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| Black Polka (2020) oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cms |
The Cornwall-based artist Jeremy Annear has a new exhibition at David Messum's new gallery in Bury Street, St James's Mayfair, London, opening this week, June 2020. This is the essay I wrote to accompany the catalogue.
It might at first seem odd to call Jeremy Annear a Surrealist, but it’s not a bad place to start. With titles like ‘Dream I,’ ‘Nocturnal Muse’ and ‘Harbour Moon III’, and with their mysterious evocation of place and mood, there’s a subtlety to these enigmatic, inviting paintings that speaks of a more distant and different world – like one glimpsed, half-darkly, in a mirror.
It is exactly a century since the French poet André Breton began his experiments in ‘automatic writing’ that led him to the invention of what he called ‘Surrealism’. It would go on to become one of the most important literary and artistic movements of the twentieth century, embracing artists as diverse as Salvador Dali, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Paul Nash. And it’s fifty-three years since Annear – then a young student at Exeter College of Art – met Roland Penrose, one of Britain’s leading Surrealist artists, advocates and collectors. Breton had died the previous year, and Penrose was in Exeter helping to curate ‘The Enchanted Domain’, a city-wide celebration of Surrealism. Participants included a number of other key figures in the British Surrealist movement – among them E.L.T. Mesens, Conroy Maddox and George Melly. Annear’s job was to help Penrose in hanging an exhibition of Surreal art.
Even now, over half a century later, Annear’s recalls that experience with pleasure. But did its influence rub off on his art? He admits that he does see something of Surrealism in his early work, whilst collage – a significant Surrealist technique – has been something that has interested him greatly over the course of his career.
But at first glance Annear’s powerful current work must clearly be placed in the great tradition of twentieth-century British abstraction. That movement had as its leading figure in this country the painter Ben Nicholson. He was no Surrealist – indeed, in the mid 1930s, when Nicholson was at the height of his powers, Abstraction and Surrealism appeared entirely antithetical. Yet one of the key influences on young Nicholson had been the Cornish naïve artist, Alfred Wallis. Famously, Nicholson had run into the retired mariner outside his little terraced house in the back streets of St Ives in 1928. Wallis was just the sort of untrained, visionary ‘outsider’ artist the Surrealists liked to fête – in the way the Parisian Surrealists admired the self-taught tax collector, Henri Rousseau.
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| Cabaret-sur-Mer (2020) oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cms |
It was family holidays in St Ives in the early 1960s that first led Annear to Modern European Art: it was exactly there as a teenager that he first knew he wanted to become a painter. Though Paul Nash had extolled the powerful potential of the ‘Seaside Surrealism’ he had discovered in the Dorset town of Swanage in the 1930s, St Ives offered a different mode of Modernity. This was definitely and definitively a town of Abstraction – witnessed in the presence of leading abstract artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The influence of the art being made by artists such as these was enough to draw Mark Rothko, the doyen of American Abstract Expressionism, to St Ives in the summer of 1959.
As Rebecca Wright wrote in Studio Internationalon the occasion of a Rothko exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in October 2011,
Although the St Ives School has, at times, been presented as derivative of Abstract Expressionism, by exploring how American artists made the pilgrimage to St Ives to make contact with British artists this exhibition confounds any accusation of imitation. Instead, it reveals a collaborative dialogue in which artists from either side of the Atlantic are growing and learning together. It somewhat levels the geographic playing field, no longer pitting Abstract Expressionism as the dominant player, but presenting both groups as preoccupied with a similar endeavour.
What Wright does not note, however, is that one of the influential spurs towards Abstract Expressionism had been Surrealism. The great American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was, first off, a Surrealist. And it was Motherwell who during World War Two encouraged a young Jackson Pollock to take lessons at the exiled Atelier 17, the famous Parisian printing school run by the English Surrealist, Stanley William Hayter (whose work Annear greatly admired, and who was a considerable influence upon him).
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| Three Beats in a Bar X (2020) pencil and ink on paper, 21 x 30 cm |
The link between Abstraction and Surrealism was thus quite close (both historically and for Annear himself). Indeed, in 1940 Ben Nicholson used the phrase ‘abstract Surrealism’ to describe the work of his friend, Henry Moore, who was still exhibiting sculpture and drawings with the British Surrealists. But then, as Moore observed, ‘All good art, has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part …’ Thus in Annear’s work – as in Moore’s – we have a fruitful meeting of these two key Modernist movements. And one must always remember that the artist Annear most admires is Braque, the French artist he calls ‘my painting father – the highest influence’.
So if Annear is an Abstract artist with a small debt to Surrealism, what are we to make of his relationship to landscape? Born in Exeter in 1949, and having moved from Devon to Cornwall in 1987, he is deeply rooted to the landscape of the West Country. But although he loves exploring the outdoor world, interestingly he does not really consider himself a landscape painter – or even a Romantic. He doesn’t feel like he analyses landscape, though place is still important to him: as he states, his paintings do make ‘odd connections between places and ideas.’
This comes out most clearly in works that – in their titles at least – clearly relate to very particular locations. Cameret-sur-Mer and Roscoff in the Finistére commune of Brittany, for example, are two places that inspired a number of works in the current exhibition. Across the course of five visits to north-west France in 2019 he was deeply struck by the impression the Atlantic Ocean makes upon the coastline there. He explains that these works all ‘relate to harbours, to harbour structures and the large wrecked trawlers along the coastline, with their extraordinary colours and shapes often against a winter sky. I’m very fond of Roscoff.’ Likewise, the ‘Siesta Song’ trilogy, with their rich, rust-coloured browns, were inspired by a period spent painting in Spain, and suggest what he describes as ‘the reverie of after lunch wine and music.’
When present in a landscape, Annear explains that he sees shapes, colours and forms through the periphery of his vision, and that these might give him inspiration and ideas. But his work is neither narrative nor topographical, and despite the occasional references to particular locations, these are decidedly not paintings of places. All are painted at home in his studio in Cornwall, away from places of inspiration, where he searches for what he calls his ‘given language’ and learns to speak it ‘as fluently as I can.’ He works in silence, but likes to play music between periods of painting. Jazz and chamber music are great passions – something that, again, titles such as ‘Black Polka’, ‘Blue Meolody’ or ‘Contra Tone’ reflect. But as he explains, he never has a particular title in mind whilst he’s working; these always come afterwards, with each finished work evoking a mood when he looks at it, and inspiring the name he chooses to give to it.
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| Eclipse VI (2020 oil on canvas, 30 x 25 cms |
On his process of painting, Annear states that he always paints in oil, always onto an earth or ochre ground, working wet into wet, building up, scraping off, giving the works their extraordinary patina. With decades of experience behind him, he hardly uses a brush anymore – fingers, rag, palette knife are his primary tools. From a distance the paintings look smooth and pure of surface, but when you look closely you see the marks, the under-drawing, the smudges and fuzzy edges – the edges are very important to him. He ‘just lets it all happen,’ he explains – and here we may look back to Surrealism, and the realm of chance and ‘happy accidents’.
As those years of experience emphasize, there is always something pure underlying what Annear does. Born into that fundamental denomination of the Plymouth Bretheren, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church some years ago. Religion thus also plays a significant part in his contemplative approach to his art, what he sees as the psychological relationship of shapes and ‘a preoccupation with a kind of mystical geometry’. (Among the works of art that decorate his studio, there are numerous little religious icons; his own work is obviously very different, but one can see the connection between them.) He goes further, talking of ‘the mystical element of faith’ and ‘a search for perfection that will never come – yet that I’m always hopeful of discovering.’
Contemplative is thus perhaps the final word for understanding and appreciating Annear’s most recent work. These are paintings that need to be looked at, returned to, pondered over, contemplated – like the contemplation and calm that has gone into creating them. From simple shapes and colours, lines and curves and a devotion to edges, borders and boundaries, emerges profound beauty and meaning.
