PUBLISHED IN DENNIS CREFFIELD: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS OF ORFORD NESS, EXHIBITION CATALOGUE, CONNAUGHT BROWN, 1995
ORFORD NESS IS A REMARKABLE place: a nine-mile spit of shingle south of Aldeburgh, enclosing some marshland: it is a remote, dramatic landscape, to many it is bleak. The natural wildness, the surviving sense of natural wilderness, is made the more provoking by the presence of huge concrete ruins. These are the remains of laboratories constructed to test the trigger mechanisms of the atom bomb in the 1950's and 60's, built in concrete on the flat, desert-like shingle. They are like temples of some ancient civilisation, two indeed are constructed in such a way that they were always known as 'pagodas'. There are also rough wooden huts of the first war, and brick huts of the second. In the first war there was an airfield here, in the 1930's young men in shirt sleeves worked on the first radar and in the 1940's captured German aeroplanes were subjected to experiments into lethality of British firepower. Abandoned for 20 years the buildings on the Ness seem as if they belong to a different world, and are in this landscape pregnant symbols perhaps of the rapidity of technological change in the 20th century, as well as the fragility of man's presence on the land. Such a remarkable landscape requires a remarkable artist to understand and interpret it: Dennis Creffield is such an artist.
The Ness, or 'The Island' as it is known locally was acquired by the National Trust in 1993, as part of the campaign to protect the coastal landscape of Great Britain. The Trust also bravely accepted the responsibility for the awkward and massive 20th Century ruins. Creffield arrived on the Ness on a commission from the Foundation for Art in 1994. The Foundation was set up in 1987 by the National Trust to acquire and commission works of art by contemporary artists, to record the diverse range of the Trust's properties. Creffield spent weeks on the island, camping in a small wooden hut and rising with the dawn. His rapport with the place was immediate and intense, almost mystic.
Eight years old at the outbreak of World War II, he grew up familiar with bombs, bombers and bomb sites. This "familiarity" is what strikes a note of unexpected humanity to these drawings and these paintings, a note of innocence, curiosity, and understanding in what others might think a bleak place. For Creffield's drawings and paintings are not merely illustrative, they are descriptive, visionary poems. They are abstract works, and respond to the incidental abstract qualities of this particular landscape. For landscape it is, the buildings of a military establishment in semi-ruin, overgrown, – overrun with gulls, rabbits and hares – slowly but inevitably returning to nature.
It is a fitting co-incidence that at Orford Ness Creffield had another opportunity to re-interpret a view once painted by Turner, as he had done at Petworth. Turner had painted the view towards the castle and the church from the Ness; ancient buildings, worn by wind and weather, seen across the river Ore as rock-like presences in the landscape. The vivid sunset painted by Creffield introduces a third structure to the line of weathered and monumental buildings: the 1962 AWRE Magazine into which lorries drove loaded with bombs and high explosives. In this painting the sky is heavy with light, the buildings, ancient and modern, seem organic – almost living.
Unusually the interpretation that appears in Creffield's work influenced the Trust in its management of the site. Those of us working on hard management decisions soon discovered that Creffield knew the spirit of this island as it was now, better than anyone, and expressed his knowledge both to us in conversation, and on canvas. Both his drawings and paintings speak to me of one who has absorbed all he can from a place and puts his impressions down in a frenzy of near visionary expression, working rapidly and deftly, capturing mood, moment and the unexpected music of the island which hangs between the calling gulls and the endless wind.