Exhibitions
John Wonnacott's East Anglian Coast (Wolsey Art Gallery, Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, till 10 May)
Essex man
Martin Gayford
St Ives is not the only spot in the United Kingdom where artists have responded to the sense of place. East Anglia has a much longer history than Cornwall of habitation by painters — Gainsborough, Constable, the Cromes of Norwich, Bawden, Ravil- ious, Cedric Morris. Nor is this tradition dead yet, as is shown by the exhibition John Wonnacott's East Anglian Coast at the Wolsey Art Gallery in Ipswich.
Actually, Wonnacott does not see him- self as an East Anglian artist, he sees him- self as, artistically, an Essex man (Suffolk he considers a trifle weird and foreign). And this topographical precision makes sense in terms of his paintings. The over- riding quality of the esturine fringe of Essex where Wonnacott lives is not, as you might presume, seaside rock and big dippers, but an immense expanse of space.
Opposite Wonnacott's studio, set above the railway line from Fenchurch Street to Southend, a little way past Constable's Hadleigh Castle, the sand, water and mud `Estuary Mud Flats: Girl Leaping' 1986-88 stretch away, billiard-table flat, apparently to infinity. Above that exhilarating immen- sity of earth and sea, there is an even larger quantity of sky, filled with swirls and scuds of cloud. That's the sense, of space zoom- ing away from you further than you ever thought you could see, that you get, time and again from these pictures. It's a feeling that I don't think anyone has ever quite caught before in art, not even the flat-land- scape specialists of 17th-century Holland such as Philips Konnink.
To do so, Wonnacott has developed a virtuosity in wide-angle perspective that would have excited admiration in 15th-cen- tury Florence. That is, of course, in mod- ernist dogma, politically incorrect in the extreme. In this respect, Braque spoke for orthodoxy, when he remarked that, 'the whole Renaissance tradition is antipathetic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspec- tive which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.' But since then `Chalkwell Beach, Floodwater Overflow, Mid-Morning, 1989-92 we've learnt that it takes all sorts to make an artistic world. Wonnacott was brought up in a climate where flat abstracts, not flat landscapes, were the thing to do — he is now in his late fifties — but nonetheless he not only loves those much-derided Renais- sance tramlines, he uses them to deliver novel pictorial sensations (so that must be all right).
True to form, for landscape painters with a strong sense of place, this Thames Estu- ary scenery was the background to his early life. 'I was brought up in the London sub- urbs,' he once told the critic Richard Cork, `but I had a granny who lived just round the corner from here, my grandfather worked a pleasure boat from that beach. I know that estuary. I used to walk all over that mud, those creeks, those riverlets. I know all those strange greeny-purple- greys of the mud, they are as deep a part of my childhood memories as the people I loved.'
Consequently, perhaps, the best pictures in this show are the most personal ones, which deal with the space immediately below his house, covered by strolling walk- ers and playing children, while the clouds make wildly flamboyant abstractions in the sky — the Chalkwell beach series, or 'Estu- ary Mud Flats: Boys Leaping'. The com- missioned series of the abandoned weapons-testing zone on Orford Ness — on the opposite wall — and of Felixstowe Docks, deliver the same sorts of spatial exhilaration, but with a less powerful undertow of feeling.
An unusual, but remarkable painting shows Hadleigh Castle, gnarled and darkly overcast, with children playing around. In `The Place Hotel, Southend' (1983-1997) a different kind of Essex man from Wonna- cott prowls past wearing tattoos, combat fatigues and Doc Martens. The artist is considering adding some killer-dogs, to complete the design. Uccello would have quite understood.
Those who get this magazine promptly have just time to see a strange and interest- ing exhibition of paintings by Victor New- some at the Grosvenor Gallery, 18 Albermarle Street (until 24 April). New- some is also preoccupied with perspective, as can be seen from the tramlines inscribed on the charcoal 'Cartoon of Model Relax- ing'. Furthermore, he paints in egg tem- pera, not a popular medium since the early 16th century.
He is inclined to meticulous depiction of items banal, contemporary and verging on grungy, such as satiny bedspreads, and the covers of paperback books. But in the nudes — especially 'Model Seeking Tobac- co', which is by far the best — there is a hint of that rare thing, a genuinely fresh look at the human body. The model seek- ing tobacco in her handbag is somewhere between a geometric solid in the manner of Piero della Francesca, and the compulsive quirkiness of Stanley Spencer. It's very odd, but rather memorable.
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