what seas what shores what great rocks

What Seas What Shores What Grey Rocks

You can see how they are painted. It feels European; like a stucco wall in a Mediterranean fishing village; or early Matisse interiors. Light on water like boats in a Dufy. The causal marks are self-evident, the energy of their application connecting us with the painter, his hand.

Consider the smaller works first. Bird and Lighthouse (2) is a still life, if foreground matter is what matters. The bird of the title is probably a china bird, although just possibly a stuffed bird, its inertnature established by a conspicuous base; the lighthouse similarly miniaturised, materials less certain. The surface they are on could be anywhere, with landscape beyond, but for the fact of the curtain which occupies a third of the canvas and makes this a window scene: what’s inside the window and what’s beyond it. The pattern of the textile does not pick up the pattern of the neighbouring estuarine surf right next to it, but it so nearly does, so very nearly. The bird’s feathers similarly are of the same family of marks: kind of rough-looking but actually super-deftly applied. If you were in the world of this painting, you just know you would describe this china bird, with its glinty eye and flinty beak, as ‘life-like’. The model lighthouse comes with its own garden and trees. Just centimetres away in the composition, the same kind of quick blobs of paint denote real buildings on the opposite shore, real trees. And yet you don’t quite wonder who lives in that house, who’s sailing that boat, because they are so nearly the same kind of made-up objects as the models in the foreground. We don’t need to know this, don’t need to decide, but you feel it has to be a made-up scene. We don’t find ourselves thinking, I bet he saw this when he was on holiday. We just go with its matter-of-factness; we sense, in this one painting considered alone, the interchangeability of objects from both foreground and background. It is depictive and spatial; a flat composition and an illusion of volume; but its commitment to the realities of either is provisional at best.

For the record, Bird and Lighthouse (1) has all the same elements. It must be the same scene, its richer, brighter colours indicating a different day, different weather, a different season. But wait; it’s not the same bird, not the same lighthouse; the curtain is different, and the passing boat; the topography of the distant hills has changed. So much for commitment to realities. I think it’s important that we knew this before we compared the paintings. Each one of them has, in its own right, this some-place/no-place thing going on; and what are we going to say about this, that it is about the feeling, the mood? That it is about the kind of moment?

You can make a similar comparison of Estuary and Fishermen and Evening Sun. The elements, named, are the same; but inspected in any kind of detail, they are peculiar to the individual paintings. There is another, bigger difference between them: the fishermen – thanks to the evening sun, presumably – are on some kind of impossible edge of the world, whereas Estuary gives us an easily read and carefully plotted volume of space, the white sails of foreground, middle and far distance pacing it out for us. The volume of space is massive, of course; because it has to accommodate an estuary and the hills around it and the sky above it. But it’s really packed in tightly, every element of the composition made to work really hard to pull that space out of a tiny canvas.

These small paintings offer us the chance to play the real-thing-in-the-distance-or-foreground-model game all day, and very pleasurable it is too. Yacht and Island comes with a special prize: the odd plinth in the foreground has a model yacht on it, and a model island; but both those elements have ‘real’ counterparts beyond them in space, above them in the composition.

Let’s pick out just one more: Zebra and City Lights, because it is a painter’s painting. Three models – zebra, tree and church – a window and Manhattan-style lights beyond. The lights are so like those in Michael Andrew’s Lights 2: The Ship Engulfed (1972) in which the shadowy and unlikely presence of a hot-air balloon is a recurrent motif signifying an isolated ego observing the city. The form of the balloon has been inverted in Zebra… to become a more conspicuous bare lightbulb. The zebra too, in Emrys’ s work, is an occasionally recurrent motif, which seems to refer in its turn to the 1930 zebra painting by Christopher Wood. There is one solution here to the bigger puzzle: these are all painter’s paintings. The references enrich the work, a kind of folding back which is different from that involved in the cycling of similar objects between tabletop and landscape. But both anchor the work, make it more solid, as the inevitable outcome of the painter’s daily round, even as its significances and readings slide about before our eyes. I am minded to mention another artist, the late Brian Fielding, a painter of abstractions but with figurative elements, who said: The main concern is to create a balanced, self-contained structure with as wide a range of references as is necessary to create a richness which cannot be seen in one flat dimension. Painting, to exist, has to create indefinable space, and a sense of interest or curiosity in the spectator, but at the same time it has to be half-believable.

I want to say that the larger paintings make a different family, but the relationship is close, the vocabulary similar, with the conspicuous additional elements of a young bathing man, someonlookers, some other characters. Although they are clearly painted with the same kind of ready touch as the smaller works, the extra canvas makes the paint feel somehow lighter, thinner even, the air more rarified, and the spaces sometimes tend to the impossible in the way the volumes join up. That ready touch is so subtle: the characters I mentioned have faces just dashed in there like the light on the water; but they have shy eyes, sly eyes, judgemental expressions, real emotions.

Something Emrys said rang utterly true with me as an account of his work. I had to write and ask him to remind me of what he had said, because it had made such complete sense that it went straight in: frictionless assimilation, the idea without the words:

I was walking in old quarries above Penrhyndeudraeth near Blaenau Ffestiniog with Howard Bowcott and he pointed to a very wild looking area ahead and said that's Bird Island. Then the weather turned to cold hailstones so I never got to it.

A comment which is narrative, mysterious, and true. Because isn’t that what it’s like for all of us? We are walking in old quarries our whole lives, the weather changes and we never get to Bird Island. Bird Island is the idea we have that keeps us going. Bird Island, in the painting of that name, is a kind of paradise, constructed from the things that we know, in ways that we don’t. But there is an ambivalence here, bordering on darkness, islands within islands, waters within waters. Yachts sail by in a sunset so bright the sea grows dark; and no one meets your gaze. Peace, but with diffidence and passivity. Is this what lies up ahead, beyond the quarry? Something promisingly bright but uneasy because of all the carry-over stuff from before?

When I look across the other works here, the island turns out to be in the midst of a slowly, reliably evolving constellation of ideas which are intensely visual. ‘Motifs’ is too dismissive a term, too graphic for these things, but the sense it carries of accumulating significance still applies. Significance born of a long commitment to reading and to viewing of other painters’ art, increasing the cultural density of the imagery. Significance growing through repetition, revealing new aspects of these objects, sometimes transforming their nature utterly: from manor house to ornamental house; from songbird to china bird; from ship to model ship; from zebra to zebra – this last one always impossible to place. These things remain constant as compositional elements regardless of whether they signify the real thing or not. The changing relationship between them from painting to painting, which seems like the greater part of the artist’s work here, gives them different narrative weight; those women sitting placidly but pensively on Bird Island bear witness in Il Tabarro 1 to brutal crime. Their self-absorbed placidity remains; our view of them shifts uneasily.

Il Tabarro raises the stakes somewhat. Puccini's opera Il Tabarro tells the story of a barge owner whosuspects his young wife is having an affair. He strangles the lover and hides the body under his expansive cloak. On the arrival of his wife, he throws open the cloak to reveal the dead body. It is as upsetting a tale as it is a strange one. The theatricality of the cloak as the central device is irresistible, but even in the context of a painter’s practice which trades on unexpected juxtapositions, it is a conspicuous intrusion. In both versions here, the figures look a bit darker and more indistinct in detail than the songbirds, but their shapes and actions are described with much the same painted marks as the rest, much the same sense of uninflected reportage. It might lead one to question the innocence of all the other pictures anyone has ever painted in this way.

Having explained his commitment to Proust, Emrys sent me quotations to help my thinking along:“From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.” And: “Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten”. This is helpful indeed, because one might imagine Proust to have wholly anticipated this body of work and its unattainable setting. The compelling thing here is that Emrys knows. He knows that he is ‘dragging things forth’, that they remain a mystery to the rest of us, and only just within his own reach, as passing from memory, like dreams on waking, endlessly reconfigured.

John Gillett

Notes
What Seas What Shores What Grey Rocks
Exhibition title from first line of Marina by T.S. Eliot

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

Marcel Proust quotations from:
Time Regained from Remembrance of Things Past
(page 241 translation Andreas Mayor, Chatto and Windus edition)

And The Captive from Remembrance of Things Past
(page 258 Terence Kilmartin revised from original English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Penguin edition)