Dennis Creffield

There are three letters from Dennis Creffield to Ruth Borchard, sent from Leeds in 1964. Ruth noted that she paid £20 for his self-portrait. Creffield's third letter reads: 'Thank you for buying my painting (I hope it continues to wear well) and for showing me your collection. I enjoyed the afternoon [he visited her in Reigate]'; he then went on to give her the London address of Mario Dubsky (q.v.).

Dennis Creffield was born in south-east London in 1931; his father was a mechanic; he was close to his mother, who was in domestic service, and was distraught when evacuated to Cornwall during the Second World War. His self-portrait in oils is signed and dated 1959; the artist was then a twenty-eight year-old student at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied from 1957-61. Creffield had been fortunate to attend David Bomberg's painting classes at the Borough Polytechnic in London from 1948-51 – introduced to these by his fellow artist Cliff Holden. In 1988 Creffield remarked: 'Thank God, I was brought to study with David Bomberg when I was only sixteen, and he made me realise that you don't have to think things up, that one lives in a world of imagination.' The self-portrait is strongly inspired by the influence of Bomberg without being at all derivative. It is a distinctly personal picture, conjuring up a distinguished, youthful, floppy-haired figure of gentle dignity, warmth and a certain shyness or, perhaps rather, immense sensitivity. Its curiously evanescent, indeterminate features are encompassed within a robustly modelled head, above a vigorously defined neck and solid though slender shoulders. The exaggerated form of the top and back of the head in contrast to the compacted delicacy of the much-occluded facial features may put the viewer in mind of the stylised sculpted and painted heads of Modigliani. The picture's colours are muted within the scope of an earthy, ochre-ish palette with a good deal of white used to help evoke radiant, pinkish flesh tones. Though muted, the colours are not at all dispiritingly drab – there is a delicious golden quality to the painting. It seems to be the case that he is seen here as a rather dapper figure – the two broad, criss-crossed, dark brown brushstrokes below the neck appear to represent a bow-tie above a white shirt (the same surf-like tones more or less as those on his face), and it seems as if he is wearing a jacket too – though of course in such a non-naturalistic painting, that may not be the case at all. The figure has a robust sculptural quality all of its own - gracefully imposing and not at all intimidating – as though the figure has perhaps been carved out of limestone.

As a teacher Bomberg rejected the traditional English academic approach – which he described once as 'corruption in the name of Drawing – the "hand and eye" disease'. Instead, he encouraged draughtsmanship where, as he said, 'the hand works at high tension and organises as it simplifies, reducing to bare essentials, stripping all irrelevant matter obstructing the rapidly forming organisation which reveals the design. This is the drawing.' Certainly, Creffield's self-portrait strips away all irrelevancies, revealing the pure spirit of the artist's essential still-youthful self: a warm, gentle, reticent though still assured, incisively searching presence.

Creffield has recalled Bomberg's oddly informal, inspiring teaching: 'a curious situation – classes within an art school but not of it – no diploma or exams. You paid – or didn't – a small fee, simply to work with him. Of course the authorities didn't care for this... the schools taught a debased academicism, and were repressive to innovation. So his classes were a beacon to people of spirit – they found there purposive seriousness and encouragement. He was also ill at the time, and it's been suggested that he felt he might not have much time left for painting. True or not, that was the spirit in which he taught – giving everything that he knew and loved – holding nothing back, to a degree that can have rarely been paralleled.'

Another 1959 self-portrait in oils by Creffield has a more elongated head and neck, and the palette is predominantly browns, blacks, lilacs and purple; the features, just discernible, are as occluded as in the Borchard Collection self-portrait – the overall impression is less of a dapper, spirited if spiritually secretive young man than of a pacific, even prophetic presence wise beyond his years, the luminous intelligence of his face shining out from the surrounding contoured darkness. A self-portrait in charcoal from the same year, more literally 'readable' and precisely linear than the contemporaneous self-portraits in oils, shows delicate, sharply sculpted features taut with concentration.

In 1952 Dennis Creffield exhibited alongside fellow Bomberg pupils Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden and Peter (later known as Miles) Richmond in a critically well-received show in Stockholm entitled 'Four Englishmen' (sic); however no works sold. Creffield and Mead stayed on in Sweden for a while before moving to Spain, returning to England in the mid-50s; Holden thereon made Sweden his lifelong home.

Following Creffield's death in 2018, his friend the writer Philip Dodd wrote, 'In 1957, Creffield entered the Slade School of Art, as a ‘mature and arrogant young man’, in his own words. He made a memorable set of paintings and drawings of London from Greenwich as well as a substantial body of work that was in terms of its subject religious [he had become a Catholic on his return to England]. The year he left the Slade he not only won two of its prizes (awarded by William Coldstream) but also a prize at the John Moores painting exhibition. The year afterwards he was awarded the prestigious Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University where he met and established a close bond with the poet Peter Redgrove [referring to his appreciation of the latter's company, Creffield said, 'Everything was transposed into magic.'] He painted the city over and over again, work that connected with the earlier London paintings. He had married [Diane Clutterbuck, nicknamed] Dilly in London and she joined him in Leeds.' (The Daily Telegraph Obituary of the artist (14th July 2018) notes; 'His first marriage to... "Dilly", with whom he had seven children, broke down. He had five more children by other women. But for the last 20 years he found happiness with Theresa Roche, whom he married last year. She survives him as do four sons and seven daughters. Another daughter predeceased him.')

'His next move was transformative – he went to Brighton and said ‘I was enraptured by the light and movement’ [he had a third floor flat overlooking beach and pier]. After the ‘inland airlessness’ of London and Leeds, ‘I was in Brighton in the 70s. I had been such an intense young man, serious measured and earnest’. ‘I discovered the delights of women in a new way.’

'There is no doubt that from this time on there was a new Creffield, the brushstrokes more various and where appropriate lush, the subject matter now extended to the erotic (he made a painting called ‘The Geography of Love’, inspired by a John Donne poem; another set of Love Paintings were the subject of an AIR Gallery show).'

Dodd also noted that 'In truth Turner became more of a presiding presence for Creffield (than Bomberg) from the time he moved to Brighton where he taught at the Brighton Polytechnic until he left when he was fifty years old. Turner had painted Brighton Pier as did Creffield, there were a set of Creffield  Petworth paintings and drawings that were a response to the landscape and to Turner. Of course Turner had also made work of some but not all of the English cathedrals.'

In Creffield's later work – notably his charcoal drawings, such as his Archaic Figure Studies (1986 and 1989) evoking Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; his series depicting English cathedrals (made 'from February to November 1987 [when] I drove all over England in a motor caravan'); dozens more studies of French cathedrals (made in 1990); his studies of Orford Ness ('a nine-mile spit of shingle south of Aldeburgh' in Suffolk, according to the catalogue of his 1995 show at Connaught Brown, London); his multi-faceted drawings of a dome-headed William Blake for his 2011 exhibition, Dennis Creffield. Jerusalem, at James Hyman Fine Art, London, exploring how deeply William Blake’s poem Jerusalem had inspired him over the years ('In Creffield’s incredible pictures made from the life-mask of William Blake, the subject changes before our eyes: young then old, animate then subdued, dashing then downcast, strong then weak,' in James Hyman's own words') –his hand evidently worked at speed, simplifying all the time to reveal the elemental design, so that it can truly be affirmed in each case (using Bomberg's own phrase). 'This is the drawing.'

Philip Dodd captures something of the cosmopolitan, sometimes arcane erudition of Creffield's visionary orientation when he says that he 'was like Blake, an English radical in love with an England which was part of a wider world (the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ paintings drew on Cycladic sculpture; Rilke was an abiding feature of his imagination).'

Creffield's marvellously variegated cathedral drawings - each inextricably containing, like his early self-portrait, both lucid muscular structure as well as an abstracted quality of immateriality – may be called, in the truest sense, portraits. And as portraits of individual cathedrals – as well as diverse aspects of individual cathedrals – each work is quite startlingly unique: some, for example, gracefully etherial in atmosphere, others broodingly dense and sombre with some sparkling high notes; some playfully lyrical and delicate in structure; others monumentally and sonorously architectonic. Great medieval cathedrals are, as he acknowledges, 'almost impossible to draw'; this fact he found an inspiring challenge rather than an impediment. People may be similarly hard to draw, yet the true, gifted draughtsman intuitively recognises the sublime, sensuous and dynamic qualities each person uniquely possesses – as well as the elemental core of each individual – just as he or she recognises those singular qualities in the innate structure and primal, truly gestural presence of a great cathedral.

An admirer of Wittgenstein's saying, 'Architecture is a gesture', Creffield wrote:

          By gesture (I mean) the significant stance that characterises and

          identifies people and things. Van Gogh remarks that we can identify an

          acquaintance from a great distance because we recognise their

          stance. We recognise familiar trees, and animals in the same way. (This

          is not simply shape – the gesture is an animate principle.)

          Each cathedral is a gesture – I respond with my gesture and the

          drawing is a mutual embrace. (And the marriage of two minds.)

In his essay, 'Creffield's Cathedrals', for the 1991 catalogue for the exhibition, 'French Cathedrals: Drawings by Dennis Creffield' at London's Albemarke Gallery, Richard Cork acknowledged that the artist was 'doubtless fired by the realisation that his teacher, David Bomberg, drew Notre Dame, Chartres and other cathedrals on a similar trip in 1953. Although these precedents (that is, Bomberg's example as well as the two years Creffield himself had already spent making a series of drawings devoted to all of England's twenty-six medieval cathedrals) buoyed him up, Creffield did not underestimate the difficulties confronting him. Driving through the cemetery-strewn battle regions of northern France from one motif to another, he came to feel like a war artist striving to fulfil a particularly nerve-wracking commission. The vicissitudes of climate accentuated the sense of strain, for Creffield on this trip was haunted by greyness and persistent rain. So his French drawings are about the weather as well as the architecture. Far more than in in his English series, the exteriors of the cathedrals seem to be invaded at every turn by dramatic shifts in visibility. They intensify the pervasive mood of excitement, generated and sustained by an artist who did his best to regard each new drawing as an unpremeditated event.'

Creffield's bold imaginative approach, which utterly eschewed the tradition of academic 'copyism' in favour of what he said  'was entirely what Bomberg’s teaching was: "You structure your experience. What you experience is what you should paint." I remember him saying it.’ – is well and most intuitively summed up in another of his statements: 'I don’t look at the drawings while drawing. I simply smell, listen and respond to them.'