Form and Fabric

'TO THEM HOWARDS END was a house;' E.M. Forster wrote, 'they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir.' Of course those spirits are around us still, and the testimony both of English art and English literature confirms that the house, the church, even the smallest dwelling place, represents the eternal transaction between man and the earth. Dennis Creffield is part of that tradition and all of his work affirms what used to be called genius loci, but which can be less mythologically rendered as the spirit of place. His wonderful drawings of the English cathedrals, for example, displayed his veneration for those great bodies of stone - 'body' being the appropriate word here since, as he himself explained, he was intent upon 'the reconciling of geometry with the organic'. These vast fabrics of stone live again in his charcoal drawings, and in so doing emphasise an important truth - that to have a sense of place is also to have a sense of history. The artist stands before the great churches and, in that moment when he reveals their instantaneous shape upon paper, he becomes part of a larger process; to paraphrase the German mystic, Jacob Boehme, he discloses time in eternity, as well as eternity in time.

Dennis Creffield is in that sense part of a continuing inheritance, and it is intriguing to learn that he sketched inside Westminster Abbey when he was a young man. This was also the site of William Blake's apprenticeship, and we can see in Creffield's work the same instinct towards a religious, almost a medieval, vision. But he is also attached to a more accessible English tradition; there are artists like Cotman, Girtin, Cozens and Constable, who have been drawn to the qualities of stone, to the textures of houses, to the surfaces of cathedrals, to the harmonies of a building in a landscape. Creffield can also be seen as part of the antiquarian tradition in England, which itself leads back to the great Gothic builders of our race and eventually, perhaps, to the masons of Stonehenge who made stone their god and therefore saw God in the stone.

But this is to stretch history into legend, when there are far more important resemblances closer to hand. Dennis Creffield's paintings of Petworth and its park may be seen on one level as a 'homage' to Turner, but only in the spirit that animates all of Creffield's work – that the artist's vision is a collaboration between past and present, between the living and the dead painter. The great floods of colour and the bright tonality continue Turner's own fantastic ceremonies of light, but in Creffield's painting there is always the sense of the house and its land as organic, breathing forms. In his recent drawings of Brimham Rocks he demonstrates his affinity with the very texture of the earth, and in these paintings of Petworth he reveals the same concern for form and for fabric - the form of the house, the form of the land, the form of that moment when house and land meet to become an expression of the same spirit. That is why his paintings of Petworth Park are filled with a sense of the English landscape – their rhythms, their gentle curves, their luminosity, express an almost religious fervour. They are, in the proper sense, a revelation.

Yet this need not be a solemn or portentous undertaking, and in Creffield's paintings there is a great vivacity combined with exuberance; he becomes one with the fabric of the house or the land, and so can reveal its permanence in that moment of celebration when he puts paint upon the canvas. Note, in particular, how he manages to convey that light which seems to surround the old house; it is as if time were accustomed to it, and rested a little. So we return to Howards End and the house as 'spirit'. Dennis Creffield has himself quoted Wittgenstein's aphorism that architecture 'expresses a thought'. It is the triumph of these paintings that, here, the spirit and the thought are so beautifully aligned.