Goldmark 12

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SPRING 2019

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g spring 2019

Spring has brought with it a flurry of exhibitions here at the Goldmark Gallery. Last month we opened two exciting shows: new work by acclaimed draughtsman David Suff (featured) and a career-defining exhibition from slipware potter Clive Bowen. Next month will see our Ron King retrospective hit the gallery floor, followed swiftly by new pots by porcelain wizard Takeshi Yasuda, all the way from China. We hope you will join us in the weeks ahead.

NUMBER 12

Contents 4

Rigby Graham’s Ireland

12 Takeshi Yasuda 18 David Suff 20 Thomas Shotter Boys - Original Views of London 28 Peter Kinley 30 Johann Georg Müller - Nach dem Krieg 36 Mabel Royds 44 Pablo Picasso - Linocuts

CONTRIBUTORS

48 Phil Rogers - My Wood-fired Kiln

Malcolm Yorke is an award-winning writer on art and the author of biographies of Eric Gill, Keith Vaughan, Matthew Smith, Edward Bawden, and Mervyn Peake. His The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times won the Yorkshire Post Art Book of the Year award. He also paints, sculpts and writes children’s books.

54 Alan Sorrell - John Francis Murals 58 Ralph Steadman - Oddbins Mural 60 Goldmark Books

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 4 © Malcolm Yorke 12 © Prue Venables 18 © David Suff 48 © Phil Rogers Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, March 2019 Printed in Wales by Gomer Press ISBN 978-1-909167-63-6

goldmark

Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 info@goldmarkart.com www.goldmarkart.com

Prue Venables is a critically acclaimed Australian ceramicist working predominantly in porcelain. A recent finalist of the Korean International Ceramic Biennale 2019, Venables has also taught ceramics, written extensively on her subject and on fellow makers, and has in recent years taken up jewellery and metalwork in addition to her work with clay.

David Suff is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been exhibited around the world. He specialises in works on paper and is well known for his remarkably rich pencil drawings and for intricate hand-coloured etchings. His works are held in many notable public and private collections.

Phil Rogers is one of the world’s leading studio potters. In addition to exhibiting internationally, he has written respected books on ash glazes, throwing techniques and salt glazing and lectured all over the world, most notably in South Korea and the USA. Rogers’ work is held in more than 50 museums worldwide, and he is represented by the Goldmark Gallery.

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RIGBY GRAHAM’S IRELAND ‘Stones have a strong tactile attraction,’ wrote Rigby Graham in 1969: ‘It seems almost a universal weakness to walk along a shore and pick up stones. One searches a shingle beach for round stones, white stones, veined stones or stones with holes in them, or picks up a handful and fingers them in a pocket or chinks them together in the hand.’ Then stones in all forms, from pebbles to gigantic monoliths, were already established as recurrent motifs in his works. ‘This attraction is by no means unique, and my thoughts and feelings are in no way original; they have been affected and influenced to some extent by the way in which others, particularly painters, have looked upon them. It is not what the stones are, but how they appear at different times and in different seasons; what they stand for and symbolise, what they express and reflect and above all what they suggest. In Graham Sutherland’s own words, it is a struggle.. . to try to bring out the anonymous personality of things. There exists a duality.

They should be themselves and something else at the same time. They are formal metaphors.’

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Graham first discovered Ireland, a land itself of mythic stone and rock, while he was still at school. He landed at 2am, 1st January, 1948 at Rosslare; it was snowing when he set off to trudge into Dublin on one of his youthful walk-about adventures. It was some twenty years later, in 1967, before he returned, but by now he has painted more in Ireland than anywhere else – in all the twenty-six counties of the south and the six of the north, plus many islands off the coast such as Great Blasket, Skellig Michael, Achill, Inismore, and Inisheer.

It is the depopulated, boulder-strewn stretches of land which attract him, so full of stones that there has been no need to cannibalise the older buildings to make new ones. They are allowed to fall in their own good time – so County Clare alone has 3000 ruined castles and County Kerry has 40,000 derelict ring forts, tower houses, abbeys, crannogs, forts, and souterrains.

Ireland, with its necessary vastness of scale in rock and sky,

but also the exquisiteness of detail in lichen and flower that Graham needs, has inspired some of his best work with brush and pen combined. Of the inland rocky places he is particularly drawn to the Burren, a hundred square miles of limestone karst in County Clare: ‘It is bleak, appears empty, eerie and uneventful, and inspires many with a sense of man’s insignificance and of his predicament.’ These are exactly the feelings inspired in the eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetes by the Sublime. ‘This savage land,’ Cromwell’s surveyors reported to him more prosaically, ‘yielded neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor sufficient soil to bury him,’ to which some later wag added, ‘nor even a tuft of grass to wipe his arse.’ Across the splintered pavements of clint and gryke are stones from the size of footballs to that of a house. ‘The vivid colouring of the flowers,’ Graham writes, ‘the harsh quality of the landscape and the dramatic and ever changing skies make this land peculiarly

view more Rigby Graham at goldmarkart.com

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attractive for a landscape painter. Perhaps too the richness of this land in folklore and fairy tale, its historical associations and its ruins, remnants and broken remains almost as widely strewn about as the boulders of this area, all add to its magic.’

In a note on John Piper, Graham tries again to explain the attractions the Burren has held for them both as Romantic artists: ‘Concomroe stands in the middle of the Burren, one of the strangest landscapes in Europe - a large bleached limestone terrain, absolutely dry and without trees. Over thousands of years the elements have fashioned and eroded this landscape into terraces and escarpments. It is like a giant uneven pavement, riven and split, and in these fissures grow multitudes of exquisite mosses and plants, many of which are normally only found in Alpine or Mediterranean climates.’

Rocks tell tales: of the rise and fall of continents, the drying of seas, the flooding of deserts, the heaving up and wearing down of mountains, and in their fossils the extinction of entire species, many of them branches off our own ancestral line.

Geology and palaeontology destroyed the faith of the Victorians in the Genesis myth, and even for a modern agnostic there are uncomfortable sermons to be found in stones, as Graham admits: ‘For whether the rocks are limestone or granite they are fighting a losing battle, so that although when compared with man they seem permanent, in the wider view of things they are still only transitory. They are all, like man, being worn down, and it is this affinity which I feel and try to express.’

Skellig Michael was one such ‘worn down’ place: a peak of grit, shale and quartz off Bolus Head surrounded by savage seas. In Graham’s Irish Voyage, a road-trip film commissioned

by Goldmark in 2003, we watch the artist, spruce in his polished shoes, blazer and tie, hump painting gear, umbrella and chair up the crag’s 700 stone steps ‘in wonder, fear and humility.’ He found the place much tidied up since his last visit thirty years before. It houses the grey stone remains of a seventh century monastery, ecclesiastical ruins and beehive

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huts, but also for the painter, ‘the vegetation is brilliant green and gold, moss and seapink in great thick hemispherical clumps clinging to anything it can. The rock is the haunt of puffins, petrels, many types of gull, manx shearwaters and shags.’ Graham had watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation programmes on TV in the spring of 1969 and was inspired by his story of the fall of Greece and Rome, the scattering of the early Christian church riven by theological controversies, and the subsequent birth of a new civilisation which faced the Atlantic. In Clark’s words: ‘It is hard to believe that for quite a long time – almost a hundred years – western Christianity survived by clinging on to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.’ The monks had no books and only the crudest of buildings, but it was a society united by a tough determination to survive and by faith.

Graham found it irresistible.

Of course Ireland is itself an island in the Atlantic and in Graham’s view it is this isolation which makes for its unique character. This is even more marked in the islands yet further away from Europe, though in the case of the Great Blasket the isolation led to the extinction of the community, just as it did on Skellig Michael. It lies off Dunmore Head at the tip of the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry; eight main islands with smaller outliers, inhabited for 2000 years but left to the rabbits and sheep since 1953 when the few last inhabitants were evacuated for their own safety by the Irish government.

Graham researched its ecology, economy, history, folklore, Irish language, and literature. ‘Now the long strung-out ruins are a melancholy sight on this incredibly beautiful island, for the ruins are recent and there are so many signs of the departed tenants – beds, furniture, doors, tables, and still recognisable gardens. Some of the houses which still have roofs and doors are padlocked, the windows barred and boarded up. Signs say ‘Keep Out’ and this saddens and hurts the old islanders for it was never like this before, where no door was ever locked.’ Here in the Blaskets is a melancholy story to tell, ruins new and old, isolation, a wild land and seascape untouched by other artists which Graham can make his own. From it he has made many paintings and one great woodcut, The Islandman (1997), a picture of Tomas O’Crohan, the chronicler of the last days of his community.

Excerpts from Malcolm Yorke’s Against the Grain, featured page 60 price guide inside back cover

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New Exhibition in May

TAKESHI YASUDA

Takeshi Yasuda has established a remarkable and enduring reputation across the world as a potter and teacher of great imagination and integrity.

Fifty years of making and still ‘I love the clay’ – his enthusiasm is infectious. Many people have been influenced by his inventive, thoughtful approach, with his words of encouragement and innovation remaining fresh in their minds for decades.

I have been fortunate over the years to hear Yasuda speak many times about his thinking and making and have often wondered about the source of such ability. How did it start – this imagination, engagement, dedication, this nurturing of a remarkable talent?

Born in 1943 and raised in Japan, Yasuda recognises clear moments in his childhood where important learning occurred, serendipitously and unconsciously. ‘Like a first love’, from a treasured but faded photograph peers the soft round face of his kindergarten teacher Midori. The kindergarten director, Kobayashi Munesaku, was the initiator of Eurythmics education in Japan. Based on the work of Swiss educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, this method combined rhythmic bodily movements, aural training, and vocal or instrumental improvisation and was accompanied also by progressive ideas in art education. Later, in primary school, a unique and influential teacher encouraged creative writing about any subject. How fortunate to take first steps into learning governed by such free thinking.

Yasuda's elderly father came from a working-class and not particularly intellectual background – employed as a pioneering photographer and then, during the Second World War, a recording engineer. Though more technician than artist,

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his photography magazines supplied Yasuda with the opportunity to observe the work of many great practitioners such as Edward Weston, and through this experience to recognise the essence of personality, timing, and imagination in particular images: a kind of magic. Photographic equipment lay around the home – along with easy access to dark rooms – and as a young man, Yasuda always carried a camera.

Mechanically minded and bored at school, he picked them up in the search for ‘something interesting to do and just because they were there’. Complex and manual, these cameras provoked experiments with light, aperture speeds and composition. Thus developed an unconscious recognition – unusual in such a young man – that although technique was essential, there was more to art than skill alone.

Takeshi Yasuda is ‘a hammer and plier kind of person’ – always interested in the mechanical world and known fondly by some as ‘the handyman’ because of his many invented machines – so it was a natural step to assume that he would study engineering. An unsuccessful attempt to enter Mechanical Engineering, one of the most difficult courses in Japan, led to suggestions of art and industrial product design.

Interested, but lacking in the necessary preparation, Yasuda joined an introductory high school art class. ‘It was alarming and difficult – I didn't have the background or belong to the art community. . . I had to catch up quickly and learn to understand this new language of drawing.’ Gradually academic drawing gave way to more profound realisations about the objects he was tasked with describing: ‘It was the

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understanding of 3D volume that was the most moving experience, and which permanently changed my view of the world.’

After eight months of study, Yasuda travelled with a group of friends around Northern Japan, finishing almost by chance with a visit to the pottery village of Mashiko. It was an exciting time for the community. Through the influence of Shoji Hamada, and in the wake of post-war societal change, the town was enjoying a period of expansion, moving from the production of traditional kitchenware to more experimental pots for Tokyo restaurants and craft shops. Intrigued particularly by kick wheel throwing and determined to experience this himself, Yasuda returned later to work for two weeks in a family studio: ‘I knew after that, that I would be a potter. . .’ Several short visits followed until eventually the family agreed to take him on as an apprentice. Yasuda was nineteen.

Apprenticeships in Japan rarely encompass lesson-based teaching, so clarity of intent and a drive to learn was paramount. For Yasuda, a clear understanding governed this time: that in throwing, though skill is essential, the wheel is ultimately a tool of expression, not just production. After two years he was provided a free studio and multi-chambered wood kiln. Working alone led gradually to a more managerial role, with assistants making production and one-off pieces.

There followed the eventual realisation of a need, personally, to focus on one type of work, and at this juncture Yasuda moved to England.

Shifting between cultures is a dynamic experience, presenting a confronting focus on assumed understandings of the familiar in life. For Takeshi, being surrounded now by engineering history – the entire chronicles of British mechanisation – was fascinating in itself, but also accompanied by an anthropological awareness that fundamentally affected his pottery making. Immersed in European rituals about the preparation, presentation, and consumption of food, his attention turned towards the customs of the table top: eating as the basis of family structure, relationships, and social communication.

Functional ceramic objects are some of the most centrally placed possessions in our lives. They lie quietly, familiar, mute and often disregarded, until a particular need draws them suddenly and importantly to centre stage. Each one asks to

be touched, embraced by hands, enfolded by fingers, enjoined in ritual and symbolism, all the while prompting imaginative travel across time and cultures. The making and use of functional wares has always been a key interest for Yasuda, where questions hover around their definition as objects and custom collides with the user’s imagination.

Japanese food is generally served as appetising but isolated morsels atop small dishes, with relationships between food and carrier carefully selected for their intersections of colour and texture. Here, the large serving dish is not important, and even not entirely understood. By contrast, the presentation of Western food entwines drama with sharing and eating.

Large, purpose-made serving plates set the scene for ceremony and the theatrical rituals of carving and participation.

For Yasuda, these comparisons provoked the exploration of a world of experimental presentation dishes where even weight was of no concern – ‘so long as food could be placed and two hands could lift.’ Fantastic and unusual objects appeared with extraordinary handles and features. The most celebrated of the pots from this time were made in 'Sansai' stoneware with copper and manganese glazes flowing onto a cream surface. These are pots of great presence and ingenuity, beckoning to be treasured, touched, and inviting the imagination to fill them with bounteous feasts.

Life in the UK brought many important concerns – selfsufficiency; new materials; time for re-evaluation; even a sense of novelty as a Japanese potter in a foreign land – but always at the heart of Yasuda's thinking lay a determination to avoid the pitfalls of fashion: ‘To try to please other people’s expectations, this is a dangerous thing...something that every artist faces. Pressure comes in all sorts of ways. .. You must assess if this is reality or a trap: you must not be afraid to experiment.’

Important opportunities to teach and research arrived that both provided essential income and facilitated learning and discovery. For Yasuda, teaching was an invigorating process, ‘working with and observing students’ as they developed. His own apprenticeship had presented an opportunity for intuitive learning in the absence of instruction; this teaching practice required a more conscious understanding of creative processes and the development of imaginative thought. The subversion of assumptions; the brainstorming of possibilities;

price guide inside back cover

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From the moment of birth, repetition and practice leads to bodily learning – the training of muscles to unconsciously understand and absorb movement. the triggering of questions and ideas, plus the use of the wheel in an unconventional way: all rapidly became characteristic of both Takeshi Yasuda's teaching and making practice.

The standard scenario of making a cup and then adding a handle became the making of a handle first and then a cup to suit it. Unattached, the handle was, as if suspended in air, waiting to elicit new experiments and have its placement freshly examined. Gravity too – the controller of all of our lives – is investigated here, leading to new and unexpected possibilities. The usual formula is to allow the process of making on the wheel to dictate the order of construction – firstly the bowl and then the foot. Yasuda questions all such patterns. Finished objects are inverted, even actually thrown upside down with inventive techniques developed specifically to this end. A large bowl begins life initially as a flat dish, suspended over the wheel and thrown downwards in reverse, the final result emerging freshly sprung and full of life. A vase, expertly thrown, handsome, tall, and well controlled, reaches upwards like a dancer before being coaxed to fold and collapse softly downwards – the sort of movement feared by most potters. Removed on a bat from the wheel, the form is then hung upside down and gently shaken out like some favourite rumpled linen shirt and left to set and dry – such an innovative celebration of skill, expression, and understanding of this wonderful material.

From the moment of birth, repetition and practice leads to bodily learning – the training of muscles to unconsciously understand and absorb movement. A musician learns where to instinctively place fingers, a bow, even a breath. Just as in singing where the air is moved through the body to produce sound, so clay on the wheel is manipulated, moulded, caressed, driven and shaped in intimate connection to the body. With time and practice, the body discerns instinctively, even without vision, the thickness of a wall, the weight, the

depth and quality of the material and the edges of possibility that lie in wait. The repetitive making of particular forms, so similar to the practice of a musician, enables the absorption of the object itself into muscular memory – appearing even as if to make itself – and facilitates a deeper exploration of its expression. Watching Yasuda, such a skilful, intimate, fluent and personally expressive connection to his work is immediately apparent.

A decade in China has presented Yasuda with new challenges. Jingdezhen porcelain, a clay of such breath-taking beauty, but ‘like a mistress’ – entrancing, difficult, secretive, always just out of reach – this material requires careful understanding, empathy, the emptying of previous knowing from the mind and an ability to merge and work from within.

The fired material is soft, pure, luminous and translucent – almost like milky glass, and so evocative of the centuries old ‘white gold’ reputation – but is tricky, unpredictable, almost devious in character at the making stages. The work that has emerged here is as experimental as ever. Large bowls with edges formed upside down by the weight of falling clay play with fragile tearing: they are made by hands, and yet no finger mark remains. Rich gold fills their interior – perhaps hinting at past reputations – gently held within softly melting meringue-like boundaries. Long sweeping, suspended dishes ache for bounty to lay upon them, their material challenges, design, manipulation and firing practices all absorbed, dissolved and rendered invisible. Tall vases reach upwards with necks reversed – energetic, sensual, vigorous, and as if with outward reaching arms, their filaments activating and enlivening the surrounding space.

There is a relaxed confidence inherent in this work, the result of decades of innovative experimentation and dedicated work. Here now stands an exciting invitation – to wonder and to admire these miraculous, playful objects.

view more Takeshi Yasuda at goldmarkart.com

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Prue Venables, Melbourne 2013

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Current Exhibition

DAVID SUFF

Picture-making cannot explain life’s mysteries

– but it can

make them visible.

A small drawing of a seashell may speak to us of the vast ocean, the passage of time, of human exploration and the scent of our lover’s neck. This is not just imaginative association: these are things we know instinctively.

For me, drawing is a way to glimpse these mysteries. A way to find bridges between visible and invisible, across the moving borders of observation, recollection and imagination.

Here lies, I hope, spiritual evidence of our being.

I cannot recall a time when I didn’t draw. I have always found it easier than describing in words. It is a solitary process of enquiry, which requires the suspension of disbelief. The journey has a time of its own making, alongside the living time of what is portrayed. And it demands continuous correcting, trying always to capture both the generosity and precision of looking.

Most of my work is on paper – I have long been in love with fine handmade paper. The slight resistance it presents to the pencil or brush is a challenge that continues to excite me.

Over recent years my concerns have become increasingly focussed on the formal problems of picture making: how to create a believable representation of space on a flat surface; how to represent more than one light source within the image; how to create harmony and balance.

My pictures are based upon observational drawing of the landscape, especially gardens. For me it is necessary for a work of art to search out the spiritual. The garden illustrates humankind’s search for the divine, an attempt to have a small patch of heaven here on earth. These drawings are inevitably also about the disintegration of ambition – gardening at best is a temporary imposition of order and geometry on the natural world. Whilst the depicted garden is clearly a piece of contemplation, the spiritual content of the drawings is not intended as a statement of faith. For me it is more of a questioning or enquiry into the spiritual evidence implied by the cultivated world – reaffirming the mystery and marvel of the natural world. I find it impossible to think of landscape without also thinking of people.

Green topiary emerges from green shade – apparently the view of an interloper or dreamer. I believe that a contemplative stillness is at the heart of the most successful pictures. If a picture asks the viewer to struggle with understanding what is depicted then the ‘real’ subject may just be the difficulty of ‘seeing’.

view more David Suff at goldmarkart.com

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Original Views of London as it is

thomas shotter boys

It seems unthinkable that an artist as central to the history of printmaking as Thomas Shotter Boys should have gone so long without recognition in the annals of British art. As a lithographer, he was technically revolutionary and creatively ambitious, striving for parity and acceptance in a medium more frequently employed for serialisation. At the height of his career he enjoyed minor celebrity, major critical approval, and even royal patronage – but it was not to last.

Original Views of London was undeniably his magnum opus, a portfolio that should have cemented his reputation alongside such contemporaries as Samuel Prout and J.D. Harding as a titan of the topographical sphere: ‘If he had produced nothing else,’ wrote one Boys scholar, ‘[he] would claim our attention as a national figure worthy of comparison with any other great master of the English topographical tradition.’

It was not to be; far from confirm his place among the pantheon, Original Views marked instead a career zenith to which there was no return. Short of print collector’s circles, Boys’ name has been overlooked ever since. Conspicuous among the absent advocates was John Ruskin, a man who for years, even beyond his death, could make or break an artist’s reputation by his pen.

Though he enlisted Boys’ services as an etcher-engraver in The Stones of Venice and Modern Painters, Ruskin never deigned to write about his art: the most he managed was a note of gratitude in the third volume of the latter for the ‘copies from my pen drawings, etched by Mr. Boys, with a fidelity for which I sincerely thank him.’ At a time when Ruskin’s word was gospel, ‘the word was not given.’ For almost a hundred years, his name went unpublished in mainstream print.

Born in the rural suburbs of London in 1803, Boys was introduced to the world of printmaking as an apprentice to the

engraver George Cooke – a highly respected printer and a pupil of James Basire, the man who taught William Blake.

Like Blake, Boys was just 14 when he began his apprenticeship, and stayed in Cooke’s service for another six years before leaving for Paris – as so many young artists of his generation did – to expand his horizons.

Employed as a jobbing engraver In France, he trained himself in watercolour painting. There was then a romantic vogue for scenes of Paris – a trend that traced its roots back to the traditions of the Grand Tour and the various vedutisti who made famous the classical wonders of the continent. It was here that he met fellow British painter and printmaker R.P. Bonington. Separated in age by just two months, as an artist Bonington had benefitted from a head start, having studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His tutor there, Louis Francia, had been a friend of Thomas Girtin’s, and among his peers was a young Delacroix: here was a young man with an academic pedigree that complemented Boys’ trade-learnt craft.

Boys joined Bonington’s atelier and they quickly became close friends. Their relationship was to prove invaluable, not least for the connections it brought him to the workshops of Paris, and in exposing him to the technical advances being made then in the world of print. When Bonington died prematurely from tuberculosis in 1828, it came as a great blow. It would be another ten years before he returned to London, armed now with an extensive knowledge of lithographic practice and folio after folio of preparatory sketches.

Over the next two years, Boys prepared his first major lithographic series: Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen etc., published in 1839.

This was a major project, half a decade in the planning, and compiled from ten years’ worth of sketches and studies made in the

city. Aside from the views of Paris made by Girtin at the turn of the 19th century – ‘so correct there is not a line out’ – he had found most other attempts unsatisfactory: ‘the damndest, lying, ill got up, money getting clap trap possible.’ Setting out his ambitions, he presaged the authenticity to which he would aspire in his own Paris series, and which he would surpass in London years later: ‘I intend to do Paris as it is…’

Lithography in the age of Boys was still a nascent technology. Figures like Charles Joseph Hullmandel, the lithographer with whom Boys printed the Paris portfolio, were making extraordinary technical advances, particularly in colour and tonal lithography, as demand for services increased. The method then, as it does now, depends on the antipathy between water and grease. A crayon, traditionally made from lampblack and wax, is used to draw an image on a stone block which is ‘fixed’ with a solution of acid and gum arabic. The plate is then wetted and a printer’s ink applied. The wet surface of the plate repels the greasy ink, which adheres instead to the wax marks.

Paper is then laid over the block and an impression can be taken.

In Boys’ Paris series, colours were subsequently applied to the black and white image with separate blocks, one for each colour, successive tints achieved by the superposition of the next colour.

Chromolithography of this kind, using multiple stone blocks, was then very much in its infancy, and the Picturesque Architecture – arguably the first major example of its kind – was hailed as a masterful achievement. On publication, Boys, who had been responsible for engineering the method, felt moved to publish an express notice citing them as lithographs, so easily mistaken were they for the original watercolours.

If the Paris lithographs proved the medium’s extraordinary capacity for

view more Thomas Shotter Boys at goldmarkart.com

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simulacra, it was in Original Views of London that Boys championed the idea of an ‘original’ lithograph. Unlike Picturesque Architecture, Original Views was intended as a monochrome suite, with no prior watercolour models from which to copy.

After the success of the Paris series, Boys immediately set to work making sketches around the city. Additional to drawings in pencil made on the street, Boys drew outlines on tracing paper in chalk which were then transferred by rubbing directly onto the litho stone. The chalk dust would leave a ‘ghost’ impression, over which the general outlines of the scene could be traced. A single, sepia-wash tone was then executed for each print on a separate stone, without outline, using in part the natural texture of the etched stone plate.

The freedom Boys’ approach allowed him shifted the compositional stress from studies and sketches directly to the block. Working straight onto the stone, architectural details could be removed or enhanced, figures rearranged or improvised off the cuff. Boys made lithography a live process in a suite that presented a living place: with the creative autonomy his method provided, he transformed an otherwise straightforwardly topographical series into a theatrical diorama, with London’s streets centre stage.

26 plates were produced, ‘drawn from nature expressly for this work.’ Initially issued uncoloured as original examples of the lithographic process, in a bid to make the suite more commercially viable Boys was persuaded to add hand-colouring after the fact. London, it turns out, was not ready to receive itself on the printmaker’s terms.

Original Views, true to its ‘as it is’ tagline, presents us with a valuable snapshot of the London of the early Victorians. There is so much to credit Boys in the various scenes

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presented in the suite. His sense of composition has tended to be neglected – the architecture of the city, after all, was already laid out for him – but the chosen viewpoints offer a wealth of discoveries: St Paul’s, looming like a spectral figure in the background, emerges as a holy site on the approach of a Fleet Street pilgrimage.

We have no real indication whether Original Views, or the Paris series before it, were commercially successful. Whether Boys and his publishers ever recouped their costs on either project, they certainly found favourable coverage in the press. A Times supplement found virtually nothing to quibble in the pages of Original Views, and lavished praise on their preferred scenes.

At a time of great cultural tourism, coinciding with the birth of Baedeker and John Murray’s ‘Handbooks for Travellers’, they commended especially Boys’ fidelity to the spirit of the city: the lifelike ‘bustle and animation’ of Regent Street, the ‘turmoil of business and pleasure, the cares, exigencies, and varieties of fashion and labour…’

Boys’ father was a salesman, and trade of all types features heavily in these prints.

Various images include mischievous selfreferences hidden among the crowd – a ‘Vote for Boys’ message on a worker’s sandwich board, or a ‘Boys Removals’ cart parked in the street. In ‘Fleet Street’, the foreground paving stones removed for repair, The Times once more singled out his ability to capture the essence of a living city: ‘In the picture, as in the reality, this part of London as it is seems almost impassable for foot passengers and somewhat dangerous for those in carriages, such wedging, jambing, crowding, jostling and so forth, that it is almost miraculous that each passenger threads his way through the throng, and that so few accidents occur to life and limb.’

It is hard to see, given their almost

universally positive critical reception, how it is that Boys’ name faded so quickly into obscurity in the decades following his lithographic achievements. True, he shared none of the lauded turbulence or transcendence of Turner, nor the majesty of Girtin – Boys’ art was rarely assertive in the same way, and therein may lie the rub.

Cleanliness, reservedness, levity: these are not the sort of virtues typically praised in posterity, but there is undeniable value in them here. Boys’ skies and architectural lines have the crystal clarity of fine glassware – a typically Victorian combination of industry and artisanship. Though it was not written of his work, you could as easily apply Ruskin’s praise for the ‘fidelity of intention and honesty of systems’ in David Roberts’ painting for a description of Boys’ rendition of Guildhall, where ‘the main lines of the real design are always there, and its hollowness and undercuttings given with exquisite feeling; his sense of solidity of form is very peculiar, leading him to dwell with great delight on the roundings of edges and angles; his execution is dexterous and delicate.’ There is great craft in his architectural drawing, though always tempered by the human element. By virtue of composing directly on the street, Boys always preserved the human sense of scale, the alternate openness and claustrophobia of these spaces. His London is one great human tableau.

Whatever critical successes Original Views could claim, however, it failed to secure Boys’ future. Subject to dwindling fame and finances, by the time of his death in 1874 he was practically a pauper. In the last two decades of his life he had been reduced to taking out advertisements as an architectural draughtsman for hire.

One anecdote indicates quite how far was his fall from grace. In 1839, shortly after publication of the Paris series, a young William Callow – Boys’ junior contemporary,

and for a time something of a protégé – was asked by Boys’ cousin and publisher, Thomas Boys, to present a copy to King Louis Phillipe. As a mark of his appreciation, the king sent back an initialled gold ring, studded with a crown of diamonds. To the artist’s great disappointment, this was mistakenly sent to his cousin, who bore the same name. When Original Views was published three years later, Boys was very particular to send a copy himself to the king once more; he received in turn a beautiful watch, and a gushing letter written in the monarch’s own hand.

In the 150 years hence, attention to Boys’ career has been in comparatively short supply. A select few writers – Hugh Stokes in the early 1920s, and in the mid-1970s James Roundell and Alistair Smart – have sought to rectify that omission. Boys, writes Smart, stood as one of the few visionaries of his generation to treat lithography as a truly original medium, and as an artist is owed his place at the vanguard of British pleinairisme: ‘Like Girtin and Constable before him, and like Bonington, he recognized the value of the sky in an openair scene, whether it was a townscape or a landscape; and the luminosity of his usually calm skies sets the key for his compositions, which he bathes in a cool, pervasive light observed (as it can only have been) directly from the motif.’

But as a testament to the endurance of the work, and as a reminder of the kind of renown he earned in his lifetime, it seems fitting to end once more with the congratulatory comments of the Times: ‘There is in the execution of the work scarcely anything to find fault with, and the public, not only of this country, but of the continent, are greatly indebted to Mr T.S. Boys…The work is worth general, we may say, universal patronage: it ought to be in the possession of every native of Great Britain who can afford to purchase it...’

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peter kinley

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Less than a decade separates the death of Matisse and these paintings by Peter Kinley. Kinley was just 12 years old when he was evacuated from his home in Vienna on the eve of World War II, and barely 15 when Matisse, his insides riddled with cancer, underwent two surgeries to cut out the disease.

As this young man embarked on the opening chapters of his life as an artist, an invalid Matisse was coming to terms with the approaching close of his own. Scarcely able to walk, let alone paint, he picked up a pair of scissors and liberated birds, fish, fruit, and stars from sheets of gouached paper in a glorious career coda of life-affirming, constellatory splendour. It was to change his legacy, and the narrative of 20th century art, forever – and to propel a generation of young artists, Kinley included, towards new ways of mediating their surroundings.

Figuration and abstraction; description and essence; these were the contesting tensions central to Kinley’s painting, as they were to those paper experiments of Matisse – and more broadly to a post-war art world and its state of existential malaise. Where the likes of the St Ives school looked to landscape to reconcile content and abstract form, Kinley, like Matisse, worked from the interior out: from flower vases on bureaus and upright figures, stood like statuary, to the four-walled page as the pictorial embodiment of a room.

Reproduced here are two paintings made by Kinley in 1962, held by most as the first peak of his career and by far his most sought-after period.

Sourced directly from his wife, Monica, they possess an air of privacy: his portrait of her in ultramarine, a pigment prized by Renaissance painters as a foil to the pinks and vermilions used in depictions of the Virgin Mary, is of touching intimacy. With a single colour she is transformed into a devotional Madonna, hands clasped as if in prayer, cloaked in a dress of Marian blue.

This was a time, Norbert Lynton writes, of searching for ‘viable means’ to paint the human figure: ‘summary accounts of the nude, in more or less straight lines and broad strokes of colour, almost flat and with enough detail to characterize without identifying . . .’ By the early 1960s, these had become ‘almost geometrical: the figure was now little more than a long rectangle of paint, the easel a forked vertical space . . . As design these works could scarcely have been more minimal; as surfaces they were rich and enticing.’

Kinley owed much of this early style to the patchwork, impasto approach of the Russo-French painter Nicolas de Staël. Like De Staël, he worked prominently with the palette knife. It is a way of applying paint that is almost architectural – like brick laying, or planing sculptor’s clay. As the knife drags over the paper, paint rolls at the crest of the blade and comes to rest in hair-thin ridges: suddenly, otherwise flat surfaces are thrown into sharp relief.

In paintings that visually gave little away, it lent a welcome tangibility: like Matisse’s découpés collages, where the shells and drooping fronds lift from their pins on the wall, in Kinley’s paintings it feels almost as if you could peel back the paint, if only you could get your fingers under it.

Matisse’s genius in the cut-outs was in reducing the union of colour, line, and form to a single act: ‘Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the colour,’ he wrote, ‘I draw directly in colour.’ Painting with the knife served much the same purpose for Kinley. Colour is not brushed in or built up but delivered in paint. It overlaps, smears, striates and suspends. Subject and space are differentiated not by gradation of tone but by physical borders. Shape intimates depth: by the silhouettes of armchairs and table legs, or a mirror ingeniously reflecting an unseen wall. There is a minimalism to Kinley’s description of three dimensions: his paintings are like working drawings; blueprints of paintings.

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In the winter of 1918 – after the announcement of the armistice, but before the quashing of the Novemberrevolution and the rise of the Weimar Republic – a wearied Max Beckmann, still reeling in the dissipating fog of war, wrote his ‘Creative Credo’. Part affirmation, part manifesto, and by his own admission, not easily won – ‘I’m by nature tongue-tied, and only a terrific interest in something can squeeze a few words out of me’ – in it he confirmed his embrace of the city, of the very same people at whose hand such unfeeling inhumanity had been waged for four bloody years: ‘We must be a part of all the misery which is coming.

We have to surrender our heart and our nerves, we must abandon ourselves to the horrible cries of pain of a poor deluded people. Right now we have to get as close to the people as possible. It’s the only course of action which might give some purpose to our superfluous and selfish existence – that we give people a picture of their fate. And we can only do that if we love humanity.’

johann georg Müller Nach Dem Krieg

Born in 1913, months before the outbreak of the First World War, Johann Georg Müller was just five years old when Beckmann wrote his Credo. What for Beckmann became the catalyst of a new artistic vision was, for Müller, little more than a childhood memory. But just as Beckmann’s art would spur him on after his own wartime experience in the late 1940s, his words then foretold the kind of emotional turmoil to which Müller’s art would reach: ‘Actually it’s stupid to love mankind, nothing but a heap of egoism (and we are a part of it too).

But I love it anyway. I love its meanness, its banality, its dullness, its cheap contentment, and its oh-so-very-rare heroism.’

Nach dem Krieg is a small portfolio of woodcuts carved and printed by Müller in 1947. It is a raging sucker punch of a suite: manic and monstrous and murderous images that gnaw at your gut. They are the kind of pictures that only someone who had seen the absolute, visceral horrors of war could faithfully produce.

Like Dix and Ernst and the other hate-filled German artists before him who channeled their wartime experiences into

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powerful revelations of post-war society, Müller witnessed war firsthand as a conscript, serving in the infantry before being stationed as a motorcyclist in occupied Greece. In a military hospital facility in Kiedrich, on the slopes of the Taunus, he made charcoal sketches of patients battered and blasted.

A Communist sympathiser, his nonconformist affiliations frequently got him into trouble in the army: at least one contemporary claims he was at one time or another drafted to one of the German Strafbataillon, a penal company formed from convicts and political dissidents. Ostensibly a provision of military service in lieu of imprisonment or corporal punishment, in reality these were often death squads, frequently expended on the most dangerous or demeaning missions: clearing minefields, constructing military camps or railways, or reclaiming untenable territorial positions.

In Greece, in a bizarre set of circumstances, one of Strafbataillon 999’s main objectives was the repression of local guerilla fighters and insurrectionists, pitting dissident against dissident (and often, when the two sympathetic sides merged,

to disastrous tactical effect). Casualty rates among the troops were high, their conditions often squalid. It does not bear to think what Müller may have seen to have prompted an image like Tote (‘Fatality’): two bodies, their skin burned and withered and worn as if it had been flayed, one of them naked, his arm blown off past the elbow, the bone stuck out dumbly like a splint.

After his military service, Müller moved to the village of Daudenzell, to a house that had been bombed during the war. It was here, living with his second wife, Marta, and their first son, Kaspar, that these woodcuts were likely produced, during a time when he was – quite literally – rebuilding his life after the war. She appears here, pregnant with their unborn son, her swollen belly swirling like galaxy in the void: bringing new light into a dark world.

From Baden, a little less than a hundred miles south of Frankfurt, he travelled that same year to an exhibition of works

by Beckmann at the local Städel Museum, the last major show of the artist’s work before he left for the states. It was to have a profoundly moving effect, one which Müller cited throughout the many later years of his career as definitive. Beckmann was then in the very twilight of his career; Müller’s had scarcely begun.

Müller was one of many young post-war artists in Germany to have been born during the First World War. The timing would prove fateful: growing up between two world wars, and training as a young artist under the Nazi regime, he was utterly constricted in the sort of stylistic and subjective explorations that might normally have been open to him.

Faced with exhibition bans and labels of degeneracy, a lack of teaching staff, and limited resources, students during the prewar years were left to make the most of an ever worsening situation. This had not always been his chosen vocation: his father, an architect, had encouraged him to study civil engineering; at some point, he gained experience as an apprentice carpenter. It was not until 1935, well into established Nazi rule, that he abandoned his course and enrolled, against his father’s wishes, to study art at the

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academies in Munich and Mannheim.

Despite his academic training, much of Müller’s art education was autodidactic. In the two Munich Pinakotheken – one dedicated to the Old Masters, the other to Modern, Romantic and Impressionist art – he studied in front of the many paintings on view, sitting for hour upon hour before the Rembrandts and the Holbeins. His art, however frenetic in

later years, was always surely rooted in the traditions of the European past, and in their accumulation in the present. He was to apply the same retrospection in the aftermath of war – to look back with shame, and rage, and dysphoria on returning to a broken and brittle world. Like Beckmann’s ‘Credo’, Nach dem Krieg is as much a confessional document as a charge against the awfulness of humanity. ‘Ich kann doch

nur malen, was ich sehe’, he would state in later years – ‘I can only paint what I see.’

Restricted during those early, formative years of his university career, in his emancipation from the prudish strictures of the National Socialists – who had singled out Expressionism in particular for its emotional ‘vulgarity’ – Müller’s style became overwhelmingly pluralistic. The end of the war was an event doubly liberating: from the harsh realities of wartime prescription and from Nazi oversight. He was now free to paint and print as he liked, but as for so many faced with the same liberation, the freedom was paralyzing. With the heavy burden of war lifted from their shoulders, these young artists were suddenly weightless, free-floating: For Müller, the conflict had to be confronted, purged from his system, before he could move on to the innovations and explorations of his later career.

That confrontation is felt in full force in these woodcuts.

Stylistically, the suite lands somewhere between the vigorous Expressionist tradition of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter and the New Objectivity artists – the Groszes and the Dixes – who turned against its spiritualism and its romanticism to show the world in all its fetid moral ugliness.

Müller took up woodcutting in his second year at the Mannheim Academy, where he had met a young Rudolf Scharpf. A fellow student, Scharpf would become an important graphic artist in his own right, and it was likely he who first properly introduced his classmates to the medium. Partly selftaught, Scharpf had also spent time at the Académie Julian in Paris. When Müller was served notice of his exhibition ban in 1938, he travelled to France to take drawing lessons at the Académie, almost certainly on Scharpf’s suggestion.

There were, of course, practical considerations for turning to the woodcut in the post-war period. The basic materials and tools were comparatively cheap and available versus oil paints, and through shrewd editioning were more easily marketed to German collectors and dealers under financial strain. But like the Expressionists before him, more importantly for Müller there was catharsis to be found in the carving – in

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the physical act of the cut, in the resistance of the material, the sense of wringing the subject out from the soul as the wood was wrought from its block.

Every part of the process, for the Expressionists and no doubt for Müller too, took on the specialness of ritual: the cutting, sanding and polishing of the blocks, carving the design, inking, burnishing and printing. Drawing upon his carpentry apprenticeship, he would have been well aware of the materiality of the wood. Müller’s designs in Nach dem Krieg are not translated arbitrarily – the images are directed in part by the medium, every cut of the lines made in concert with the dogged grain of the wood. Printmaking was, for Müller, a personal exercise, not a commercial pursuit. For the most part, these early prints were either not intended for sale, or were never editioned in any great numbers. Though a prolific artist, the disparate nature of his prints has meant a satisfying catalogue of works remains incomplete. We suspect that this portfolio, unnumbered and apparently unrecorded in the extant catalogues, may well be unique.

Müller’s suite is not a documentation of the brutalities of war: it is quite specifically, according to its title, a postscript; a comment, like Beckmann’s Gesichter before it, on the demons, external and internalised, that war brings back and lets fester at the heart of its communities, even in times of peace. The twelve images – like a zodiac – present a kind of allegorical summation of the lasting effects on its people: impoverished invalids and amputees; lovers after the war, clutched in an embrace that distils the woodcut to its essential traits of positive and negative in sharp relief – white and black – in crisp, formal articulation. Madness, strife, and death are altogether more complex: two figures emerge from the shadows, grappling over a choking woman, a contorted composition of heavy, wrestling limbs breaking the light around them; or a countryside scene, obliterated by bombshells until it becomes virtually impossible to tell what is what; and that harrowing image of death again, the two bodies laid out on a bed of flowers, alternately dark and light under shadow. In rigor mortis their arms and legs rise up like

budding shoots: the reclamation of the dead by the earth.

Nach dem Krieg was the purgative Müller needed to advance his art: to dig deep into the soul and wash the war from his bones when so many were fleeing into abstraction.

An extraordinary work of unwavering resolve, it is precisely the re-enaction of what Beckmann sought, all those years ago, when he declared ‘There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality. The stronger my determination grows to grasp the unutterable things of this world, the deeper and more powerful the emotion burning inside me about our existence, the tighter I keep my mouth shut and the harder I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life’s vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razorsharp lines and planes.’

This article is indebted to the 2015 dissertation work of Dr Christina Runkel on Müller’s life and art.

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mabel royds ‘Her India is a country in a state of constant activity: labourers, musicians, craftsmen and farmers, builders and tradesmen, all going about their daily business.’

There is in the Goldmark Gallery store rooms a large, cloth-covered, tobacco brown box containing a residue of Mabel Royds’ estate. It is probably among the largest assembly of Royds’ work in the world, public collections included: at least two hundred drawings and dozens of woodcuts, many of them colour variations of the same print.

This portfolio box has enticed one former member of gallery staff already, whose dissertation on Royds’ work – positioned between two competing and connecting worlds of tradition and modernity – provided a sorely needed revaluation of her place in 20th century British art. To his hard work, this piece is indebted.

I have spent some few hours shuffling through the many loose-leaf sketches and prints contained. There is a tantalising variety among the former: figure sketches and life drawings, observations of children especially, animal sketches and landscape studies from travels abroad, and tens upon tens of images – almost all of them made in northern India – of labourers at work. People are everything in these pictures: their postures and poses, miens and manners.

Some are beautifully candid and revealing; others wholly enigmatic. All demonstrate a directness and an empathy that is utterly disarming – like touchstones to another world.

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One of eight daughters born to a church rector in 1874, Royds died in 1941. She was among one of the first generations of young women to have been given – and to have fought tooth and nail for – greater professional and scholastic freedoms. It gave rise to the phrase ‘New Women’: working women, of various backgrounds and upbringings, who had begun to take their professional lives into their own hands.

At 15 Royds was faced with a difficult choice of her own – a scholarship at the Royal Academy, a remarkably precocious achievement at such a young age; or a place at the more radical Slade School. A biographer could not contrive a better image of a young woman caught on the cusp of the Old versus the New: while in the drawing schools of the Academy young men (and very few women) were made to sketch from cadaverous ‘Antique’ statuary, in the rooms of the Slade a more equitable programme of ‘life’ drawing – in the proper sense of the word – was underway, under the formidable leadership of Henry Tonks.

Her choice was all but made for her.

Tonks – the former surgeon whom Paul Nash recalled ‘disliked self-satisfied young men’ and whose clinical eye ‘raked my immature designs’ – was just one draughtsman responsible for the shift in emphasis at the Slade from the traditional life drawing, built up slowly over hours, days and even weeks, to the rapidity of what could be achieved in single hour-long session.

Students were encouraged to begin only with line before adding shade to indicate volume. Line was everything: the indication of shape and space, position and motion, thrust and weight: drawing lived and died upon it; all else was embellishment. ‘All works of art are a series of corrections’, Tonks wrote to a colleague: it was to become Royds’ mantra, in virtually every undertaken image.

At the Slade, she enjoyed not only a comparatively progressive attitude towards the drawn figure, but a school that offered far greater representation. While the Academy languished, despite counting two women among its founders, and declined to admit women to draw from the nude model until as late as 1903, the Slade placed virtually no restrictions on members of either sex. The numbers spoke for themselves: nearly two thirds of Royds’ cohort were women, compared to the less than a fifth at the Academy laughably referred to as ‘the female invasion’ by one pig-headed academician. She was just one of a number of young successful women – among them Gwen John, Winifred Knights, Edna Clarke Hall, and Vanessa Bell – to have been taught under Tonks, all of them recipients of renewed interest in recent years. ‘Here,’ wrote one contemporary female columnist, ‘for the first time in England, indeed in Europe, a public Fine Art School was thrown open to male and female students on precisely the same terms, and giving to both sexes fair and equal opportunities.’

The usual questions, however, remain inescapable. Why, beyond select circles, is her work not known? What pressures must she have felt as a young female artist looking to exhibit – what commercial paths were barred to her? Like many women of her age and training who married, her husband – Ernest Lumsden, an etcher and author of a celebrated etching treatise – was also an artist, albeit similarly little known. Has whatever reputation she might have enjoyed been subsumed by his own?

Certainly there is something to be said in the fact that the great majority of the material pertaining to her life is held in the ‘Lumsden Archive’ in the Edinburgh National Gallery.

Worst of all – and a question that is always asked of forgotten women artists – is the

intimation of mediocrity. Was she simply no good? Did she have nothing to say?

Among the very strongest of her Indian portrait studies is an image of a Ladakhi woman in her traditional ‘perak’ headdress, a young child cradled with exquisite realism in the crook of her elbow. Ladakh, a region in the far north of India, east of Kashmir on the Himalayan border between Tibet, is a naturally inhospitable environment. The climate is bitterly cold and harsh; its people observably different from a westerner’s stereotypical image of India: the faces flatter, cheek bones high and pronounced.

Royds was by no means the first woman to document this place. Fanny Bullock Workman – an industrious mountaineer and writer true to her maiden name – famously recorded her travels throughout the various settlements of the Himalayan range. In one memorable passage she describes a Ladakh mountain village, ‘hung effectively upon barren cliffs . . . Approaching it from Leh [Ladakh’s largest town], you gradually descend from an elevated plateau to the village, lying in a tiny oasis of irrigated fields, under the shadow of a wild sandstone mountain. The old town and gompa [monastery], built of the same stone, cling to the mountain slope in a rough and tumble manner…’ Royds’ portrait says all this and more. The absolutely unwavering fixity of her subject’s gaze is astonishing. The look in her eyes shatters our preconceptions of this place as a cold, remote and inaccessible quarter of the world. She has a wildfire stare, of warmth and intelligence, a young mother caught in a moment of indescribable candor. Any question of Royds’ skill with a pencil, or of her ability to convey meaningful images, dissolves in the face of a portrait like this.

At the time Royds was working in India, there was a prevailing fashion for ‘scenes from the Orient’ – colonial desires for notes

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from the exotic and the undiscovered corners of the world. Unlike many of the artists employed in making such images, she was unusual in having actually travelled to the places she depicted. Briefly employed as a teacher in a college in Toronto, around 1907-8 Royds applied for a post at the Edinburgh College of Art. It was here she met her husband, then a star etcher in the making. Both were employed in the Painting and Drawing department, but Lumsden soon left his post in 1911 to

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concentrate on his commercial work. It was he who first introduced her to India.

Travelling by himself to Benares and Rajputana (modern day Rajasthan) in 1912, after their marriage that year they honeymooned together in India in 1913, Royds quitting her post too. They would return again for a second, longer visit from 1915-17, Lumsden having been declared unfit for military service in the First World War. This time they journeyed north, into the mountain stretches of Ladakh.

Travel offered young female artists of the 20th century the chance to escape the birdcage of their studies, free from the scrutiny of tutors. For Royds, it came with the freedom from her job: relying on personal income alone, she was free to draw and paint what she wanted. The true spirit of travel – to make a human connection, across distance and culture – is the life force of these images of India. Her pencil and chalk sketches are like a photojournalist’s reel – the work of a latterday Don McCullin. If McCullin’s India today is a portrait of a country adapting to a postindustrial world, Royds got there as that imperially directed industrialisation was just starting to take off. Although they worked in vastly different areas of the country, McCullin in eastern Kolkata, they were both chronicling a country in a period of explosive transition. They will have shared the same material concerns: an environment of intense saturation, of colour, humidity, and one’s own perspiration. Lugging equipment around, often in difficult terrain, through passages of a country of such extraordinary diversity and industry that it becomes difficult to know where to look. It must have been, for both parties, a literally draining ordeal.

The India in which Royds was operating was a country of extreme contrasts, pulled in multiple directions: between traditional modes of industry and agriculture, craft and artisanship, and the mechanised methods introduced by colonial investors, all the while struggling with aims of independence under its suzerainty. Her India is a country in a state of constant activity: labourers, musicians, craftsmen and farmers, builders and tradesmen, all going about their daily business. Like Brangwyn, she seems to have zeroed in on the peculiar contortions of men and women at work: the slender, feline legs and arms variously pulling, pushing,

grinding, hammering. But where Brangwyn’s labourers toil under the extraordinary pressure and scale of their work – all muscle and sweat and backs bent to breaking point – Royds’ possess a romantic serenity. There is a great nobility to her portraits – not one of ‘noble savages’, but an appreciation perhaps of their aesthetic differences: a delight in the Indian body, the framed shapes of its working limbs.

It is interesting to see the preparatory drawings that evidently fed into the woodcuts. Like Brangwyn’s work, many of these sketches are composed in such a way that they would almost certainly work as murals: our loss in never seeing what Royds might have done with such a large-scale project is balanced by the care she took in translating them to her wood blocks.

Where Royds learnt to cut, we don’t know – but at Edinburgh she was employed as a teacher on the woodcutting course, then run by the severe college director Frank Morley Fletcher. Whether he taught her or she came with prior experience, she was evidently sufficiently equipped to make the cut. The course was then described in the college prospectus as comprising ‘demonstrations in methods based on the Japanese practice of cutting and printing in colour from wood-blocks.’ The emphasis was on William Morris-esque handicraft: carving, inking by hand with the brush, and burnishing with a Japanese ‘baren’, a round, wooden, handled block lined with braided cord used to burnish the back of the paper in an impression.

Unlike the highly orchestrated division of

labour in traditional Japanese print production, Royds designed, cut, and printed all her own prints. In this practice she was extraordinarily experimental: prints were close-cropped, produced in multiple colour ways, often with extremely varied depths and spreads of tones. Multiple states employed extra blocks carved for particular effects, or areas plugged and recarved as she took impressions and made alterations to the composition. Each new version takes on different emphases: from a figure haloed here, to a hand shadowed there. They are, in a word, the very opposite of the drawings, where the single, immediate line is everything; here Royds was working in tone, layers, and transfer. Something of her methodical, experimental approach makes for a wonderful complement to the

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spontaneity of the drawings. These are to be admired for their immediacy; the woodcuts, for their sense of discovery.

Of the 60 or so woodcuts Royds produced during her lifetime, a third are of Indian subjects. Most of these were made in the 1920s – at least five years after she and her husband had returned from their travels.

The colours are, by necessity, largely improvised, based perhaps on what she saw around her: spices and fruits, dyed cloth, the hot sandstone that you can feel almost beating with irradiant heat. This was partly due to the length of time between making the original uncoloured sketches and the

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coloured woodblocks, but also, as Lumsden – and McCullin – have commented, because of the ferocity of the natural light: ‘It is difficult to realise,’ wrote the former, ‘that many associate the Orient with blatant positive colour. No doubt the colour exists, but as a rule the sunlight kills it more effectually than any soot and fog of our own countries. It kills not only by bleaching the actual colour, but by enveloping each object with so much reflected light that local colour ceases to be an unrelated spot . . . and becomes absorbed by the general unity.’

Royds’ images reflect that effect without dispensing with the undiluted colour: they

are often in harsh contrast, playing dark shade off direct light, the colours frequently leaching beyond their registry.

Charm and delicacy; rarity and delight; grace: these are the terms with which women’s art of the period was disparagingly talked down as either an exception to the rule of inferiority, or written off as ‘decorative’ interior dressing. It cannot have helped those women engaged in printmaking that the woodcut was traditionally the purview of textiles and wallpaper designers. By engaging India as her enduring subject, even years past her last visit, Royds in some ways managed to escape the domestic sphere to which female artists of the time were relegated. In other ways, she remained confined to it. She became a mother late in life, in her early 40s, and the family were often financially strained. Unable to afford the pear wood traditionally used for engraving, she would use twopenny breadboards bought from a local Woolworths in their place.

This is complicated by the fact that often her very best pictures – those in which you sense the absolute essence of her subject – are familial: of mothers with their children, fat-toed toddlers rolling around playrooms, young children at play in the streets. A month ago, my wife gave birth to our third child and second daughter. I had forgotten, in the twenty months since our last, the fragile weight of a newborn; the sweet, buttermilk scent off the back of their heads; the contrapposto shift of weight to your hips as they begin to tire your arm. All this comes flooding back to me as I sift through these drawings. They are images of such closeness and intimacy, mirrors of Royds’ own experience, struggling to balance the agency of a practising artist with the daily burdens of motherhood. But they are all the more affecting, the more sincere, the more real because of it.

The house in which Picasso conceived his most enduring linocut prints – the magnificent Château de Vauvenargues – sits propped on an overgrown hillock at the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire plateau. A great stone box of a castle, he had intended it to serve as a permanent working base, ennerved by constant shuttling between Paris and the Provençal countryside. The house was cold and empty when he bought it in 1958; the old stucco walls peeling like cracked paint. When his lifelong dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, asked whether the whole thing was not too austere, Picasso replied: ‘But you forget I am a Spaniard – I like sadness.’

And too vast? ‘I will fill it.’

Fill it he did. The three years Picasso spent at Vauvenargues, though frequently interrupted, proved one of the most prolific periods of his whole career. Like all the houses he owned, he turned his habitation into an act of private imposition. He planted bronze sculptures in the terraced garden and pissed on them to encourage their patination. Walls were muralled on a whim as they waited to be retiled; beds, dressers, and chairs all painted in loud, declaratory Catalan colours. In his studio, the largest and brightest room in the house, he introduced two heavy lamps in an attempt – so it is said – to replicate the severity of the noonday Spanish sun. It was not long before this new setting began to bear fruit.

Printmaking in these later years had

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pablo picasso linocuts become an almost daily practice for Picasso.

He likened its procedural nature to notetaking, dating individual prints and numbering variations like entries in a diary.

Until then, lithography and etching had been his favoured printmaking methods, but the long stretches of time spent in the country made long distance collaboration with his Parisian ateliers increasingly difficult; he craved a more immediate means of expression.

Linoleum provided the perfect answer.

Before 1951 he had produced just one linocut print, and from then on mostly large, simple one or two-colour posters advertising the corridas and ceramic fairs in Vallauris, the pottery town where he met his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Hidalgo Arnéra, a local printer there, was the first to suggest it as new creative territory: the material was cheap, quick to work, inexpensive to print and ripe for exploitation.

In principle, its methods are no different from the woodcut, though in practice the two mediums are quite different. Composed of an admixture of cork and wood flour, gummed with oil and resin, linoleum has no natural grain. It is easier to work than wood, presenting equal resistance when cut in any direction. Like leather, it improves with

...the greatest inventor of pictorial language in the 20 th century... abuse: fresh lino is at first dull and soft, but with repeated rubbing and rolling as the surface is inked and cleaned, the top layer absorbs oils from the printer’s ink and will eventually stiffen until hard as teak. Only faintly textured, it prints flat and tacky with a firm, smooth edge.

That smoothness, and that speed of production, were precisely what Picasso was after. You can see in the cursive design of his clouds, or the whirligig curves of his bullfighting scenes, that these were only possible thanks to the ease of the material.

Where in other print forms he explored qualities of tone and line, in the linocuts he sought a vehicle for delivering flat colour; only occasionally did he introduce close texture, roughening the lino surface with a stiff comb.

Of the 150 or so linocuts Picasso produced in his lifetime, as many as forty were made during this period at Vauvenargues. His first major linocut, a portrait after Cranach the Elder, quickly proved the limitations of the prevailing method. Requiring a new block for each individual colour – six in total – he found that accurate registry between them was virtually impossible. The solution came with the ‘reduction’ method of cutting – a revolutionary innovation which is thought to have originated with Picasso himself.

Nailing a linoleum sheet to a wooden board, he would print a single, flat block of colour.

The block would then be carved again, inked in a second colour, and the process repeated, all from the same piece of linoleum.

This new way of printing was supremely

economical, requiring just one piece of lino for a three or four-colour print; but it also made the cutting of the block a creative high-wire act: the linoleum, once cut, could not be replaced; a single mistake would compromise the whole block, potentially ruining the print. To help him visualise his images in reverse, Picasso often worked with a mirror to see what he was carving, and to plan the cuts made before the next application of ink.

Though endlessly inventive – and he was, undoubtedly, the greatest inventor of pictorial language in the 20th century – Picasso was rarely evasive in his themes or subjects. The linocuts are no different: the themes – the bacchanalia and the bullfight, the still life and the nude – are quintessential; the motifs – satyrs, matadors, and couchside serenades – all variations on a theme. Jacqueline appears more than once, her aquiline nose, neck, olive black hair and fulsome breasts fixed in his gaze as a symbol of fecund womanhood. Faced, perhaps, with his own impending impotence, he translated his frustrated lustiness to the prints. His bulls, goats and fawns sport pendulous gonads, as sure a sign as any of animal virility. Quixotic picadors tilt at Miura bulls, pike poles gripped like pricks in hand, as banderilleros brandish their feathered darts, every thrusting barb and lance a kind of psychosexual echo of Picasso’s v-gouge goring the lino block.

As he explored this self-made world of macho myth, he evidently took cues from his surroundings at Vauvenargues. So the

black and brown scheme of many of the prints, reminiscent of Ancient Greek pottery, can be found in the terracotta tomettes lining the kitchen floor; the bacchanalian scenes in the rustic fresco daubed absentmindedly onto Jacqueline’s bathroom wall; and the setting for those festivities in the green ridge of the Montagne – a favourite landscape of Cézanne’s – visible from the castle windows.

Published by the Galerie Louise Leiris, the linocuts were an instant success. At Kahnweiler’s instigation, and in response to extraordinary popular demand, a deal was brokered with the gallery to reissue an expanded edition of the prints in large portfolios, produced by the same reduction method but at a little under half their original size. The larger linocuts from which they were made now regularly fetch many tens of thousands of pounds at auction; those illustrated here, by comparison, remain his most affordable prints.

The characters of Picasso’s linocuts join a recurring cast that defined his late paintings, as outlined by the critic Robert Hughes: ‘Nudes from the imaginary seraglios of Delacroix and the real brothels of Degas, comic in their pillowy availability; inhabitants of Picasso’s Hesiodic arcadia, little whopstraw gods, satyrs, nymphs; musketeers and majas, dwarfs and Velazquez aristocrats…’ It was, Hughes writes, a reversion to the theme of the Primitive Man: ‘I must absolutely find the mask,’ claimed Picasso; what he produced in that search includes his most ubiquitous printed images.

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phil rogers

My wood-fired kiln

I started to put thoughts and then plans together for my two-chamber wood kiln shortly after returning from a three month period living and working in Korea in 1997. I had seen a number of traditional Korean multi chamber kilns during my stay and, together with my travels in the USA and the kilns I saw there, I formulated a design that was an amalgam of the various features that I had seen, drawn or photographed. I decided very early in my career that, once I had the necessary space, I wanted to try everything in terms of stoneware firing. Almost as soon as I moved to my present location just outside Rhayader in 1984, I built a large oil-fired reduction kiln. Soon after came the first of my salt kilns, to be followed by a bigger version in 1996: I knew that one day I would have a wood kiln.

The building of the kiln was a protracted affair. Block base, firebrick floors and fireboxes were laid before things stalled.

There were – as there always are – pots to be made, commitments to be met; a couple of years went by before much further progress. Thanks to the help of my good friend Ken, a professional refractory brick layer and refractories manager at what was then British Steel, the rest was assembled in quicker fashion and by 2002 I had a functional kiln. Ken knew every trick of the trade, making the complicated seem straightforward. Since then he has helped me with every firing I have had. I have a great deal to be grateful to him for his loyal support and friendship.

My intention, initially, was that the second chamber might function as a salt glaze kiln.

Indeed, it was fired to that end for its first six firings, but I was never satisfied with the results: even when the pots were good, they were really no different, nor any better, than those produced by my dedicated oil-fired salt kiln. I decided the extra work involved wasn’t justified and retained the second chamber as a wood fire chamber. Both chambers produce essentially the same work.

Let me state from the outset that if almost 20 years of wood firing has proved anything, it is that I am not a natural born wood firer.

Wood firing, for me, is a means to an end.

I love the effects we get from the kiln, the colours and textures that are the result of flame and vapour on unglazed clay, but I can’t say I enjoy the process. My firings last between 36 and 40 hours which, by many

price guide inside back cover

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wood firing potters’ standards, is not long.

I’m afraid I simply haven’t the patience for anything longer: having worked with oil and gas for so many years, I can’t help but want the firing to progress, for the temperature to keep climbing. I don’t need large accumulations of ash. The flashed colour of passing flame interacting with the semiglassy clay surface at 1300˚C – white heat – provides more than enough surface entertainment for me.

When my kiln was first ready to fire, I sat back and thought about what I wanted it to do, what direction it might take me. There were wood fire effects I knew I didn’t want.

I had deliberately not built an Anagama: I didn’t want pots that were over-ashed, smothered in grit and those ubiquitous rivulets of glaze, running round a pot like fingers round a cup, meeting at an equally predictable shell imprint. I decided I wanted something a whole lot more subtle. I wanted, I thought, blushes of colour, subtle shades that echoed the flame as it passed by the pots in the kiln. I have seen a great many wood-fired pots particularly, but not exclusively, in the US where form has given way to surface. Pots without skeletons, flabby in a misconstrued Japanese style, that relied upon a flashy wood-fired skin to rescue an otherwise less than impressive silhouette. I knew if I were to pursue my path of no glaze, relying on flame and vapour alone, that form and orchestration would be paramount to the work.

I have always admired the pots from Shigaraki in Japan. I have Louise Cort’s seminal book on Shigaraki, from which I extracted several analyses of Shigaraki clays.

The unglazed pots from the area are often a beautiful red to orange colour, a happy accident thanks to a higher than average alumina content in the clay. Consolidating

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these analyses into a single, chemical average, I then set about with the help of Seger – 19th century inventor of the pyrometric cone and a revolutionary glaze chemist – to recreate an equivalent using British materials.

It was one of those rare moments, at least for me, when something worked first time.

I had a clay based on an English ball clay that had wonderful working properties and fired to those wonderful warm red and orange colours I wanted. As always when a potter embarks upon a new creative thread, advice is sought from wiser, more experienced heads. There are many very fine wood-fire potters from whom I have learnt by looking and absorbing, and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. I remember well talking with, amongst others, John Leach, Nic Collins, Ken Matsuzaki, Joe Finch and, in the USA, Bill Van Gilder, Jack Troy, Mark Shapiro and Cary Hulin. The pottery fraternity is a sharing and giving one: long may that continue.

When one builds a kiln there are innumerable decisions to be made about size and configuration: chimney height, exit flues and fire boxes – so many things to consider. There are published formulae that one can adhere to, but these are really just guides. Having looked at and digested as many kiln designs as possible, I wanted to find a solution that was in some way my own: I wanted my kiln to be, at the very least, a little different. So – the mistakes I made? The second chamber is too narrow; the firebox is not big enough. I have had excellent results from it and then, as if purely out of spite, and for no other apparent reason, the next firing will be awful. The first and larger chamber has always been, by comparison, fairly straightforward. A cooler pocket in one of the back corners provoked

a certain amount of consternation before I found some lower temperature glazes that could be reliably placed there; the chimney is probably too wide. All of these things are extremely difficult to rectify once the kiln is built and one inevitably ends up working around them. Firing – like all potters’ work – is a perpetual process of adjustment.

Wood firing is immensely hard work. The wood fuel I use arrives in 20+ tonne loads from a local saw mill. The waste slab wood must be cut with a chainsaw, moved and stacked near to the kiln. The natural born wood firer might find this a strangely Zen, self-centring, meditative therapy: I find it hard, back-breaking drudgery. All this of course is additional to the actual making of the pots. Glazing and stacking the wares in the kiln is one week’s work in itself. I have never been afraid of hard labour – making pots for a living is laborious, in the truest sense of the word – but as I slide with ever

increasing speed toward my 70s, I tend to think my wood firing days may be coming to an end. I remain undecided: it would be a huge loss to my creative life not to be able to see those wonderful oranges and reds, the soft, sometimes metallic shino, the sublime green of a wood-fired ash glaze contrasted against the warmth of a toasted red clay, the decorative serendipity of the flame.

Firing with wood is like no other way to fire pots. The calm silence of the fire is so removed from the unceasing drone of the compressor that drives my oil kiln. The faint cracking and spitting of the wood as it burns at 3am, while the rain is horizontal or the snow begins to drift around the wood stack; the hot drinks at 4am, and the traditional bacon rolls and coffee for breakfast. It would be hard to give it up: we shall see what happens when the current wood pile is gone. Oh, to get another lorry load or not!?

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alan sorrell john francis murals When Alan Sorrell enrolled as a scholar at the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s, art was then taught as an applicable trade: you painted not for yourself, but for public service, and your work was engaged with (and employed by) a world beyond the classroom. To that end, under the premiership of Sir William Rothenstein mural painting was placed front and centre of the course: all members of the painting school were expected to spend time in the Department of Mural and Decorative Painting, and Sorrell – a student of exacting skill and expansive imagination – was a natural born muralist.

Of the more than 20 mural schemes Sorrell painted in his lifetime, only half have survived. Illustrated here is one of those few commissions still intact: two of the four enormous panels, 6ft by 9ft across, made for the canteen of one John D. Francis Ltd, a clockmakers factory in the Fazakerley district of Liverpool. The firm was set up, post-war, at the instigation of the Board of Trade as part of a broader programme to

‘...a distinctive flavour – pastoral, melancholic, and dreamlike in its highly finished realism...’ nurture specialised manufacturing across the country. Fazakerley had been the site of a Royal Ordnance Factory, churning out rifles and submachine guns at the height of World War II: here, in the heart of the Merseyside industrial complex, must have seemed as good a place as any to capitalise on that enduring wartime spirit of plucky British enterprise.

With the blessing of the Ministry of Supply, the venture went ahead in 1947. Sorrell’s panels were completed two years later, along with a set of intended colour schemes for the factory interior, which by then employed over 300 workers. When the company closed shop some years later, a member of staff rescued them from the refectory walls. They have never been exhibited since, and this is the first time any have been reproduced in print.

Sorrell’s designs fulfil their brief with enviable enthusiasm: four landscapes – vast, boyish, Neoromantic Neverlands – cleverly framed so as to throw open a room and transform wall or niche into whopping great

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fairytale vistas. The combination of stone window and theatrical hanging is wonderfully transportive: standing in front of them, you can all but taste the gunpowder off some nearby picaroon’s pistol, or the salt on a spring sea breeze.

Richard Sorrell, the artist’s son and a painter himself, has suggested Pinturicchio’s fresco of Penelope and her Suitors, removed from the Petrucci Palace in Siena to the National Gallery, as a source for these paintings; certainly the majestic warships, the Odyssean island shores of Sorrell’s murals have their counterpart in the Italian’s original. But the life of the Perugian ‘little painter’, as his nickname translates, makes for a fascinating parallel with Sorrell’s own.

Both artists had to contend with better known contemporaries in public employ: Bawden, Ravilious, Enid Marx and co. for Sorrell, and for Pinturicchio the beloved Raphael. Both forged reputations in Rome, too: assistant to the great Perugino, Pinturicchio cut his teeth working on the Sistine Chapel before taking charge of the frescoes in the Basilica of St Mary, while Sorrell mirrored his early success in winning the Prix de Rome for mural painting in 1928.

His three-year residency in the capital and the surrounding campagna proved formative: ‘You are now in the saddle,’ wrote a delighted Rothenstein, offering his congratulations: ‘I wish you, from the heart, a fruitful career.’

Most important of all, though – and critical to their success as ‘decorative’ painters – was their shared delight in incidental detail: parades and patterns, fabrics, costumes, the frills and frippery of the domestic scene.

The referential apparatus that is so typical of Renaissance painting is everywhere to be found in the windowsill proscenia of Sorrell’s paintings: from the lit cigarette, fumbling its embers into a clam shell ash tray, to the tin figurine soldiers poised to fire on the galley in the distance, the rolls of thumbed

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letters and newspapers, calendars and candelabras, open books and bird cages, roundel portraits, perched busts, bottles and champagne coupes, and the cat, Mephistophelian black, who curls at the window’s edge.

In the hands of a lesser painter, this festoonery might well overwhelm, but Sorrell specialised in transforming the piecemeal into coherent pictures. As an archaeological illustrator – the work for which he is still best known – he became the man who brought Roman Britain to life, reimagining ancient settlements from evidence unearthed by academic colleagues. It was a job that hinged upon creative leaps of faith: combining fact with informed fantasy to tell a story. As a discipline, it could not seem further from the scale and scope of mural painting, with its indulgent flourishes and its inherent whimsies – but here, just as in his reproductions, the minutiae were to serve a greater purpose. ‘Microscopic observation must be subservient to “vision”,’ he wrote of his work: and so the trinkets and the trimmings and the swagging red curtain never obscure the impossible views beyond.

The panorama – misty, seductively distant and indistinct – always wins out over the window dressing.

‘The work of Rome Scholars,’ writes Alan Powers of Sorrell’s paintings, ‘has a distinctive flavour – pastoral, melancholic, and dreamlike in its highly finished realism’ – qualities all elevated in this magnificent quartet. He detects in the Francis murals the rakish ‘touch’ of Rex Whistler: and what they might lack in Whistler’s sweeping luxuriance, his debonair charm, they make up for with a swashbuckling sense of childhood reclaimed. The escapism of these paintings served their intended purpose; it has become their great triumph. Before these scenes of J.M. Barrie make-believe, we feel like giddy children again.

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ralph steadman oddbins mural 58 |

Back in the 1990s, Ralph Steadman was travelling the vineyards of the world for Oddbins, the wine merchants, in order to create artwork for their quarterly catalogues. One of their more unusual requests for Ralph was to create a 44ft mural that they could display in their flagship shop in London. So, one summer Ralph gamely stood eleven sheets of 8Ă—4 MDF around his garage and set sail

on this creative adventure. He began by sticking huge, random shapes of old canvas sheeting he had found across the expanse and, once dry, drew out the outlines of the forms in black paint.

What would emerge, two weeks later, was an astonishing piece featuring abstractions reminiscent of wine press, glass, grapes, and two giant feet of which the BFG would be proud.

We have just acquired this extraordinary mural - Needs a big wall. | 59

goldmark books

AGAINST THE GRAIN The Life and Art of Rigby Graham

Written by Malcolm Yorke 336 pages, 140 illustrations, published 2015

Not only is he impelled to produce work, he has to find a hard way to do so – in a cramped bedroom, with makeshift equipment, by a painfully laborious method, using a woody medium which resists him all the way, or painting in the damp field where we first encountered him at the beginning of this book. It can truly be said of Rigby Graham, both the man and the artist, that he has always gone against the grain.

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DELUXE HARDBACK Edition of 425, cloth covered with dust jacket £35 + p&p COLLECTOR’S HARDBACK Edition of 75, (of which 70 are for sale) Cloth covered, numbered, housed in a slipcase with four signed and numbered original lithographs and two dvds.

Last few copies £475

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The Prints of John Piper: Quality and Experiment A Catalogue Raisonné 1923-91 Revised and Expanded Edition This is an expanded and revised edition of Orde Levinson’s definitive catalogue raisonné of the prints of John Piper: an essential reference book for collectors, curators, prints specialists and art historians, and an invaluable visual resource for all those with an interest in Piper’s prolific and varied printmaking output.

SPECIAL EDITION Compiled by Orde Levinson, published 2010 192 pages, Cloth bound hard back in slipcase Includes 3 John Piper stamped photographs & 2 signed photo etchings by Orde Levinson Last few copies £475 | 61

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DAVID SUFF ≈ river Facsimile Sketchbook

River is a facsimile sketchbook in the form of a 72page, double-sided leporello, housed in a handmade clamshell box. Each box includes a hand-coloured etching, signed and numbered by David Suff; a film version of River with original music by Kathryn Tickell (Northumbrian pipes) accompanied by Martin Simpson (guitar); and a filmed interview with the artist.

The whole has been printed and hand-assembled in the UK in a limited edition of 120 copies, 100 of which are for sale.

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72 page double-sided facsimile leporello sketchbook including hand-coloured etching and film dvd Published 2019 rrp £375 Special launch price £250 + p&p

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Robert Dawson A Most Uncommon Man Old dwellings huddled together within the folds of Welsh and Staffordshire landscapes constitute a recurring motif in the work of Robert Dawson. With the exception of some passing cattle, Dawson appears to depict deserted villages, devoid of life. But don’t be fooled, for this is work that crackles with energy.

It is there in the vigorously painted surfaces that possess their own physical intensity. And it is there in the vision of an artist, who through tone and colour, transforms these seemingly lifeless environments into places full of character, often sinister and mysterious.

Written by David Whiting, published 2019 160 pages, 110 colour illustrations SPECIAL EDITION - £450 Cloth covered hardback and folder in slipcase including an original drawing, 2 etchings, a cd and dvd Introductory offer price - £350 + p&p STANDARD SOFT COVER - £35 Introductory offer price - £25 + p&p | 63

goldmark books new

Michael Rothenstein

Artist Printmaker Exploding the Boundaries Whether working with woodblock or zinc etching plate, silkscreen or linoleum scrap Michael Rothenstein [1908-93] was perhaps the most experimental British graphic artist of the 20th century. For over 4 decades he dedicated the greater part of his career to printmaking, advocating it as an expressive means of revelation, not merely a technique for reproduction.

Rothenstein exploded the boundaries of traditional printmaking and this insightful book captures the same excitement and daring that galvanised his work, featuring a series of essays by acclaimed writer – and longtime Rothenstein champion – Mel Gooding.

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Written by Mel Gooding Paperback 160 pages with over 100 colour illustrations Published 2019 Price £10 + p&p

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cover image: detail, Alexander Calder, Untitled, lithograph, 1971

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