JAKE ATTREE front cover 1 From Penistone Hill, Haworth £7,500 oil on canvas 102 x 102 cms 40 x 40 ins

right 2 Pathway Across the Moors Towards Stanbury £2,500 oil on board 1 1 42 x 44 cms 16 ⁄2 x 17 ⁄4 ins

left 3 A Screen of Trees at the Edge of the Wood £4,500 oil on board 1 7 85 x 48 cms 33 ⁄2 x 18 ⁄8 ins

overleaf - opposite title page 4 The Chapterhouse and Great East Window, York Minster from the City Walls £8,500 oil on panel 1 87 x 87 cms 34 x 34 ⁄4 ins

All prices stated will be subject to VAT at 20% JAKE ATTREE

2017

www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545 Jake Attree: The Quiet Relevance of the Apparently Irrelevant

Jake Attree, celebrated for his evocation of cities and landscapes, makes solid the airy castles of inspiration in paintings of rare integrity and depth. He is a formal painter, who values the construction of his painting equally with its subject. Thus he orchestrates stripes or patches of paint in quasi-regular patterns, sometimes deploying them like the tesserae of mosaics, and to this extent his work may be regarded as abstract. Of course, all great art, whether Poussin or Picasso, partakes of both

6 Large Clouds Over the Moors above Haworth £4,500 oil pastel 1 3 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins

5 The Path Over the Moors £4,500 oil pastel 1 3 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins abstraction and representation (it can be persuasively argued that even the most severely geometric of artists, such as Mondrian, base their work in the perceived world), and if the bias in the last century or so has been in favour of abstraction, this is more than likely a mis- reading of a highly complex situation. In fact, the artist and writer Timothy Hyman has recently published a book 7 Pathway Across the Heather £4,500 8 The Path Over the Moors £9,500 entitled The World New Made: Reshaping Figurative oil pastel oil on canvas 1 3 1 Painting in the 20th Century which seeks to redress the 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins 120 x 160 cms 47 ⁄4 x 63 ins balance in favour of figuration. His central thesis is how an artist organises and interprets reality, and this must be as relevant to Jake Attree as it was to Mondrian himself. Attree requires close identification with the subject, and with the making of an interpretation of it. But real knowledge and understanding are not the inevitable result of fact-gathering. No amount of research can produce insight: the raw material must be transformed through the person of the artist, transmuted from reality into art. Attree’s intimate relationship with his subject

10 Baile Hill and the City Wall £3,000 oil pastel on paper 1 5 52 x 65 cms 20 ⁄2 x 25 ⁄8 ins

9 The River and City of York from Baile Hill £3,000 oil pastel on card 3 1 45 x 64 cms 17 ⁄4 x 25 ⁄4 ins is everywhere apparent in the structures, unities and perceptions of his paintings. Yet familiarity does not breed contempt: for the artist, intimacy with a subject is a form of reverence and awe. And as we are shown why a thing 11 Montpelier Parade – Harrogate £3,000 – be it ancient building or hawthorn tree – should be so oil pastel on paper 1 marvellous to look at, so we are made aware of its beauty 54 x 74 cms 21 ⁄8 x 29 ins and the ramifications of that beauty, which resonate with opposite the personality and experience of the artist, raising echoes 12 Moors over Haworth, Storm Passing £7,500 and vibrations with our own preoccupations. For the oil on canvas authority with which Attree paints comes from the inside, 102 x 102 cms 40 x 40 ins from a long-considered and distilled response which clearly surpasses a mere record of the exterior of things. An interesting comparison with Attree’s tessellated surfaces – as may be found, for instance, in some of his Ancient City series – is in the “mosaic” style practised to such potent effect in the 1940s and 50s by the classical surrealist John Armstrong (1893–1973). Like Attree, this blocky divisionism was not Armstrong’s only stylistic strategy, but he employed it in tempera and in oil with

14 Storm over the Moors £3,000 oil pastel 1 3 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins

13 Sunlight and Shadow, Haworth £3,000 oil pastel 1 3 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins great dexterity and vivacity. At its best, this square-brush technique, with its controlled dabs of colour, brings a splendid textural animation to the picture surface, with patches of paint laid down on a darker ground, rather like the bark on a London plane tree. The optical vibration 15 Storm Passing over the Moors £3,000 oil pastel thus set up between ground and surface brings a new 1 3 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins dynamism and luminosity to the imagery. However, Attree doesn’t build his paintings in quite as orderly or regular a way as Armstrong did, and the varying distance opposite between his squares of colour allows greater formal 16 Storm Over the Moors £9,500 flexibility while encouraging a more subtle and individual oil on canvas 1 emotional response on the part of the viewer. 120 x 150 cms 47 ⁄4 x 59 ins Attree himself rejects the influence of mosaics (as did Armstrong, revealingly), and traces this distinctive application of small units of paint to such diverse sources as the ‘magic square’ paintings of Paul Klee, and a thorough immersion in Cezanne, as well as careful study of Rembrandt and Jasper Johns. To which, of course, should be added the pointillism of Seurat. Other key influences and inspirations have been Bruegel, Pissarro and Nicolas de Stael, that great Ecole de Paris artist of

18 The River and the City of York from Baile Hill £4,000 oil on panel 1 64 x 84 cms 25 x 33 ⁄8 ins

17 St George’s Gardens £3,000 oil pastel on greyboard 3 1 45 x 64 cms 17 ⁄4 x 25 ⁄4 ins luscious slabby abstracted paint, not as well known in England today as he was 50 years ago when Attree was growing up. (But very much, in my opinion, due for a revival.) 19 The Wooded Hill £3,000 Attree is knowledgable and eclectic. He’s been oil pastel on grey board 3 1 looking at Constable, for instance, since he was 12 years 45 x 64 cms 17 ⁄4 x 25 ⁄4 ins old, an influence that can be discerned in the potency of his glorious skies. He is very much a Northern opposite European painter, and has stated an affinity with the 20 Storm Haworth £7,500 Belgian Constant Permeke – another artist little-known oil on canvas to the gallery-going English public. Likewise, Bomberg 102 x 102 cms 40 x 40 ins is a key figure for Attree, as can be best seen in his drawing, which similarly recalls the vigorous linearity of Martin Bloch. But he also admires Braque and Morandi, and the tight tonal range of Gwen John. Then again he must have looked closely at the Camden Town painters – and in particular Gilman and Ginner. In his use of deep impasto Attree is close to the School of London painters Auerbach and Kossoff, and perhaps especially to Kossoff. (The density of paint produces a literal sense

22 Distant Horizon, Haworth Under Snow £2,500 oil pastel over watercolour & emulsion 38 x 51 cms 15 x 20 ins

21 Rocky Outcrop at Haworth, Snow £2,500 oil pastel over watercolour & emulsion 38 x 51 cms 15 x 20 ins of weight which in turn implies seriousness of purpose.) But he is also aware of the golden light in some of the Euston Road paintings of William Coldstream or Graham Bell. Through a critical but appreciative awareness of a great breadth of sources, Attree makes something that is entirely his own. The subject has come and gone in Attree’s work. In the past, he has attempted to refine the image out of 23 Early Snow, Haworth £2,500 24 The Waterfall Walk by the Bronte Bridge £9,500 the painting, while (as he says) ‘retaining the emotional oil pastel over watercolour & emulsion oil on panel impact the image initially inspired’. (Like the grin without 38 x 51 cms 15 x 20 ins 120 x 150 cms 47 x 59 ins the Cheshire cat, to recall Lewis Carroll.) So the building or view that inspired a picture might be buried deep in heavily impastoed paint, the marks layered over the figurative beginnings in increasingly minimal and abstract impulses. To look at it from another angle, Attree’s true subject was not the city of York or the moors above Haworth, but his own inner landscape, which could only find expression through the medium of a subject observed in the world around him.

26 Light Passing Across the Landscape (study) £2,200 oil on board 31 x 38 cms 12 x 15 ins

25 Storm Clearing (study) £2,200 oil on panel 31 x 38 cms 12 x 15 ins

Some of Attree’s best works are carried out in oil pastel, a medium which combines the substance of paint with the linear potential of graphite or charcoal, and through which he can readily model in colour and line at the same time. He has devised a method of applying the pastels in layers, which are then fixed and re-worked, building up a depth of pigment that begins to resemble what he more expectedly achieves in paint. His work is 27 Storm Over the Moors (study) £2,200 28 Large Clouds Over the Moors Above Haworth £9,500 founded upon the primacy of drawing, and it is through oil on panel oil on canvas 1 pencil or charcoal studies that he will first begin to explore 31 x 38 cms 12 x 15 ins 120 x 160 cms 47 ⁄4 x 63 ins a subject that fascinates him. The activity of drawing is not a display of skill or autobiographical memoranda, rather it is a perpetual struggle between what the artist feels in response to a subject (and understands by it), what he newly sees (each time something slightly different), and what he is currently capable of expressing. His thoroughly worked surfaces might be seen as some kind of equivalent for the medieval stonework of an old minster town, yet he also paints the surrounding

30 Quarry at Penistone Hill £3,500 oil on panel 1 51 x 59 cms 20 x 23 ⁄4 ins

29 Hawthorn Tree £2,500 oil on board 1 1 42 x 44 cms 16 ⁄2 x 17 ⁄4 ins air and light in the same calm and solid manner. This 31 Bracken and Heather £4,500 is his vehicle, his mode of painting, his language. It is oil on panel not an equivalent but a means of conveying knowledge, 59 x 86 cms 23 x 34 ins intuition, passion. Although Attree’s approach is opposite deliberately unemotional on the surface (and thus 32 An Extensive View Across an Ancient City £9,500 intendedly drained of autobiography), it is nevertheless oil on panel 3 3 rich in hidden meanings. His working method is also a 121 x 121 cms 47 ⁄4 x 47 ⁄4 ins metaphor for memory, and the ways in which it acts on direct experience – events are elided, inessentials discarded, details edited out. A painting is the product of hundreds of distinct moments of looking, all of which inform it, though no single one could be said to be the actual trigger for it. In the more obviously landscape paintings, Attree often features a number of trees – say five or ten – which are also five or ten strong vertical accents with which to

34 Weeping Aspen, St George’s Gardens £3,000 oil pastel on greyboard 1 3 64 x 45 cms 25 ⁄4 x 17 ⁄4 ins

33 York Minster from the City Walls £1,200 3 1 graphite 38 x 54 cms 14 ⁄4 x 21 ⁄4 ins construct an essentially geometric composition. He has a powerful impulse towards the rectilinear, but needs also a balancing emphasis on sensual tactility. Building brushstroke on brushstroke, solid and tangible, his is a direct engagement with the physical stuff – the coloured mud - of paint. His paintings have an all-over quality, the surfaces activated from edge to edge, packed with mark and texture. For instance, look at his snow paintings. Snow reveals the structure of landscape in a different way: accentuating some forms, draping and disguising 35 Bradford £2,000 36 The Minster’s Central Tower £6,500 others, rearranging emphasis and balance in an charcoal oil on board 3 3 1 extension of a place’s identity. Suffused with snow-light, 60 x 78 cms 23 ⁄4 x 30 ⁄4 ins 72 x 91 cms 28 ⁄8 x 36 ins these paintings emphasise Attree’s habitual stillness and quietude of image, while introducing something of the pregnant mystery of Caspar David Friedrich. The most recent landscape paintings plumb a new vein of lyricism, not just essaying the storm-tossed top moors, but a wider seasonal remit of light on verdure, with the russets of autumn varying the greys of winter. Attree has long had a feeling for the red/green polarity, but a new range of vernal greens and combinations of less-expected colours

38 The Edge of the Path, Snow £2,200 oil pastel over watercolour & emulsion 38 x 51 cms 15 x 20 ins

37 The Waterfall Walk by the Bronte Bridge £4,200 oil pastel 1 1 52 x 69 cms 20 ⁄2 x 27 ⁄4 ins enlighten his paintings of looking across the moors. Several of these spacious pictures feature bracken or heather, seen usually from high viewpoints under big skies. We feel we can see for miles. Sometimes, for contrast, Attree brings us up short against what appears to be a sheer rock face, as in the powerful painting Quarry at Penistone Hill. Equally impressive is another sculptural image, Stones on the Moor. These new paintings add an extra dimension to Attree’s 39 Penistone Hill Near Haworth £4,250 40 Beacon Hill from North Bridge, Halifax £7,500 achievement: a warmer side of the landscape which is yet oil pastel oil on board 1 3 1 1 just as intransigent and unyielding as it ever was. 52 x 78 cms 20 ⁄2 x 30 ⁄4 ins 82 x 105 cms 32 ⁄4 x 41 ⁄4 ins Attree has a need to state things as they are rather than dramatising them. He says: ‘I like to think they are considered, contemplative paintings that speak about revealing apparently prosaic moments.’ And he goes on: ‘One of the things I like to think the paintings convey is the quiet relevance of the apparently irrelevant.’ This is the key to Attree’s work: not only does he revel in the unassuming and overlooked, he creates a fabulous but low-key apotheosis of the ordinary. As poetry is

42 Looking Across the Moor £2,200 oil pastel 3 1 43 x 56 cms 16 ⁄4 x 22 ⁄8 ins

41 Fulford Ings £2,500 oil on canvas 1 5 39 x 50 cms 15 ⁄2 x 19 ⁄8 ins everywhere for those capable of finding it, so are subjects for paintings. Jake Attree finds both and moulds them into cool, calm episodes of deep reflection: paintings which are powerhouses of thought and feeling which will continue to give out energy and inspiration long after the work of more flashy contemporaries has exhausted itself and lost all relevance. 43 Pathway Over the Moors Towards Stanbury £2,200 44 Storm Passing Over the Moor £5,000 Andrew Lambirth oil pastel oil on panel Writer and art critic 1 1 42 x 60 cms 16 ⁄2 x 23 ⁄2 ins 61 x 81 cms 24 x 32 ins 46 Figures Beneath the West Door II £4,500 oil on panel 7 61 x 71 cms 23 ⁄8 x 28 ins

45 The Pale Tower II £6,500 47 York Minster: Five Figures £4,500 48 The Pale Tower £9,000 oil on panel oil on panel oil on board 5 1 1 1 1 122 x 60 cms 48 x 23 ⁄8 ins 67 x 75 cms 26 ⁄8 x 29 ⁄2 ins 80 x 120 cms 31 ⁄2 x 47 ⁄8 ins 2003 Bruton Gallery, New York 1995 City Art Gallery, Hartlepool Hart Gallery, London 1994 RIBA “Site Gallery”, Leeds (two 2002 39 Essex Street, London exhibitions) 2000 Bruton Gallery, Leeds 1993 Leeds Centenary Exhibition – Leeds Cartwright Hall, Bradford University Gallery; “A City Made Dean Clough, Halifax Visible” – Leeds City Art Gallery 1999 Huddersfield Art Gallery 1990 Cadogan Contemporary Art, London The View Gallery, Liverpool 1989 “Exchanges” – Kunstlerhaus, Mid-Pennine Arts, Burnley Dortmund; “Art ‘92” – Generals Huis, 1998 Michael Richardson Contemporary Maastricht Art, Art Space Gallery, London 1987 New Grafton Gallery, London Batley Art Gallery, West Yorkshire 1986 Thackeray Gallery, Kensington Square, 1997 National Lotteries Charities Board, London (also in 1985 and 1984) London 1985 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1996 New York Paintings and New York (also in 1975) Drawings, Dean Clough, Halifax (two 1984 GLC Spirit of London Exhibition exhibitions) (Highly Commended) “City Visions”, Leeds City Art Gallery 1982 Serpentine Gallery, London – Summer JAKE ATTREE Michael Richardson Contemporary Show 1 Art, Art Space Gallery, London Born: 13 October 1950 1994 Michael Richardson Contemporary COLLECTIONS Art, Art Space Gallery, London 1974–1977 Royal Academy of Arts York Art Gallery; Bradford Museums & Dean Clough, Halifax Creswick Prize (Landscape) Galleries; Leeds City Council; City of 1991 Leader’s Office, Civic Hall, Leeds Landseer Prize (Figure) Dortmund; Hartlepool City Art Gallery; (Loan Exhibition) David Murray Scholarship Sheffield University Fine Art Society; 1990 Sheffield University Art Tower Bronze Turner Medal Calderdale Museums & Galleries; Paintings in 1968–1971 Liverpool College of Art Selected Mixed and Two-Person Exhibitions Hospitals; Nuffield Trust, London; Provident 1966–1968 York School of Art 2015 ‘Elemental North’, Messums, London. Financial, Bradford 2012 Views of York, Fairfax House, York Private and corporate collections in Great 2008 Meyer Brown, London EXHIBITIONS Britain, USA, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Selected One-Person Exhibitions London Art Fair Germany and Sweden 2017 Messum’s, London 2007 39 Essex Street, London 2013 Messum’s, London 2006 Collyer Bristow, London; Dean Clough 2012 Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden Halifax (Curator’s Choice) opposite Hester Gallery, Leeds 2002 Bonhams, Leeds (Hart Gallery Show) 49 Ancient City II £3,500 Hartlepool Art Gallery 2001 Bruton Gallery, Leeds (London and oil pastel 3 3 2011 Hart Gallery, Islington Leeds) 60 x 60 cms 23 ⁄4 x 23 ⁄4 ins New Schoolhouse Gallery, York 1999 Rowe & Maw, London 2010 Huddersfield Art Gallery 1997 Northern Light: The Ninth Provident back cover 2009 Hart Gallery, Islington Financial Triennial Exhibition George Smith, Chelsea (Banqueting Hall, Whitehall) 50 Hope Hill from Saltaire £4,500 Shadbolts Solicitors – Loan Exhibition 1996 Hull, St Katherine’s Dock Development; oil on board 3 3 2008 Dean Clough, Halifax The Crescent, Scarborough 81 x 81 cms 31 ⁄4 x 31 ⁄4 ins 2007 Winchester College Hart Gallery, Islington Manor House, Ilkley ISBN 978-1-910993-13-2 Publication No: CDXXII 2006 York Minster, Inaugural Exhibition CDXXII Published by David Messum Fine Art for Creation: Artists working for York © David Messum Fine Art Minster All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, 2005 Hart Gallery, London electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and 2004 Dean Clough, Halifax (Retrospective) retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell Printed by DLM-Creative Messum’s 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545 www.messums.com [email protected]