MAXWELL DOIG Front Cover Lord’S Mill in Winter (No
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MAXWELL DOIG front cover Lord’s Mill in Winter (no. 7) 1 Sandstone Barn MAXWELL DOIG acrylic on canvas on panel 1 97 x 72 cms 38 x 28 ⁄2 ins 2020 www.messums.com 12 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6AB Telephone: +44 (0)20 7287 4448 Foreword It’s always interesting to watch the way an artist develops and grows. And it’s especially interesting seeing one who was once 3 Pelvis, 1989 so preoccupied with the human form that as a student he studied monotype human anatomy move away from painting figures to painting 1 79 x 61 cms 31 ⁄8 x 24 ins buildings instead. True, his central concern with the figure had always been the architecture of its form, with all its various positions and angles, rather than with the individual personality of the model (he was certainly never a portraitist). Yet in a way Maxwell Doig is still painting figures: in his attention to their character and individual detail, his buildings and boats and abandoned objects seem almost like individuals, in the same way Paul Nash once described trees as being like people to him, each with their own particular personality. Perhaps, then, painting people was Doig’s route to now painting the buildings he records in his distinctive, inimitable manner. Certainly he himself feels that he has brought the awareness of balance and poise gained from his early anatomical studies whilst a post-graduate student at the Slade School of Art into these new works that have preoccupied him for the last six years. Indeed, as good as his paintings of people were, in buildings he has perhaps found his true subject. As he acknowledges, he has always had a fascination with them, and he is only surprised that he didn’t start painting them sooner. It wasn’t until he was approaching his fifties that he first saw them as an appropriate subject for his art. With the growing feeling that he had taken the figure as far as he could, he 2 Church with Holly Tree, Fylingthorpe 4 Stilts I, 1989 was gradually losing interest in painting people. It was then that he acrylic on canvas on panel monotype 1 1 7 82.5 x 61 cms 32 ⁄2 x 24 ins 74 x 53 cms 29 ⁄8 x 20 ⁄8 ins was struck by the idea of painting buildings instead. He had always been interested in the shape of a suddenly glimpsed gable end, or the decayed surface and texture of the 5 Twilight Gable End with Trees derelict factories that surrounded him in the town where he grew monotype on Velin Arches cream paper 1 38.1 x 29.2 cms 15 x 11 ⁄2 ins up and still lives – Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire. The turning point came in 2014, however, with a derelict house not far from home that particularly interested him. ‘The building itself I had always liked and photographed for years,’ he remarks. ‘The transition moment happened in the studio, when I realised I could use the surfaces and textures I normally used in the background for figures, as the central subject.’ This building became the large painting Gable End – the first of a series of studies of one side of this house viewed at different times of day and in subtly different lights. ‘It was,’ he acknowledges, ‘a turning point for me.’ And it all came so easily. When he started painting buildings he found it all perfectly natural – like he had always been doing it. So much so that it surprised him that he hadn’t started doing it much earlier. They were and still are often the sort of places passersby simply overlook. One of the wonders of this part of Yorkshire is the sudden transition from urban to rural: the industrial revolution kicked 6 Yore Mill at Aysgarth, North Yorkshire 7 Lord’s Mill in Winter monotype on Velin Arches cream paper acrylic on canvas on panel 1 1 38.1 x 29.2 cms 15 x 11 ⁄2 ins 122 x 97.8 cms 48 x 38 ⁄2 ins off around here partly because of the easy access to water power, and large buildings can be stumbled upon in unexpected locations. ‘They’re so big many people just seem to overlook them,’ Doig remarks of the old mills that dot the landscape. ‘With the exception of Peter Brook in the 1950s and ‘60s, nobody paints them.’ One that features strongly in this exhibition is Lord’s Mill, a Grade II listed building in the village of Honley, not far from Huddersfield. Built in the early 1790s and subsequently expanded, it was in use until at least the 1950s, when its roof was destroyed by fire. It is now abandoned – boarded up and graffitied. ‘It’s like I’m the only person 8 Abandoned House above Marsden, 2 who’s really looked at it,’ he observes. ‘It’s nearly as old as America acrylic on canvas on panel – it’s amazing! But it just goes unnoticed – the location’s fantastic, in 58.4 x 81.3 cms 23 x 32 ins a wooded valley, really romantic. It’s like a Bruegel, or one of those early painters from Ghent – valley, wood, river, rolling hillsides.’ 9 Lord’s Mill with Fence in Snow acrylic on canvas on panel 1 101.6 x 75 cms 40 x 29 ⁄2 ins Certainly when seen like this they are the Modern Romantic’s equivalent of Tintern Abbey, the Welsh monastic ruins captured so famously by J.M.W. Turner in the 1790s, just when buildings like Lord’s Mill were going up (built, like Tintern, on the wealth generated by wool). And when seen up close there’s plenty there too to attract the attention of the discerning artist: old roof lines, patches of plaster, mould and decay, the sandstone of the region carrying its age interestingly, telling the stories of these places, their history, the records of past industry and past lives. These stones certainly speak. 10 Mill Roof 2 11 Newsome Mill, March 2017 monotype on Velin acrylic on canvas on panel Arches cream paper 66 x 91.5 cms 26 x 36 ins 38.1 x 27.9 cms 15 x 11 ins 12 Barn Wall Palimpsest acrylic on canvas on panel 61 x 83.7 cms 24 x 33 ins Doig makes a great deal of the sudden juxtaposition – so frequent in this part of Yorkshire – between the urban and the rural. Seeing his work as ‘essentially romantic’, he does not look at these buildings or the detritus of heavy industry as an intrusion upon the landscape, but rather as partners and complements to it. The Colne Valley was another of West Yorkshire’s centre of industrial activity. But as Doig remarks of the scrapheap he discovered there that is also the subject of a number of paintings and prints in this show, ‘it fits really nicely with the landscape – big chunks of heavy machinery, the abstract, geometric shapes.’ The same is true of the boats he saw on the Isles of Arran and Mull during a trip to Western Scotland in 2019: they fit neatly in to their similarly rugged landscape, one that has been the place of human habitation and activity for centuries. They are like the past life of the mills and the scrapheaps after snow – a jigsaw of pattern that reflects poignantly on former glories. 13 Winter Scrapyard in Snow monotype on Velin Arches cream paper 3 1 40 x 29.2 cms 15 ⁄4 x 11 ⁄2 ins 14 Yorkshire Cobble acrylic on canvas on panel 15 Steamroller with Snow and Trees 63.5 x 90.2 cms acrylic on canvas on panel 1 1 25 x 35 ⁄2 ins 75 x 96.5 cms 29 ⁄2 x 38 ins 16 Salen Fishing Boats with Rising Tide, Isle of Mull. acrylic on canvas on panel 1 88.9 x 67.3 cms 35 x 26 ⁄2 ins His feeling that he was doing something worthwhile in this new direction was confirmed a few years ago when Doig discovered what he calls ‘the subtle, quiet’ work of the English painter Algernon Newton (1880–1968). To my mind, Newton was one of the finest RA’s of the twentieth century, his oddly brooding and slightly surreal paintings of urban canals, suburban houses and bare English countryside not having quite the attention they deserve – though he is highly collectable. ‘There’s a particular stillness and quality of light which resonates with me in both his landscapes and architectural works,’ Doig explains. He was particularly struck by Newton’s observation that ‘[t]here is beauty to be found in everything, you only have to search for it; a gasometer can make as beautiful a picture as a palace on the Grand Canal, Venice. It simply depends on the artist’s vision.’* This confirmed to him that he was on the right track; he now sees his purpose as capturing the grandeur of these overlooked and 17 Pennine Hillside with Church Spire seemingly ordinary places before they’re pulled down. monotype on Velin Arches cream paper 1 38.1 x 29.2 cms 15 x 11 ⁄2 ins *Newton’s remark echoes a similar observation made by his contemporary, the poet Edward Thomas, who, unlike Newton, was not to survive active service in the First World War: ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to.’ 18 Hade Edge House, May acrylic on canvas on panel 66 x 91.4 cms 26 x 36 ins 19 Gasometer II acrylic on canvas on panel 3 122 x 90 cms 48 x 35 ⁄8 ins One noticeable development in Doig’s work since his previous exhibition at Messum’s in 2018 is his widening viewpoint.