Alexander Mackenzie

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE AUSTIN DESMOND FINE ART 1 Fishing Boats 1951 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 51cm In Character: Alexander Mackenzie and Landscape Michael Bird Pencilled in a small black notebook in Alexander Mackenzie’s clean, open italic script: ‘We find in the countryside the character of enduring things’. Is he quoting someone? – Thomas Hardy, maybe, or Edward Thomas. Or W.G. Hoskins in his 1955 classic The Making of the English Landscape, which scraped down the post-war landscape’s layers of social and cultural accretion to decipher the human palimpsest they contained? Whatever its source, the sentiment sounds familiar. It may have come from some volume Mackenzie pulled from his studio shelves, as he did when he wanted to illustrate a point, but the precise choice of words makes me think that this is the artist himself speaking. Mackenzie looked long and deep into landscape. Like Hardy or his own contemporary Peter Lanyon, he was haunted equally by its tactile, impersonal contours and its imagined histories. What he found there, however, and what he made of this in his art were wholly distinctive. 4 2 Still life (Buoys), Kehelland, Cornwall 1951 Gouache on paper 35 x 44cm 3 Still Life 1953 Oil and collage on board 16 x 22.5cm 6 4 Painted Relief 1953 Oil on board 13 x 40.5cm Cup and ring marks - artist’s slide, 1979 ‘Character’ is what Mackenzie would have called the operative word in the aphorism. When we use it as a synonym for personality, we forget that it is a physical metaphor, from the ancient Greek kharassein, to scratch or carve a furrow. The marks charactered in landscape may be hardwearing as the ramparts of a hillfort or accidental as a tree’s shadow. To an observer of Mackenzie’s reflective temperament, both types signify ‘enduring things’ – archaeological ancientness in one case, the ephemeral brushwork of profound cyclical recurrence in the other. Mackenzie thought of painting as a parallel process; though all painters are revealed in the detail of their mark-making, his artistic personality is notably (and characteristically) concentrated in his. Lines, scratches, abrasions, collage, cuts and cloudy flourishes of rubbed-down pigment re-enact on gesso panels, canvas, parchment or paper landscape’s ‘wild structural’i qualities. In the abstract idiom he practised consistently from the early 1950s until his death in 2002, 8 5 Llan, Gwynedd 1953 Oil On board 15 x 28cm 6 Chapel Street 1954 Oil on Board 12.5 x 54.5cm Mackenzie seems often to be referencing patterns of field walls or hill contours as though they were calligraphy in a lost language, interpretable only through meditation on the marks themselves. Mackenzie said that he thought of his work as ‘paintings first, with landscape elements’,ii but this didn’t stop reviewers placing him firmly in the English landscape tradition. This was a mixed blessing for a young artist around 1960, especially one who was by then associated with Nicholson, Hepworth and the Middle Generation painters of St Ives. ‘In St Ives’, the easily unimpressed young trendspotter Lawrence Alloway quipped ominously as early as 1954, ‘they combine non-figurative theory with the practice of abstraction [i.e. abstracting from observation] because the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out of their art.’iii Lanyon distanced himself from the word landscape’s picturesque connotations 10 7 April-May 1959 Oil on board 42 x 29cm Landscape - artist’s slide, 1979 by talking instead about ‘place’. The more homely ‘countryside’ in Mackenzie’s note is apt too – for him it started as the green hinterland outside his native Liverpool, and his lifelong enjoyment of it was unashamedly that of the twentieth-century, city-bred incomer. It was experienced though weekend rambling around Cornwall, where he took a teaching job in the art department of a Penzance secondary school in 1951, occasional holidays elsewhere, and amateur passions for archaeology and ornithology. Mackenzie’s analytical approach to ‘wild structure’ insulated him from the atavistic mythologizing of the Celtic landscape he could easily have picked up from the charismatic Lanyon or heard expressed with stately fervour by Barbara Hepworth. He saw the cliffs and moorlands of West Cornwall neither as turbulent Romantic heritage nor as neo- Constructivist ecosystem but as layered, resonant surfaces inscribed with meaning. A small work from 1953 in oil and 12 8 Green Red Coast 1959 Oil on board 26.5 x 42.5cm 14 Autumnal Equinox 1959 Private Collection 9 Reclining Dartmoor 1960 Oil on Board 7.5 x 20.5cm collage on board, Still Life (cat.3), shows Mackenzie learning from Nicholson’s formalistic conflation of still life and landscape as well as from Neo-Romanticism’s brooding thorniness, but it asks to be enjoyed primarily for its carefully organised translations of surface texture. In this sort of effect, Mackenzie was tuning in at least as sensitively to developments in post-war European art as to the legacy of pre-war abstraction, with which even self-consciously experimental work by Lanyon, Hepworth, Nicholson, Frost and other artists in West Cornwall was still emotionally entangled. 16 10 July Pool c.1960 Oil on Board 17.5 x 38.5cm 12 Untitled c1960 Oil on board 5 x 15cm ‘The most obvious difference between the art of today and the art of the inter-war period’, wrote David Sylvester in 1955, ‘is that rough surfaces have taken the place of smooth ones … the present age delights in texture and irregularity, exploits the accidental, courts imperfection.’iv He was thinking of Bacon and Giacometti, and we could add the Cobra group, Burri, Rauschenberg or Tápies (the last particularly admired by Mackenzie) – the post-war preoccupation with objectified surface texture can be seen everywhere in the 1950s, as Sylvester noted, across ‘styles ranging from the purely abstract to the naturalistic.’ Although he described paintings here as if they were meant to be touched, the new taste for tactile roughness was in practice satisfied in the viewer’s imagination. In Mackenzie’s painting this interest in the irregular and accidental doesn’t make itself felt in terms of impulsively scrunched hessian collage like Sandra Blow’s or Auerbachian worm-cast impasto but through a steady clairvoyant pressure under 18 13 Cross Current 1961 Oil on board 52 x 37cm above: Granite Tower 1961 Private Collection above right: Granite White/Black 1961 Private Collection 20 15 Untitled, June, 1964 Oil on board 41 x 25.5cm left to right: From Hotel window, Montmartre | Wall Posters | Road out of St. Owen, Road trip 1950 which, as he worked his panels with ink, paint, sandpaper or pencil, depth’s complex textures push against the picture plane like archaeological strata or mistbound rockscapes contemplated through glass. His paintings’ physical finish, even where he used collage, is always as smooth as possible. But though he may have picked up a certain streamlined fastidiousness from Nicholson, the penetrable, organic aura of Mackenzie’s surfaces makes them hard to mistake for anyone else’s. Mackenzie’s eye for structure and surface can be detected well before he found his mature painting idiom in the mid- 1950s, in photographs from the motorcycle trip he took through France and Spain in the summer of 1950, after he finished at art school in Liverpool. From a shot of a Parisian street corner, built around the dynamic tilted T-shape of the junction, you’d guess he had been looking at classic Kertész or Moholy-Nagy. His enjoyment of ripped layers of posters 22 16 Untitled 1965 Mixed media on paper 38 x 58cm top, clockwise: Landscape | Alex asleep in a hayloft at High Wycombe | Town Square, Road trip 1950 and motley typography on the side wall of a provincial French café is more Aaron Siskind. But all the time you can feel Mackenzie wanting to go deeper than the camera will let him. Other snapshots, some pasted together into miniature panoramas, pick out the interplay of horizontal landforms and vertical structures. He noticed the unclassifiable kind of aqueous shadow contained by open windows reflected in still water, an effect many of his paintings reproduce. Some 24 18 Cottages c.1975 Oil on board 18 x 49cm Green (Landscape) Movement 1970 Private Collection images from this trip could translate with little difficulty into drawings he made many years later. A 1984 drawing, Grange Keswick (1984, cat.21), shows his ability to evoke an entire landscape with a gnomic balancing of glyph-like lines. From a visit to Italy in 1989 comes a concise yet lyrical rendering of the Mediterranean fieldscape through shaded-in abstract shapes, animated by inscrutable deputations of Tuscan cypresses. In both snapshots and drawings, people are mostly absent – except when Mackenzie’s travelling companion Jack Derbyshire managed to photograph him unawares, crashed out in a haystack, head down in textured surface. 26 19 Beacon Fell 1977 Oil on board 59 x 84cm 21 Grange Keswick 1984 Oil wash and graphite on paper 33.5 x 40cm ‘I like the contrast between paint and texture,’ Mackenzie reflected in his seventies. ‘I don’t like paint that’s just put on. It has to have an experience of its own.’v The idea that paint needs ‘an experience of its own’ relates to the post-war vogue for texture identified by Sylvester (though few artists could be personally less voguish than Mackenzie); it also sounds – strangely enough - very like Roger Hilton. Both Mackenzie and Hilton used their materials to create a sense of penetrability in the inscribed (or charactered) surface, although in Hilton’s case it wasn’t prehistoric field boundaries and fissured cliffs but unkempt pubic thickets or the wonky geometries of breasts and buttocks that informed 28 20 Chalk, Dorset 28.08.1983 Oil on board 56 x 76cm 24 Guiseniers, 18.12.85 Mixed media on card 20 x 26.5cm the abstract lexicon.

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