Introduction
Morning!In the notorious libel trial of 1878 arising from Ruskin’s contention that in his painting of fireworks known as “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket” Whistler had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face”, the painter Albert Moore testified that Whistler “has painted the air, which very few artists have attempted”.
This latest solo show of the pastels of Matthew Draper reinforces the impression that as well as capturing nocturnal lights and shapes in company with the American master, Draper can see and capture the very air around us. He sees and depicts nuances and changes in the atmosphere which the viewer recognises and marvels over, but can barely understand how they have been achieved. Returning from Edinburgh to Cornwall for this first solo exhibition at the Lemon Street Gallery, Matthew Draper has decided to represent the townscape, harbour and docks of Falmouth, where he studied at the College of Arts. The title of the exhibition might suggest a series of descriptive views of the town where his crucial formative years were spent.
Instead those who have followed Draper’s brief and impressive career will not be surprised to see that he has honed in on the Falmouth night, on the harbour, and most importantly how light, both natural and artificial, affects the concrete and liquid elements of the harbour-scape. As we should also not be surprised to note, he has immersed himself in the liquid night air, and he has drawn and painted it for us. The exhibition is staged ten years to the month since Draper graduated. While studying in Falmouth he started to make work on a nocturnal theme, settling for his subject matter on what is the third largest natural harbour on earth. He shared with other students a flat at the top of a Georgian house high above Greenbank Pier, and from this vantage point he would sketch the view down across the harbour to the docks and Falmouth Bay. He revelled in the night-time maritime activity - ships being towed back and forth by tugs looking like so many twinkling, floating lights above the bejeweled sheets of moon-lit water, with lights reflecting around the rim of harbour and bay. In recording such scenes Draper discovered that with pastels, applied to paper he had previously painted black, he could obtain the combination of shimmering and twinkling lights that he was trying to achieve. He looked closely at the effect of light on differing water surfaces, from choppy to calm, and the shapes created in the water by the light and the horizontal and vertical framing of land, piers, buildings, cranes and boats. At this stage such drawings were essentially seen as preparatory studies, a means of gathering information on colour, tone and shapes of elements of the scene, rather than ends in their own right. He would then go to the studio and use them as the basis for large-scale paintings. The results were considerably abstracted from the original sketches, and focused primarily on shapes derived from the different and varied areas of light on the water. Now Draper as predominantly a pastel artist, working either directly from the subject or more likely from an amalgam of photographs, newspaper cuttings and other material to make energetically worked pastels of a townscape that to a greater of lesser degree represent, his adopted city of Edinburgh. The most recent exhibition of Draper’s pastels, in 2004, centred round a series of often achingly beautiful large, panoramic drawings based on the city skyline and streets after dark, or looking across the roof-scape into a low sun, several of them taken from high viewpoints around Prince’s Street. These works characteristically reveal the contrasting soft and hard edges of forms in a twilit, back-lit or nocturnal townscape, exploring the way surfaces and edges can transform among the myriad lights of a city night, and the reflections of these lights on rain-washed tarmac and stone.
These pastel drawings share with Monet’s Rouen Cathedral or Westminster series a passion for light, colour and space, but they are less overtly topographical and never formally repetitive. The grandeur, drama, richness and subtlety of these works are a tribute to the versatility of pastel, but also to the artist’s very personal working methods. Draper’s physical engagement with his work perhaps eclipses even Turner’s scraping-out with a deliberately long thumb-nail and, well, Whistler’s metaphorical throwing of a pot of paint in the public’s face! Rather like the action painter’s Ruskin’s bluster evokes, Draper dispenses with the intermediary of the brush, which he finds over-methodical in its mark-making, and manipulates pastel and charcoal with his hands, working instinctively rather than methodically. To withstand the physicality of his technique Draper chooses robust printmaking paper, which he tapes to the studio wall.
Next to this might be a photograph and a drawing made on the spot. Lined up on a table will be a meticulously chosen and carefully laid out selection of soft pastels, looking for all the world like a counter in a sweet shop.. Draper crushes these pastels in his hand and rubs them straight on to the virgin paper, laying in broad passages of colour with the ball of his thumb and the heel of his hand. He paces up and down in front of the drawing, pushing the pigment around, merging and obliterating some marks and colours, emphasising others. As the drawing develops and shapes, layers and edges start to be defined in the swirl of colour, and recognisable images emerge from the apparent chaos. Charcoal and pastel sticks are used, in conventional manner, to insert hard edges and shapes which confirm the composition and the relationships between its different elements. Michelangelo is reported as seeking the sculptural form that already lay within the marble, and one sometimes feels that Turner found the motifs within his late finished watercolours as much by scraping medium and paper as by addition of paint. There is a sense in which Draper too reveals and defines his imagery from beneath the encrusted layers of pastel, pushing and scraping at the accretions of colour, pummeling the paper with sandpaper until it takes on a unique velvety texture, producing clouds of pastel dust in the studio. The day’s sweepings, an admixture of all the colours in the sweet-shop, are always recycled.
Thrown at the drawing, they are then worked across the paper surface to provide the carefully modulated mid-tones which help unite Draper’s compositions and enhance the tangibility of the atmosphere. The final act of this dramatic working process is usually to re-define and refine the relationships and tensions between shapes and edges, between tentative or elusive forms and more incisive, hard-edged ones. On his return to Falmouth ten years after leaving college, Draper again positioned himself at a high vantage point, but this time in the centre of the town, around Harbour Terrace, the Moor and Jacob’s Ladder. From these positions he could look out over the harbour and docks. Drawings and photographs made on the spot have been taken back to the studio and transformed into a breathtaking and highly atmospheric set of large nocturnal pastels. Once again Draper has chosen to study the light effects and shapes of the dockland waters, but in keeping with the development of his work over recent years, rather than focusing on individual abstracted shapes, his view has opened up into the panoramic. Using light sources - whether the moon or the glare of floodlighting, the halos of sodium lamps, the twinkling harbour-lights, or the silhouettes of hulls, piers, cranes and buoys - as reference points for his compositions, Draper explores the complex effects of light and dark over the great dramatic sweep of the maritime night. In large works like “Moonlight across Falmouth Bay”, “Calm”, “Dark, Dark Night”, “Half Light” and “Shrouded”, Draper reveals the full panoply of his achievements. The eye roves over rich and complex passages of pastel, exploring shapes, edges and subtle modulations of light, texture and atmosphere, and one becomes entirely immersed in the liquid beauty of the Falmouth night. In “Twilight on the Penryn River” the fading light above low cloud just illuminates the water enough to frame the hulks of ships and boats at anchor. Smaller studies like “Nightfall”, “Still” and “Last Light” are more direct, and simple, but equally effective and evocative. Away from the docks Draper has also made some more sparsely populated studies of sea and sky at night, relieved only by a few reference points, for example the headland and a buoy in “'Strange Light, St Anthony Head (17: 45) 23.02.05'”. This is one of a series of drawings based on Draper’s experience of a storm rolling in over the bay, each specifically timed, rather as Monet specifically recorded his Rouen Cathedral paintings. There are also the Turnerian (or even Claudian) repoussoirs of a lit-up boat and a middle-ground tree in “The Fal”. Draper has said that this latter work is about the moonlight he observed when standing on a jetty in Flushing, looking over the water towards Penryn, recalling that he used to cycle here as a student to draw the view. Draper has clearly been looking again at the nocturnes of Whistler, particularly perhaps the Thames scenes such as Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge in the Tate and Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge in the Burrell Collection, and also of the harbour views, such as Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green: Valparaiso, also in the Tate. Draper is happy to acknowledge the influence of Whistler, Turner, Monet and of the painters of the American Sublime. Yet, as always when reviewing his work, such influences are evident, but elusive in this new exhibition. If one surmises on subject matter alone that Whistler has been the presiding muse, one is in danger of an over-simplistic or superficial reading of the body of work on show. The theme of the exhibition is Nostalgia, a title almost Victorian in its sentiment, but as it suggests the meaning in the work is personal and recent, not the generalized impersonal sentiment that can be a distinguishing feature of Victorian landscape painting. The observer can connect with the stirring of emotions that Draper’s return to Cornwall has evoked for him, not least through the incredibly personal and intense nature of his process of working. It is a process that brings both meaning and form, and mental and physical creativity, together to create pictures which are thus remarkably devoid of the superfluous, the extraneous, the superficial or the pretentious. They may be nostalgic for the artist, but they are not sentimental. Just as Monet and Whistler objectified their subjects to capture elemental phenomena not apparently seen by their predecessors through painterly processes not previously practiced, Draper has found his own personal and unique way to reveal the beauty of his Cornish subject matter, and this exhibition embraces us in his vision.