Review, ‘English Cathedrals: drawings by Dennis Creffield’, published in times literary supplement, 1988
TO THOSE OF US USED to consuming our cathedrals in the form of National Heritage postcards and calendars, Dennis Creffield's large charcoal drawings may come as a shock. At one moment his cathedrals are light and linear, suspended within the paper; at the next they become dark and massive, rubbed and smeared into palpability. The format can seem barely large enough to contain them. They are uncompromisingly material constructions which can also be as evanescent as the weather; detailed and generalized, rectilinear or awkward, angular and always dynamic, they are creatures in their own right like figures drawn by Goya. Yet Creffield's approach to his project is as precise as it is intuitive.
The show is the outcome of an unusual and imaginative Arts Council commission, which enabled the artist to fulfil a life's ambition and, within the space of a year, draw all twenty-six English medieval cathedrals something no artist has done before. Like Cézanne, to whom he owes his greatest debt, Creffield seeks the particular within the characteristic, an operation which, if it is to work, requires integration on several levels of experience and understanding. It is a constantly renewed effort to find form or style; a process of discovering the characteristic viewpoint through which to be able to grasp the particular character of the motif. In every case, Creffield must come to terms with the fact that this character is locally and historically determined, a fact which, in the drawings and in his catalogue notes (Drawings by Dennis Creffield: English Cathedrals. The South Bank Board. £4.50. 1 85332 019 6), he approaches in the spirit both of a historian and of a poet or phenomenologist; thus the stocky, curly-headed tower of Hereford is "the image of a Hereford bull". As Creffield keenly understands, the medieval cathedrals were integral parts of a totality, of a whole structure of belief within which aspiration and functionalism, the symbolic and the tangible, spirit and matter, were inseparable; this, as totalities in themselves, they mirror and embody. The artist has tried to integrate and parallel this understanding with his own response, as lived by him physically, in its particularity, and in the present: to find and hold an understanding in the act of drawing itself. Beyond naive notions of object and subject, the drawings are as far from being expressions of subjectivity as they are from literal transcription: they are efforts of translation.
The exhibition, which will be touring the country for the next two years, will reveal to a wider public the work of a supremely gifted artist, whose stature should no longer be overlooked. It gives us not just "treasures" from our heritage; it pushes and cajoles us into repeated shocks of recognition, in a way which can, quite literally, take the breath away.
Winchester Gallery, Winchester until April 6