David Tress 2019 Cataloguefi

3 Big Sky, Shapley Common (Dartmoor), 2018 mixed media/paper 3 7 62 x 81 cms 24 ⁄8 x 31 ⁄8 ins New landscape works David Tress tears apart the landscape and almost forces his way into it. His paintings and drawings are like pages ripped from the places he has visited: like turfs dug from a field or a hillside, at times they are almost three dimensional in their form. He is no passive bystander; he is both artist and archaeologist. He inhabits – physically and intellectually – the places he paints. The works that result from this existence, this experience in the landscape, are about history, memories, relationships – but they are not topography; they do not attempt to accurately describe the physical details of a particular place, though they are clearly born of those places. What Tress explores is the physical experience of being in a landscape, of responding emotionally to it. 4 The Big Oak, 2018 graphite/paper 5 104 x 126 cms 41 x 49 ⁄8 ins Hence this is not simply Tress’s own personal experience of the place, but his reaction to the history of these places, the centuries – and sometimes even millennia – of human activity they have recorded upon them. They are about the past in the present, and the present in the past. ‘Paintings are complex things,’ he observes, ‘they gather lots of ideas … They are never just landscapes – they always carry some freight … a personal resonance’. That personal resonance is vital. Tress now lives in Haverfordwest, the small riverside town in Pembrokeshire that was once the home of Gwen and Augustus John. But though his mother was Welsh, and south Wales has been his home and the subject for a great deal of his art since he first moved there in 1976, he was actually born in Wembley, west London, in 1955. His family was not especially artistic, and from a young age moths and butterflies were (and still are) a fascination for him. Biology he 5 Ullswater, 2018 graphite/paper 3 1 30 x 41 cms 11 ⁄4 x 16 ⁄8 ins 6 Cross and Land. St Clether, Cornwall, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 39 x 30 cms 15 ⁄8 x 11 ⁄4 ins 7 New Year (The Sky Washed Eggshell Blue) I, 2018 Mixed media/paper 1 7 52 x 58 cms 20 ⁄2 x 22 ⁄8 ins describes as having been ‘this marvellous romantic thing’, and his early academic direction was towards science. But he could always draw well, and when he discovered that biology was not quite all that he had expected, he turned towards art instead. An early inspiration, when he was still studying for O Level art at school, was a visit to an exhibition of watercolours by the early nineteenth-century English landscape artist John Sell Cotman. ‘It was completely new to me but I was immediately taken by it – I found there was something visually exciting about it. His wonderful sense of simplified composition, placement, structure – I was intrigued.’ Not long after he also discovered Abstract Expressionism – the American artists Robert Motherwell and the ‘action painters’ Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. In many ways his work today is almost a collision between those two early artistic encounters. 8 Kirkstone Pass, 2018 graphite/paper 3 1 29 x 42 cms 11 ⁄8 x 16 ⁄2 ins 9 Cross and Land. Sancreed, Cornwall, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 39 x 30 cms 15 ⁄8 x 11 ⁄4 ins 10 The Year Ending II, 2018 mixed media/paper 5 3 50 x 62 cms 19 ⁄8 x 24 ⁄8 ins He aims at the latters’ rawness and honesty, whilst continuing to follow the fundamental traditions and concerns of British Romanticism. (It is perhaps no surprise that Graham Sutherland also found inspiration in the landscape of Pembrokeshire.) He describes his own work as ‘reckless, but deeply disciplined,’ founded upon forty years of studying the tonal relationships that are key to the success of his paintings. These deep artistic foundations are clearly in evidence in the extraordinary measured drawings he made whilst still a student in the early 1970s, as well as in the meticulously painted paintings he produced in the early 1980s: landscapes and interiors in watercolor and oil of incredible vision and intensity. His striking recent drawing exhibited in this current exhibition, ‘Big Oak,’ is something of a return to those roots (if you will pardon the pun), and he thinks it will prove ‘a bit of a surprise, too, for many 11 Old Sarum, 2018 graphite/paper 3 1 35 x 47 cms 13 ⁄4 x 18 ⁄2 ins 12 Cross and Land. Howmore, South Uist, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 30 x 39 cms 11 ⁄4 x 15 ⁄8 ins 13 The Year Ending III, 2018 mixed media/paper 3 7 45 x 58 cms 17 ⁄4 x 22 ⁄8 ins people who are not aware of my detailed early work and have only seen the much broader recent pieces. I didn’t particularly plan to work in this sort of detail again,’ he admits, ‘but it was an image that I had in my mind and which I very much wanted to make, and when I began work on it, it seemed to demand the sort of concentrated analysis and exploratory drawing that is evident in the finished piece.’ It is a work of daring confidence and assurance, and he calls working in black and white like this ‘viscerally exciting.’ And it is interesting to see the way in which it evokes the work of the black and white photographers he loves, in particular Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith. By the mid 1980s Tress was moving away from the hyper-realist technique that had already won him a dedicated following as well as considerable critical attention, moving steadily in the direction that we find him today: an action painter at work in the 14 Ullswater from Glen Ridding, 2018 graphite/paper 3 3 30 x 40 cms 11 ⁄4 x 15 ⁄4 ins 15 Cross and Land. Horn’s Cross, Dartmoor, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 39 x 30 cms 15 ⁄8 x 11 ⁄4 ins 16 Landfall, St Columba (Isle of Mull), 2017 mixed media/paper 1 3 59 x 78 cms 23 ⁄4 x 30 ⁄4 ins British landscape. The impact of seeing paintings by David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach in the 1980s was significant. ‘Hair-raisingly good’ is the phrase he uses for that encounter. ‘Definite’ and ‘vigorous’ are thus words that crop up frequently in a discussion with him about art – both in his own work and that done by those artists he admires. These are the elements he seeks to achieve, whilst at the same time enjoying what he calls the ‘struggle’ to achieve it. It is hard work, to make art like this. But ‘through your hard work,’ he explains, ‘you put spirit into something.’ He uses the analogy of an Anglo-Saxon blacksmith, working at his anvil upon a pattern-welded sword, endlessly beating the rods of iron into shape to create a blade of extraordinary resilience and beauty, filled with the spirit of the maker. He aims for a similar spirit is hammered home in his own work – it is something he strives for, but knows, hopes, he will never quite 17 Summer, A Quiet Day, 2018 graphite/paper 1 7 36 x 43 cms 14 ⁄8 x 16 ⁄8 ins 18 Cross and Land. St Buryan Churchyard, 2018 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 29 x 38 cms 11 ⁄8 x 15 ins 19 Land and Sea (Winter Spring), 2018 mixed media/paper 1 1 52 x 64 cms 20 ⁄2 x 25 ⁄4 ins 20 Clegyr Boia and Thorn, 2018 graphite/paper 1 3 42 x 62 cms 16 ⁄2 x 24 ⁄8 ins reach in its most perfect form. Because it is in the process of reaching that he is always discovering. That telling phrase ‘the hard-won image’ was almost made for him. ‘Palimpsest’ is another word Tress likes to use to describe his paintings and drawings. ‘A palimpsest,’ as he explains, ‘is – strictly speaking – an early manuscript that has been almost, but not entirely, erased for purposes of economy and re-use. The previous script or decoration remains as a just discernible and fragmentary record of the earlier incarnation. What a word for landscape – what a word for describing the ancient landscape of Pembrokeshire with its layer upon layer of human intervention over thousands of years, and its fragmentary legacy of scars on the landscape – a sort of cuneiform script, half-erased.’ 21 Cross and Land. Bennet’s Cross, Dartmoor, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 30 x 39 cms 11 ⁄4 x 15 ⁄8 ins 22 Cross and Land. Long Tom, Bodmin, 2017 watercolour and mixed media/paper 3 3 29 x 39 cms 11 ⁄8 x 15 ⁄8 ins 23 From Meldon Down (Devon), 2018 mixed media/paper 3 7 40 x 48 cms 15 ⁄4 x 18 ⁄8 ins 24 The Land (Leaving Winter), 2018 mixed media/paper 5 50 x 61 cms 19 ⁄8 x 24 ins A new subject in these latest works, exhibited for the first time here at Messum’s, are paintings inspired by an early summer visit to Wiltshire in 2018. It was not the sort of rural, agricultural landscape Tress had ever painted before, and he considered it a new challenge. The broad fields of oil seed rape had not been in his mind before he went, and as he explains he ‘never had a reason before to paint these great slabs of yellow.’ But they proved a perfect subject for his pictures adding a new dimension of vivid colour, leading to paintings that almost hum with heat.

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