New Delta Review - Richard Gilbert

To reveal art
and conceal the artist
is art's aim.
—Oscar Wilde

Excerpt from
"Julian Grater and the Sense Sublime"
By Richard Gilbert

Introduction

Who is he – this journeyman, whose journeys to remote locations are almost like artworks in their own right? Whether the remote deserts of Western Australia, a peak in British Columbia or the frozen wastes of Alaska, each terrain reflects an aspect of the artist’s character. What impels an artist to make difficult journeys with all his materials to inaccessible places? The necessity of the journey has become a vital part of his artistic project that is his life project. The distinction between life and the creative practice is blurred. One is a necessary prerequisite of the other.

For a visual artist, where and how to find vital experience in our world so networked with the second-hand, the digital flotsam and jetsam that we cleave to so vapidly, is a pragmatic question facing every maker. John Russell Taylor ponders in the introduction to Scattering of Dust, the exhibition of Australian work, that the actual physical experience brings together the natural phenomena together with the private and archetypal images, “the sense of something clicking decisively into place.” Perhaps one has to physically know what it was like to experience -35º C. on a subarctic permafrost to secure the knowledge that gives the painted image fixed on the canvas a kind of sustainability, a sense of lived reality.

Viewing the lived experience in Julian Grater’s work, it is Francis Bacon’s memorable words that spring to mind when he famously said that he wanted the paint in his paintings to “work directly on the central nervous system of the viewer as there is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” To pick up a paintbrush is in a sense to have a dialogue with tradition, as every painting casts its shadow back in time. However, painting will continue as long as that special chemistry of sensations so strangely yet so eloquently connected to lived experience exists. One feels that Grater is a painter, grinding his own paints, extending and blending using antique recipes, who actually believes in the transmutation of base matter into artistic gold, as the alchemists once sought the Philosopher’s Stone. This is a strange, even a perverse preoccupation by the standards of contemporary painting, which prefers the charts of this year’s colours to the linseed oil and finely ground pigment of a pre-modern sensibility.

Beginnings

What launched Grater was his selection for the 1985 London Hayward Annual, curated by the prominent London gallery dealer Nigel Greenwood as A Journey Through Contemporary Art with Nigel Greenwood. Grater exhibited a body of drawings that he had made during post-graduate study at Chelsea School of Art. With the prevailing “New Spirit in Painting” promoting acres of expressionism, Grater was conversely working on small-scale drawings. Drawing has essentially been his bedrock ever since, and his belief in the discipline has not fundamentally changed over the years. The work in the Hayward Annual amounted to a series of detailed but incoherent forms, demonstrating many characteristics of his drawing to the present. The paper itself appears to be treated like skin, incised, punctured, tattooed with glyphic markings and lines of scalpel like precision. The imagery may have some resemblance to the awkwardly expressive drawings of Joseph Beuys, or the ideographic drawings of Paul Klee, where the line appears to have its own anima. Grater’s line, too, has its own idea of what it may choose to represent, in turn depicting strange biomorphic forms, landscape elements, and male and female genitalia. These drawings were intensely conceived autobiographical works, a diary about separation and loss.

The image of a smoke blackened anvil recurs in these drawings, perhaps derived from the Old Forge, in Cornwall, that Grater had used as a studio in the years between graduation from Falmouth School of Art and subsequent post-graduate study in London. Perhaps the anvil was a metaphor for the artist’s intention to forge meaning from base matter. There are also suggestions of closely observed insect life and vegetal forms. This work also features inclusion of actual organic material in the form of dried flowers and seeds, often chosen for their emblematic significance. Grater has continued to use this approach, combining actual matter such as iron ore, lead, wood, sand, crushed insects, and even his own blood, with traditional graphic mediums. The power to invest certain materials with an almost mythical status representing the elemental forces of life is a characteristic that charges the work of Beuys, who has always remained a key influence on the artist’s thinking. However, these drawings were in no way derivative works. Their uniqueness lay in their lack of obvious formal device. They have an unfinished-ness because they were never intended to be finished; much is left to the imaginative interpretation of the viewer. They possess a patent weirdness, a sense of a very private iconography that is only partially revealed, that hints at fetish, ritual and sexual activity.

Extending his drawing as a self-sufficient language became his main vehicle of expression. Within a studio space that enforced small-scale work along with a limited budget lay a wealth in the riches of the imagination. He produced a remarkably strong body of drawing on the theme of the self-image, which resulted in his first solo exhibition selected by Sean Kelly at Artsite, Bath in 1988.

The subject matter in his drawings continues to be deliberately nebulous, heads that are presences but not portraits. It is as if he is trying to use drawing to put flesh on the bone, to identify somebody or someone he has never met.

So, whose is this head? The skull of the corpse, which sits upright in the artist’s imagination. Is this he, the artist? Perhaps it is no one and perhaps it is everyone. Why this image gripped the artist’s imagination to the exclusion of any other is far from obvious. Obsessively worked, as if someone or some force held his mind so fixedly, every drawing was a vain attempt to release his mind from the spell. In some sense we are all here, captured in these charred images, forged in the fire of his imagination. However, I would like to suggest specific terms of reference.

Leonardo’s The Last Supper in the sacristy of Santa Maria Della Grazie, depicts the frozen silence of indignation, after Jesus announced his forthcoming betrayal by one present. From his insight combining both psychology and anatomy, Leonardo creates this tableau frieze of the moment. “The intention of the mind,” as revealed in The Last Supper, is an essay on the physiognomy of character, drawn a dozen times in a dozen different ways, the tensed muscle of neck and jaw convey the whole range of human emotions, from fear to indignation and embarrassment to incomprehension. Leonardo came to a painter’s block in that he could not find the image in his fertile mind for either Jesus or Judas. Leonardo eventually found his model for Judas in the Prior of Santa Maria Della Grazie, a vociferous critic of the commission.3 Jesus was never completed, and Leonardo left Milan and never attempted to portray him again.

Something in the temper of this work attracted the attention of Peter Gabriel. He identified the very image that he sought for the album cover of Gabriel’s Passion, the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Released in 1989, many will be familiar with Drawing for Self Image II without knowing the name of the artist. Whilst the image may be interpreted as the head of Jesus, an alternative reading could just as likely point the finger at Judas. With the popularity of the anti-hero in modern culture, Judas has gained many fans. His act of betrayal meant not only a death for him but also eternal damnation. What possible greater sacrifice could he be asked to seal with a kiss and thirty pieces of silver? These heads, so removed in their own thoughts, governed with sadness, regret and guilt, screaming in horror, seem to invoke a man contemplating his destiny of eternal pain.

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