Chips (detail) watercolour, 2014, 69 x 49.5 cm

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21 After the Storm watercolour, 2013, 48 x 64 cm

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22 Autumn watercolour, 2013, 47.5 x 62 cm

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23 Pigeon Handlers oil on canvas, 2015, 76.5 x 102 cm

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24 Antiques watercolour, 2014, 68 x 45.5 cm

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25 In Bed Sleeping watercolour, 2014, 46 x 68 cm

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26 Catching Fish watercolour, 2014, 46 x 68.5 cm

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opposite

27 Tattooist (detail) oil on canvas, 2015, 122 x 76 cm

28 Stitch in Time watercolour, 2013, 45 x 67.5 cm

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29 The Quilt watercolour, 2014, 46 x 68 cm

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30 Lobster Men watercolour, 2012, 51 x 67 cm

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31 Checkmate watercolour, 2015, 31.5 x 19.5 cm

George Large was born at Islington, London in 1936 and went on to study at Hornsey College of Art from 1958-63 where one of his fellow students was Allen Jones. His early influences included the work of Edward Burra and Stanley Spencer.

Goldmark Gallery 14 Orange Street, Uppingham

Large is a member of the Royal Society of British

Rutland, LE15 9SQ

Artists and in 1986 he was elected to the Royal

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Institute of Painters in Watercolours. Three years later he won the Winsor & Newton Award and

Text: © David Whiting 2015

his work is represented in several important

Art photographs: © Christian Soro

public collections such as British Rail, the National

Portrait: © Jay Goldmark

Gallery in Malta and ICI America. He has held

Design: Roger Porter

several solo exhibitions and was commissioned

by British Rail to paint a mural for Kings Cross

ISBN 978-1-909167-27-8

Thameslink Station. In recent years he has lived

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and painted in Rutland and Malta.

These monumental, sculpture-like, wilfully convoluted ďŹ gures now consume his paintings. They have become the very hallmark of all his work.

Here we have a painter who has ďŹ ne-tuned his skills to give us paintings that are well-balanced, always full of dramatic impact and frequently imbued with his quirky sense of humour.

Anthony J. Lester

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Uppingham, Rutland