Maxwell Doig, Abandoned Farm near Marston Clough, acrylic on canvas on board |
It
has taken years for Doig to reach this remarkable point – to be able to look,
say, at the Flamborough Head lights
ouse in North Yorkshire, and paint it in a way that no-one else has quite achieved before, ‘to see it anew,’ as he says.
ouse in North Yorkshire, and paint it in a way that no-one else has quite achieved before, ‘to see it anew,’ as he says.
His
artistic journey started young. ‘I wanted to be a painter even as a little
kid,’ he told me when I visited him recently at his Huddersfield home. Skipping
A Levels, at sixteen he went straight to Batley Art School, already ‘dead set’
on becoming an artist. A significant early encounter came when a friend introduced
him to the veteran Huddersfield painter, David Blackburn (1939-2016). ‘I don’t know any artist to whom I can
compare him,’ Sir Kenneth Clark once observed. ‘Blackburn is not a landscape
artist, not an abstractionist in the ordinary sense. He is a painter of
metamorphosis.’
Doig
would never quite become an abstractionist, and looking at his work today you
see little direct link with Blackburn. But it was Blackburn who really taught the
teenage Doig how to see, and how to draw – starting with the simple things: a
still life of fruit or flowers on a table, or an allotment seen out the back of
Blackburn’s modest terraced house. The seasoned artist taught the young student
a valuable lesson: that he did not have to draw everything he saw in the world; you could pick out the salient
points, and abstract from it.
‘He
changed my life,’ Doig admits.
What
he learned from Blackburn helped Doig get into Manchester School of Art, and from
there to the Slade School of Art in London. Artists who can draw well have
always attracted him, and draughtsmanship has long been the raison d’etre of the Slade, from Henry
Tonks, Augustus John and Stanley Spencer to William Coldstream and Euan Uglow.
Though a graduate student specializing in printmaking, Doig spent hours in the
life-class, and he also studied human anatomy at University College Hospital.
By the time he left the Slade he was already selling his work, and other than a
brief stint teaching part-time at Leeds Metropolitan University he has made his
living ever since as a professional artist, recognized for his skill as a
painter and his confident yet idiosyncratic approach to his subject matter.
His
art has not stood still, however. His post-Slade period was when he came
closest to full abstraction, but he has moved from there through a close focus
on the human form towards the intense yet dream-like realism captured in
buildings, boats and allotments that characterizes his latest work. He has
always shown a keen interest in the surface of his works. ‘In a way,’ he tells
me, ‘it’s all about the surface, the texture.’ That’s why, when he draws, he uses
monotype – a print medium that, as the name suggests, only produces one or – at
very most – two images. He has a wonderful feel for texture, for surface,
patina and palimpsest – prints and paintings alike are very tactile works;
there is this almost irresistible urge to touch them, to run your fingers
across their surface. His flat, featureless skies deliberately accentuate the
texture of his walls, his grass, his trees – even a fall of snow.
Seeing
Doig as a Romantic, we might link him also with William Blake, whose most
famous words come from his epic poem ‘Milton,’ better known as the lines to the
hymn ‘Jerusalem,’ put to music a century ago at the height of the Great War. If
Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ are to be interpreted as the new-fangled factories
of the urbanising industrial revolution, then Doig in Huddersfield lives right
among their decay. Whilst Blake worked at the beginning of the Romantic era,
here we find Doig at the end of it, painting and carefully recording de-industrial
decline and our gradual disconnection with the sublime.
‘These
empty dwellings,’ he tells me, ‘they make people stop and look. My pictures
trigger memories – forgotten emotions, perhaps?’ They are places where people
have lived, loved, worked and sweated out their lives, be it on a factory
floor, in a boat or in the green fields of Yorkshire. Something remains,
remembered and yet half-forgotten. And Doig records – making the momentary immortal.