GRAHAM OVENDEN (born 1943)
BROTHERHOOD OF RURALISTS (founded 1975)

It is clearly arguable that the most consistent and important contribution that Britain has made to the world’s artistic endeavours and connoisseurship over the last three centuries has been inspired by a joyous observation of nature, which emerges in all three arts: painting, music and poetry. And this flowering of painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of an intimate and somewhat mystical expression of the humbling beauty of the artists’ rural surroundings echoes the illuminated manuscripts uniquely created in Irish and Northern British monasteries over a thousand years before.

Graham Ovenden is a traditional landscape painter in the sense that he makes no attempt to be avant-garde. In the same fashion, he is a man of his time and his images are unlikely to have been created in any previous era. He is, as were his antecedent muses, at one and at peace with the landscape and awed by its gentleness, its power, its spirituality and in wonder at the poetry within a transient snowflake or its dramatic and overpowering presences. This, in itself, does not make great art. To see and feel deeply is one thing, but to have the gift of the gods and the application to express those feelings in a manner which enhances the life of us mere mortals and draws us deep within our private emotions, is quite another.

For to be gifted one great talent is not nearly enough – in Graham’s case a photographic memory, an ability to absorb a visual moment in time with all its subtleties and detailed nuances, as Turner did - a turn in the light that takes your breath away before, in the blink of an eye, it has been lost forever. No, nor added to that the ability to draw and paint, making poetic marks and lines that form an entity that can be read and felt by all. No, not even enough is it to hear and play and be moved by the most lyrical composers, nor enough again to read and absorb and revel in the poets – for those talents may be held lightly by those that have them, but they are not given to all. Combine all these with an intellectually curious brain and these are still not enough. For it is only consistent dedication and application to the artist’s craft over a lifetime that hones and coalesces these talents into fragile objects of purity, that are imbued with the power to communicate with the viewer to the profoundest level.

Graham calls this process, from conception to completion of a finished painting, alchemy. And I cannot think of a better expression. Making a painting from the first idea, setting down the initial composition in small mono-tonal brushstrokes on a chosen prepared board, and then building the subtleties of mysterious colour balance to reflect a magical moment of atmospheric bliss, to emerge finally over three to nine months later. The paint is laid on with pure glazes, mostly with tiny brushes, using four primary colours of oil paint, but that is not exclusive. There may well be watercolour and almost certainly places where precise draughtsmanship has been laid down in pencil or outlined finely in oil. As the translucent diaphanous layers are laid, over a period of time, one over another they fashion, as in Pre-Raphaelite painting, multicoloured surfaces through which light may pass, to then bounce off the pure white ground, returning to produce, for the viewer, elusively ever changing combinations of colour balance as the quality of daylight brightens and wanes. Each diaphanous glaze must take its time, over a day or more, to dry before another may be applied. But this lengthy process is not as simple as it may seem, for as the layers build they are rubbed back and added to again, not just with brushes, but fingers and other chosen instruments. Throughout the process, moods materialise, are gently tuned, transformed and balanced with other emerging tonalities. Alchemy indeed; a moon may receive ten or more applications of white glazes before it shines with the definitive intensity or the glow of dusk. Light changes with each new application of layered colour, from gentle to misty to mysterious.

Each one of Graham Ovenden’s paintings reflects a differing degree of light and atmosphere; just as those that nature infinitely creates. When we, those that know his work and those that are seduced for the first time, have the privilege of seeing a group of his landscapes, there will always be one to favour our mood and transport us. The evocation of one of these momentary encounters may conjure up an intimate memory, a descriptive passage from Thomas Hardy, a movement by Elgar or a sonnet by Shakespeare. For our perception of nature and its poetic celebration by others must by necessity be interwoven, and these entwined elements are as much part of the lyrical components of Graham’s paintings as is his glory in its actuality. A short conversation with him on Romanticism in Britain and Germany produces a rapid fire check-list interwoven with inspiring commentary:
A E Housman
Wordsworth
Robert Burns
Walter Scott
Thomas Hardy
Richard Jeffries
Gilbert White
George Herbert
Elgar
Vaughan Williams
Frank Bridges
Edmund Rubbra
Peter Maxwell Davis
Benjamin Britten
John Clare
Walton
Percy Grainger
Delius
Henry Purcel
Handel
Denton Welsh
William Morris
Samuel Palmer
William Blake
Blake - Thornton’s Virgil – woodcuts – Corn Laid Waste
Paul Nash
Children’s songs by Walter de la Mare
Starlight Express written by Algernon Blackwood and set to music by Elgar in1913
The rediscovery of Folk culture in1840s and 1850s
Music & songs & dances of Britain and middle Europe
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
High Romanticism
Wagner
Shakespeare and Goethe and Heine’s poems
Goethe: Erlkönig 1782, set to music by Schubert aged 18 in 1815
Loewe
Otto Beamish
Caspar David Friedrich
Rembrandt landscape drawings and etchings
Rubens landscapes
Rysdale
Dürer's Landscape study of water, sky and pine trees (British Museum)
The Book of Kells

And these are only jumping-off points to explore the rich hinterlands of interpretation, influence and counter-inspiration where poetry and reality intermingle. For conversation with Graham Ovenden is always enlightening and revealing. He wears his self-made scholarship lightly and donates it freely and without condescension. To while away a few hours with him is always an enriching delight. I once remarked that when I thought about his out-of-focus edges, where the leafy outline of a tree is seen contra-jour against a gentle evening sky that it reminded me of Vermeer, who’s softly myopic and mysterious interiors result perhaps from previewing his subject in the camera obscura. Whereupon Graham replied by beginning to describe his in depth observations drawn from studying Vermeer’s techniques first-hand. His small studio is always alive with music played from his extensive collection of early recordings, where pastoral symphonic idylls counterpoint with the soulful tones that originated in the sugarcane fields of slavery. The very first 78 recording that he chose for me from his extensive collection was “Careless Love”, a long-held favourite of mine which I first listened to in the 1960s; an extraordinarily perceptive and unprompted choice on his part. However, my version, which I play often, is by Ottilie Patterson & Chris Barber recorded in the late 1950s, whereas his, the original of 1925, is by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.

Early recording is only one of Graham’s scholarly interests. He was one of the first academics with a comprehensive knowledge of the Arts & Crafts movement, from Augustus Pugin to Ernest Gimson, not only revelling in “The Grammar of Ornament”, but its antecedents and influences. His library burgeons with original publications not only on these subjects, but also early photography, his first love. As a young and lauded photographer in the 1960s, he developed the tools of his trade in the darkroom as well as the fresh air. These skills have re-emerged in the new millennium in his use of the computer, where he creates enchanted imagery which materialises as elegiac giclée prints on archival paper or lettered and bound publications, all “hand-made” by the artist.. This contemporary manipulation of his classic photography and draughtsmanship, combining his knowledge of “The Grammar of Ornament” with contemporary design, has spilled back into his more recent landscape painting, where the dreamlike qualities of the landscape are enhanced by a contemporary vision. (Autumn Moonrise 2007)

I had long coveted owning a landscape by Graham Ovenden, from the days when my miserly 1970s Sotheby’s pay failed to stretch that far. In fact my first purchase was his iconic “Ophelia” (1979-81) which I bought in 2000. My wife’s first reaction to this honest and revealing portrait was one of slight shock and incomprehension, which, on better acquaintance, was soon replaced by one of admiration and respect. This is a common initial reaction which many people fail to overcome, for what we require from our greatest artists is a deep dug honesty of thought that we are often in denial of ourselves, such as Lucien Freud’s female nudes, both vulnerable and post-coital. Graham’s young girls, on the other hand, reveal the intermingling of the vulnerability of innocence and the very first learnt behaviour; that of discovering and exploiting the cracks in their parents armour, a determined seductive manipulation of their love and weaknesses. “Ophelia” is all the more initially shocking as its carefully applied Pre-Raphaelite detail and glazes are displayed in the language of contemporary advertising, thus making perhaps too raw and immediate a statement for today’s viewer, who almost certainly expects to be protected by the familiar artificial and sugary language of Victorian genre painting. But perceptive modern statements nearly always take their time to mature in the viewing public’s eyes.

This purchase and the next, a glowing little landscape entitled The Secret Valley, which we covert, lead to our first meeting, and since that time Graham and daughter have enriched our lives on so many levels. Not only do my wife and I intimately live with many of his paintings, but his artistic perceptions and far reaching scholarship have enhanced our appreciation of our own artistic world. And so, in turn, have his fellow Brotherhood of Ruralists: Graham and Anne Arnold, David Inshaw and Peter Blake. Graham Ovenden’s masterpiece, “Sentinels to Paradise” (2002-3), homage to Paul Nash, hangs in our bedroom. It’s inherent and intangible spirituality not so much waxes and wanes, but deepens, enlightens and transforms as the light changes from early morning clarity through evening softness to deep night enigma.

Our world at The Leicester Galleries is populated as thickly as we can make it with symbolist and visionary artists, those whose perceptions, however subtle, travel far beyond the merely decorative, and so Graham becomes not just a perfect piece in the jigsaw, but a real inspiration. We have handled works by Turner, Constable, Palmer and Blake, the Pre-Raphaelites: Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown and their symbolist brothers, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, along with their European Symbolistes counterparts, Gustave Doré, Gustave Moreau, Paul Gauguin, Eugène Carrière, Léon Frédéric and Odilon Redon, the forefathers of the surrealists, who we also handle. Those monumental 19th century British landscape painters who dig so deep into their poetic vision, inspired by “England’s Green and Pleasant Land”, have many followers in the 20th century, but the two giants who stand head and shoulders above their admirable colleagues are Paul Nash in the first half of the century and Graham Ovenden in the second.

In 1975, Peter Blake, Graham and Annie Ovenden, Graham and Ann Arnold, together with David Inshaw and Jann Haworth formed the Brotherhood of Ruralists. They left their urban lives behind for the sanctity of the West Country; a cathartic retreat which mirrored the romantic dream of their Pre-Raphaelite fore-fathers. Each group had sought solace and inspiration from an unspoilt time or place. Each held within their hearts Ruskin’s plea to young artists in the close of Modern Painters: go to Nature… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing. The traditions they idolised were romantic and mystical, with strong literary associations. The Brotherhood of Ruralists instinctively acknowledged the common ethos between their fellowship and that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Both groups were seven young artists, spiritually bound by shared ideals and dreams which they had found themselves unable to cultivate in a climate of rigid academic institution and banal criticism.

In 1976, the Ruralists’ inaugural exhibition was held at the Royal Academy, where a century before Dante Gabriel Rossetti had first laid eyes on Holman Hunt’s Eve of St. Agnes: the spark that led to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the Ruralist exhibition, Graham Ovenden showed his Portrait of Peter and Juliette Blake, a labour of love and his homage to the Ruralists’ vision. Behind the sitters, beyond the brick wall can be glimpsed the magical sweeping hills and fresh spring skies of their ‘mystic arcadia’. Peter’s daughter, Juliette, personifies the ‘girl-child’, which Graham describes as a part of nature, an organic part of nature, and therefore has the same validity as a growing tree. The Ruralists, like the Pre-Raphaelites, placed as much importance upon their figurative work and portraiture as their studies directly from nature. Crucially, Graham Ovenden explains of his figurative paintings, the portrait is the living human organism within it. The environment is only very secondary to the situation.

The Ruralists’ next groundbreaking exhibition, in 1980, was titled Ophelia, a favourite theme shared with the Pre-Raphaelites. The following year the Brotherhood of Ruralists presented a major groundbreaking exhibition which was supported by the Arts Council and travelled to Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow and London. In 1983, the group worked on a project entitled The Definitive Nude, to compliment Peter Blake’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.