Expressing the Inexpressible

I’m sure it is not my worst shortcoming, but it may be the one that grieves me most: I simply cannot draw. Something in this business of squinting at the world and making appropriate marks on paper eludes me. At school, I was mortified by art classes in the way that others shuddered at the thought of Games. And when I came to have my own children, their touching faith that I would be able to draw a cat or a pig or a cow could induce an almost tearful sense of inadequacy.

I think this is one reason why I am fascinated by books about painters and painting. What is it that these people do, and how on earth do they do it? For me, the book that has come closest to offering an answer is Christopher Neve’s Unquiet Landscape (1990), a short study of modern British landscape painters. Since its first appearance it’s become one of those subterranean classics – the sort that reviewers mention mostly in passing, but so often, and so intriguingly, that you finally give in and order a copy. (And if you are moved to do so, I’d advise you buy the 2020 second paperback edition since it includes additional material and a generous selection of colour plates.) Neve is a painter himself, as well as a critic and novelist, so his engagement with his subject is at once practical and philosophically probing. He has the professional’s concern with technique and the physical circumstances in which artists work, but he is also fascinated by issues of personality and belief. On perhaps its deepest level, this is a book about psychology – human psychology in all its complexity and pathos: his own summary is ‘a short book about thought and what it is like to paint’. In a preface to the second edition Neve describes how the book was seeded, quite casually, when he worked at Country Life in the 1960s. As his duties were not onerous – he was required to produce a short weekly piece on art – he would often cycle or take the train to meet artists of the older generation in their own landscapes. In this way he befriended Robin Tanner in his bucolic Wiltshire valley, Cedric Morris in Suffolk, and Ivon Hitchens in the patch of Sussex woodland he painted obsessively for forty years. Neve seems to have realized that he had the materials for a book only decades later, when most of the artists he’d met were dead. Although his painters could hardly have been more various, Neve noticed that they had one thing in common: a powerful aversion to saying anything direct about their work:

Alan Reynolds liked to talk about Debussy and bicycle racing . . . William Townsend spoke of hop-stringing and geometry. Henry Moore showed me mostly bones and shells . . . Robin Tanner talked about botany and lettering and Time. Edward Burra, towards the end of his life, began to swear and use obscene language in order to avoid speaking about any kind of art, especially his own. Some would go further: Winifred Nicholson’s obsessions being rainbows, prisms and wildflowers, the conversation very often turned to them. She was not above lightening the mood by wearing a hat she had made out of a wicker wastepaper basket with silver milk-bottle tops sewn on to it.

The artists all seemed terrified of putting whatever it was they did into words; partly from a feeling that this might not be possible, but also from a fear that the words would become a distraction. Indeed, Ben Nicholson told Neve that he disliked any kind of art writing, because it ‘interrupts’ the pictures. Rather awkwardly for a critic, Neve seems to share these misgivings, having a fierce distaste for what he calls the ‘ludicrous Esperanto of art history’. Indeed, he often seems paralysed by the problem of saying anything remotely sensible about painting. ‘Pictures are impossible to write about correctly,’ he declares, and variants of this phrase recur with disarming frequency. That this calls his whole project into question does not escape him: ‘You could say that this book is pointless,’ he shrugs near its close. That the book is very far from pointless is due mainly to Neve’s panache and precision as a writer. His artists’ tacit agreement that the best way to talk about art is usually to talk about something else seems to have spurred him to indirect strategies, based mainly on metaphor and analogy. For all his suspicion of language, Neve finds words that are wonderfully (if mysteriously) equivalent to the works he is discussing. For example:

Paul Nash’s places have in common a dumb brightness and a sense of concealment. He had an orderly mind and a consistent view of the world that was part poetry and part graphic design . . . when you look at his pictures you cannot escape the curious sensation that what they are doing is covering something up.

Writing like this challenges you to go back and test the words against the pictures – and if you do so you will find yourself nodding in bemused agreement. ‘Dumb brightness’ captures one aspect of Nash perfectly, as does the suggestion that he is performing a kind of reverse archaeology (‘covering something up’).

Neve’s chapter on Eric Ravilious is full of this sort of thing: At first he can look almost natty, not so much light-hearted as lightweight, and then you begin to see that all his drawings are compact and strong in much the same way that a kite is light and strong. However airy and amused his arrangements, they are also spare and complete.

I count ten separate adjectives here, and my editor’s pen begins to twitch – but each pinpoints something essential about Ravilious, and they all pull together to create a tension and uplift – a bit like that kite.

There is also this, which seems both acute and, in the light of Ravilious’s early death, moving: His whole approach to landscape reminds me of the sensation I had when waking as a child in someone’s unfamiliar spare bedroom and looking very closely at the wallpaper for the first time. The pleasures of his watercolours are those of feeling well, of being young, and seeing for once, absolutely clear-eyed . . .

Throughout, there are terse, gnomic summings-up of artists and their works that could hardly be improved. The paintings of John Nash are described as being ‘unruffled by temperament’ – an odd phrase that will nevertheless strike a chord with anyone who loves them. Of Ivon Hitchens we read that he ‘instinctively drew the air and light that vibrates in the interstices of a view rather than the view itself’. By contrast, the paintings of Cedric Morris ‘seem to have been pulled from the earth like vegetables’. Neve finds something new and interesting to say about every one of his twenty or so artists. But there is a lot more to the book than this. With its evocation of landscapes from the South Downs to the coast of north-east Scotland, it is also a magnificent work of ‘place writing’ (as we have learned to call it) and can be enjoyed purely as such. The book is a hymn to what Neve terms ‘the small exoticisms of the English landscape’. He rises to a Ruskinian eloquence when contemplating the taut lines of the fields in the Cornish moors above Zennor, the sea inlets of West Wales (‘boats at low tide seem to be lolling on mown lawns’), or the prospect of the Irthing Valley in Cumbria, ‘like a receptacle for hoarding the sky’:

Southwards from Hadrian’s Wall, fields fall into a river valley so generous that it acts as an enormous reservoir for light . . . On days when even the shade heats up and shadows are short and blue, sun drives the colour from the fields with their moisture, and stone walls give back a silvery light . . . Very often the great space is entirely full of altering mist which traps light and turns it slowly as if examining it. There is lemon light and violet . . . When the mist clears there are acres of blue air and radiance as far as the distant fells.

He reads the landscape with a painter’s eye, stressing its overt or hidden geometries, its subtleties of light and colour. In structuring his book, Neve draws a distinction between those artists who devoted themselves to the quiddity of a particular place, like Stanley Spencer at Cookham or Paul Nash at Wittenham Clumps, and those who used landscape as grist for an essentially religious or personal vision. Of the latter, he seems most intrigued by Winifred Nicholson (she of the wastepaper-basket hat). An adherent of Christian Science, Nicholson believed that light and colour were literally emanations of the divine, and the luminous beauty of her work inspires some of Neve’s most ecstatic prose:

She knew that lilies which are white and hold their breath in the daytime are blue and pungent at night. She did her best to paint the snow of stars, far thunder, dusk when moths fall in flight . . . dawn light between curtains and the hellebore beneath the snow.

In brutal contrast, if equally brilliant, is his chapter on Edward Burra, whose landscapes express an almost hysterical sense of dread. Burra’s England is a despoiled realm in which something awful is always about to happen:

the Weald seen from above, bulging like the bottom of a boy scout on a bicycle . . . Dartmoor ready to murder lost hikers; the Lake District with its knees up under the wet viridian blanket; an industrial town itching the lap of a valley . . . hills in Snowdonia like the stockinged heads of criminals . . . Everywhere there are the giant teeth of broken viaducts, dizzy quarries, white cauliflowers of smoke.

Unquiet Landscape will give anyone – even an artistic non-starter like me – a sense of how it must feel to stand before a small piece of the world and try to wrestle it on to canvas or paper. But if it helps to elucidate the mysteries of the creative process, it does little to resolve the perhaps greater mystery of our response to art. Why do these paintings, often of quite ordinary places on quite ordinary days, work on us as they do? Neve’s answer seems to be that, more than any other genre, landscape painting can arouse in us a sense of our relation to the outside world and to time: ‘Landscape painting has always been about what it is like to be in the world and in a particular condition . . . on a day like, and yet entirely unlike, any other.’ Although a painting, unlike a book or a piece of music, is always a physical record of the process by which it was made, the finished work presents a continuous moment. Art has the power to capture the ephemeral and to put it beyond the power of time and change:

Only very good paintings can catch this thistledown, this biscuit-coloured dust hanging in a shaft of the sun . . . Why does it move us? I think because we sense such moments all around us but seldom remain still enough to see them . . . oil paint is quiet enough to stop a falling leaf, hold a bird in the air or a dog in the park or a moon in a pond.

Ultimately and most poignantly, Neve’s subject is the human imagination in its transactions with the natural world. This puts his book in the central tradition of English Romanticism, but you will look in vain for any Wordsworthian consolation. For all its beauty, the landscape remains unnervingly alien, indifferent to any meaning we would impose: Love it lifelong and not one blade of grass will change direction because of our feelings. The land will entrance us and in the end will bury us, with impartiality. If it seems to have great beauty, that is because of what we are, not because of what it is . . . The birds have stopped singing in the lost lands. The unquiet country is you.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Jonathan Law 2023