Howard Jacobson, the Booker Prize winning novelist, said of Dennis Creffield’s work that it is the ‘exhilaration of the carnal’. Glimpses of this passion can be found even in this early nude painted when the 18 year old Creffield was a student at David Bomberg’s legendary Borough Polytechnic class, alongside Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Of Bomberg’s illustrious students, Creffield is the only one for whom the sensuous pleasure of the flesh are a constant preoccupation.

Text published by Portland Gallery on the occasion of the launch of Dennis Creffield: Art & Life (Lund Humphries), 2022