JAKE ATTREE Front Cover 1 from Penistone Hill, Haworth £7,500 Oil on Canvas 102 X 102 Cms 40 X 40 Ins

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.

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