Review, ‘Dennis Creffield: Paintings of Innocence and Experience’, extracted from an article in the Spectator, 2015
FRANK AUERBACH HAS SPOKEN of how he felt the most exciting thing a painter could do was to cross the border from figurative to non-figurative, time and again, from one side to the other.
The same, perhaps, could be said of Auerbach’s exact contemporary, Dennis Creffield (born 1931), a selection of whose work over 60 years is on show at James Hyman Fine Art. A first encounter with a Creffield may suggest you are dealing with a gestural abstraction. In front of you are bold, scything brush strokes but few distinct forms. Then a look at the title reveals that this is in fact a view of Greenwich or a still life, and you look again — and begin to discern the subject.
Like Auerbach and Kossoff, Creffield attended classes by the charismatic painter David Bomberg. There are pictures here that instantly bring Bomberg to mind. But Creffield is not by any means a clone of his intense and brooding mentor. His work, after some gloomy panoramas of London in the 1950s, became more light, airy, and — an unusual quality, especially in post-war figurative art — joyous.