ALAN SORRELL- AN ENGLISH NEO-ROMANTIC ARTIST

A last there is a modern book on the English Neo-Romantic artist Alan Sorrell. It was published to coincide with the exhibition of Sorrell's work at the Soane Museum. Another  book Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-created,which I have discussed elsewhere was  an excellent production and that is where I discuss his archaeological work.This one  is in a larger format with several contributors from  various disciplines.There is a useful chronology. So when I refer to "the writer" I am speaking about the author of a particular section of the work.

 They don't make artists like this any more. If you wanted to find someone to do  similar tasks in archaeological reconstruction nowadays you might be looking at an animation studio. Perspectives and fly throughs in a trice! But Sorrell could do perspective and lettering, anything you wanted really. He is a designer/ illustrator most definitely.And a complete professional in his field.

His  Rome scholarship did not really lead too far artistically but meeting archaeologists at the school certainly did. Some simplification of the figure-coming from an enthusiasm for Piero was long lasting. His early subject paintings  do not merit much enthusiasm to my mind. But they are a young man's work. The monochrome illustration of the Annunciation looks heavy and despondent. There is no joy in it. The painting  Summer Scene Triptych with it's disturbing reds and greens is rather repellent. But then recent English artists have struggled with colour and I find no evidence in this book of  an admiration for French work.

The book cover shows his watercolour The Artist in the Campagna. It is a curious item. It certainly doesn't  resemble the work of those artists who a 100 years earlier flocked to portray the transcendental emptiness of this region strewn with ruins. My first thought was that the artist was portraying an English scene; not Italy.The Appian Way of 1932 is more striking and here we have Italy through a full blown, slightly incoherent, theatrical and very English Neo-Romanticism. Ruins and statues abound, a courting couple strolls into the painting.

I do think that Sorrell will be remembered most for his archaeological reconstruction work and for his book and guide book illustrations.As an archaeological illustrator his work is bold,dramatic, rich and generous. The writer does not state this  and I think she should have done so.The aerial views which are such a consistent feature of his archaeological reconstructions seem to have developed from his war work with the RAF. The section on his war service has has some excellent work-again very dark-of camp life, parades etc.

Harrow's Scar Milecastle:Hadrian's Wall

His "sombre colour" was evident early on and noted by the Director of the British School.
Nevertheless his project Working Boats from Around the British Coast for the Festival of Britain certainly succeeds in a slightly jaunty and elaborate manner.It was the background to the bar on the ship which brought the Festival to  ports in the UK.

Take for example The Seasons a school mural for Warwick. No one could do anything of such competence nowadays but the colour is very low key. The writer is surely correct in seeing some inspiration from Brueghel here but everything is really rather grey. This gives coherence, unity, and a kind of impact. But to eschew the riotous colours of an English Spring, the richness of Autumn and so on...... Well, unity and impact were obviously important.

Sorrell made a visit  to Iceland in the thirties. The chronology in the book says it was in 1934, with his exhibition of resulting work occurring in 1935. The text says that the visit was in 1935 but an apparently signed drawing, illustration 118 is said to bear the date 1934. (He also met the writer Haldor Laxness). The works were on show in October of 1935*  and so just might  have  influenced   the  Auden/Isherwood visit of 1936-though Sorrell was not the only artist showing Icelandic subjects in London at this time. Was there some interest in the Sagas on Sorrell's part?  William Morris had also visited and Auden and perhaps Sorrell would have known about that trip. Or was it something specific to the Thirties? The products of this trip were-strong and bold designs with something of the clarity and hardness of contemporary wood engravings .

Sorrell's own autobiographical writings sound interesting.They are apparently pseudonomous. To me this suggests reticence rather than vanity. In this  present  book we don't get much sense of his personal character. That he was extremely hardworking and professional comes across clearly.His refusal to work on projects which might lead to the bombing of artistic centres is highly commendable.

But he had written of one of his early works ,"I always find it necessary to have information about every detail and incident in a work, and it is not by any means a source of pride but often of keen regret that I cannot improvise. Thus every individual leaf and all the curious bends of the tree trunks required as much study as the figures themselves." In his archaeological work this was something of an advantage and curiously enough he could let himself go once the structure was established and produce reconstruction work which has not been equalled.


*Oct 1935 per Times Digital Archive.

Alan Sorrell:The Life and Works of an English Neo-Romantic Artist, Edited by Sacha Llewellyn and Richard Sorell, Sansom & Co,2013

A WATERCOLOUR DEVELOPS

If you have looked at other posts on my blog you will know that I am interested in watercolour painting and in the problems painters have in depicting clouds.There follows a discussion of a tiny watercolour sketch-on rough watercolour paper. How did it get from the first  image to the final one?

start

finish

Firstly let me say what I was trying to create. It was my intention to show something of a chain of clouds as they appear in perspective ranging backwards from almost overhead towards a hill on the horizon. I am not sure that I have succeeded, but, at any rate, if you look at the following you will get some idea of how I manipulate watercolour.

POINT 1
I have said it before, but when thinking about cloud contours you might want to define them by painting in the negative-that is the blue of the sky-when beginning to establish which areas are to represent clouds.

POINT 2
The way I do clouds means that I find the shapes as I work. It also means that I remove paint or use tools to blur or soften contours. That is certainly not an C18 watercolour technique. I use various things to remove paint.A moist hog or watercolour  brush can stroke away a hard edge and a rag or kitchen towel can blot up the paint. The forms of clouds vary considerably and sometimes there is a relatively hard edge whilst on another side the values of cloud and sky are very close and the transition should be delicate. You can achieve this with the technique I'm discussing.

POINT 3
These techniques will not work on poor quality paper, nor in many commercial sketchbooks. Good paper is important and expensive. There is no avoiding this but with quality paper you can make corrections and if need be work on the other side of the sheet. Rough textured paper is important for helping with textures.

Now that I look back on the exercise I think that some of the earlier stages have  more interesting qualities than the finished version. That's life!

GIACOMETTI AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

In 1964 Giacometti came to London in preparation for the great Arts Council show of his work which was held in the following year. He was shown the sights by Robin Campbell who later wrote a charming  text  published in Giacometti's Paris, a booklet to accompany the exhibition of his lithographs Paris sans fin.

We spent several hours in the British Museum where we looked at early Egyptian paintings; he found them  extraordinarily 'real and lifelike'. Giacometti brooded silently over a tall T'ang figure of a woman. After walking up to the figure and back again repeatedly he finally reflected that more and more he preferred to anything else the impersonal, objective quality of early art. "Modern artists.' he said 'are frantic egomaniacs-myself included, of course.' Afterwards at lunch he persuaded me, since he spoke no English himself, to tell the girl who brought our order how pretty he thought her. "One living girl like her  is worth more than anything in a museum."

Tomb figure,Tang dynasty, BM, height, 44.5"

This striking figure was on display in the Chinese galleries of the BM in the mid 1960s and I suggest that it is the one referred to by Campbell. Giacometti's interest in early art is well attested by his drawings (recall his sketchbook of interpretive drawings) and by remarks noted by many others. Arikha has him frequently remarking that, "The arm which most resembles an arm is the Egyptian arm."Also his abhorrence of High renaissance art.(Arikha,pp 214/15)

Giacometti's Paris, by Robin Campbell, ACGB,undated, 1978 or later.

On Depiction: selected writings on art" by Avigdor Arikha,London,1995.

ARTHUR MELVILLE-A BRILLIANT WATERCOLOURIST

If you should ask me for the name of the cleverest, most cunning watercolourist of all I would unhesitatingly propose the name of Arthur Melville. This Scotsman who lived only for 46 years and died in 1904, evolved a complex and extraordinarily rich method of working. This can be described but it is difficult to comprehend without examination of the work itself.

Melville is at the  extreme of the nineteenth century  trend to elaborate and more complex effects which earlier masters such as J R Cozens would scarcely have recognised. It isn't difficult to describe the mehanics of Melville's technique. The more important aspects of how he visualised and developed his work is another matter. The certainties and ambiguities which he allows are what matters here. Not everything is painted with overall Pre-Raphaelite evenness-far from it. Blots and pools of watercolour are all part of the process.And so is the lifting or wiping out of colour. Melville is  master of the lost and found contour.

His  watercolour subjects are typically either Scottish landscapes, scenes from southern English  landscape or  Spanish andOrientalist subjects. His brilliant technique is particularly suitable for the painting of intense contrasts of light and shade.

HIS TECHNIQUE

Take a sheet of watercolour paper and flood it with an even coating of white. Let  this dry and repeat the process if you wish.

If you have already painted in watercolour you may be thinking, "What, do you really mean that I should paint on such a surface? Won't the wash become immediately corrupted by the underlying white?" My answer is that will surely happen if you are indecisive and push the paint about too much. But if you are certain and unhesitating in placing your colour, you should not have a problem.This should give you some idea of the deliberateness of Melville's method. Some considerable previsualisation  must be happening here. And  you would be right.You can hardly establish an architectural setting without considerable forethought. The painting of figures and groups of figures and animals is another matter.

A Moorish Procession-National Gallery of Scotland

The human element, often a crowd or group of figures is  treated as a group and not as an assembly of individuals. Once you start to look for individuals you will see the economy with which Melville works. Some parts are vague and appear almost as ghost images do on a photographic negative.In the original of the work shown above the  animal at left appears as a wraith like figure. So too the persons next to it.

The Little Bullfight "Bravo Toro!" Victoria & Albert Museum

This technique  allows the artist to remove or sponge out paint so that a figure may appear as partly solid ad partly wraith like through the trace left behind. Melville exploits this in Bravo Toro where the dust and smoke of a bullring are evoked. He does not paint a dust cloud over figures but rather sponges out something which is already there.Sponging out is a venerable watercolour technique but here Melville is wiping into the original white ground beneath-hence the peculiar subtlety of the blurring effect. Certainty and ambiguity once more.

When the white ground is dry you may work on it.Very liquid washes may be appropriate, so too puddles of very wet paint, also blots and abstract dabs which may meld together in the eye to produce an image.If you want to make a correction you may use a sponge or rag and remove the paint with it. You will be left with a white ground as a blurred, unfocused patch.The white ground gives added luminosity to the
work-all the more essential for these orientalist paintings.

There are accounts of him placing a sheet of glass over a painting so that he could try out the effects  he was working with. I am a little sceptical about that idea because  glass is not receptive to watercolour. But even if untrue it does say something about the artist's attitude to his craft.

There is little literature on Melville and most is rare and extremely expensive to purchase.The clearest short account is in  volume three of Martin Hardie's history of British Watercolour Painters.

Excellent news: The National Gallery of Scotland is planning an exhibition on Arthur Melville from Oct 10 2015 to 17 Jan 2016.This will be the first substantial grouping of his work in a generation and will hopefully result in a good catalogue with excellent illustrations.

Water-Colour Painting in Britain, Vol 3, The Victorian Period,by  Martin Hardie, London 1968.