Hugely admired by artists and writers from Henri Cartier Bresson to the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, the extraordinary life and work of painter Dennis Creffield (1931-2018) are explored in Dennis Creffield. Art & Life, by Richard Cork, published by Lund Humphries. This, the first major monograph on the artist, provides a wonderful introduction to one of England’s most fascinating and enigmatic artists of the last 75 years.
The narrative traces the artist's 'Dickensian' upbringing, his formative experiences as a teenager under the tutelage of David Bomberg, his conversion to Catholicism and his award-winning years at the Slade. Focus is given to Creffield's passions for the stories of England, not only in the Cathedral drawings, but in his expressive work on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, on Blake and in his paintings and drawings of London, the great Petworth House, Cornish tin mines and the eerie military buildings on Orford Ness.
Complementing his work on England's sacred and profane identity is an equally audacious body of work on the human body, from tender paintings of mother and child to erotic paintings of women to his late paintings of men near death - Turner, Nelson and Rimbaud. To quote his fellow artist R.B. Kitaj, Creffield's cover has been 'well and truly blown.'
The book launch and an exhibition were held in May 2022 at the Portland Gallery to celebrate the publication of Dennis Creffield. Art & Life. Writing in the preface to his book, Cork notes that “The substantial corpus of work left behind by Creffield, highlights of which are displayed in the book, enables viewers to share his essential, life-enhancing vivacity.” The exhibition, which included many of those works illustrated in the book, was a timely reminder of the artist’s extraordinary talents.
“Creffield wanted to tune the way he drew or painted to the true nature of all he encountered: from the dour mass of the city to the flicker of light on the sea off the Brighton coast; from religious to erotic subjects; and across his eclectic range of interests in history, architecture, poetry, philosophy and music.
You can tell a Creffield by its line – quivering, almost crackling with energy, rendering cathedral or nude alike as living, pulsating entities. But this is perhaps the only constant; his mature work draws on a diffuse range of influences, from Turner to medieval art and Greek sculpture. He was an ardent Catholic, but his faith in the mysteries of the liturgy – the ‘spirit made flesh’ – was coupled with an equally fervent appreciation of carnal desire. ‘You have to fall in love with a subject before you can draw or paint it’, he believed – and his love, realised in everything from erotic nudes (shown in a solo display at the Serpentine Gallery in 1980) to brazenly fleshly depictions of The Visitation (1979–80), was equal parts sacred and profane.
For Creffield, the act of painting or drawing (he held the two in like esteem) was not a means of imposing his vision of the world on canvas or paper, but of physically encountering it. It was an attempt to better comprehend how the shape of a spring lily, a naked body, the ribbed vault of a church, a poem or an aria or a liturgical sermon each, in its discrete way, shaped his experience of life. A celebratory encounter with the world, in all its abundance, that gives his work its distinctive edge in the post-war era. ‘An act,’ as he had it, ‘in which eye, mind, body and imagination are all one at the same time together.’”
“For many years, each Christmas, Creffield would begin a Nativity painting; each Easter, he would make paintings of Christ’s passion. He became a devout Catholic in the 1950s, momentarily forsaking painting with a view to taking the cloth, only to be talked out of this plan by a priest, and he always had an extraordinary sense of the seasonal rituals.
Creffield’s faith was always rooted in the physical – the living, breathing, human truths at the heart of the divine mysteries of the liturgy – and his religious paintings represented means of communion with his subjects on these terms. Even as a student under David Bomberg, before his conversion to Catholicism, he completed remarkable, large-scale oils such as the work shown below, which depicts the three crosses at Calvary; muted, pale greens and yellows of the landscape give way to the vivid mosaic of bright tones with which Christ’s exposed flesh is rendered.
Creffield continued to produce religious paintings throughout his career, and as he developed as a colourist they became ever more luminous as the decades went by. He was an artist who worked in many genres and styles, and his faith could animate every subject he turned to.
Above all, Creffield’s religious works are distinguished always by their intimate, physical quality.”
Malachite Art Films made two films with Creffield; one was the ‘Narrative' episode of their series Looking into Paintings, made for Channel 4 in collaboration with The Open University, in which he was the featured artist. They later filmed him as he worked on his commission to draw all the cathedrals of England. Their DVD can be purchased direct from Malachite, see http://www.malachite.co.uk/dvds/dennis-creffield.html.
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Gungor - Dry Bones.
