Published in the Guardian, 2018
ON VALENTINE'S DAY MORNING in 1987 Dennis Creffield set off from his third floor flat on Marine Parade in Brighton to draw every cathedral in England. Travelling around the country in a campervan, Creffield, who has died aged 87, would wake early each day to avoid rubberneckers, set up his easel, and sketch the exteriors of the great buildings in charcoal. Canterbury Cathedral is rendered as a series of sparse dashed lines, Durham Cathedral is barely visible in a smog of charcoal clouds.
Creffield, a bohemian character whom the writer Philip Dodd described as “an English radical in the vein of Blake and Turner”, eschewed proper representation throughout his career, wishing instead, in his own words to “inhabit” his subject matter. When he embarked on a series of works taking inspiration from the figure of Horatio Nelson he made himself a hat mimicking that worn by the admiral. “I don’t look at the drawings while drawing,” the artist said. “I simply smell, listen and respond to them.”
His approach to art was influenced by David Bomberg, a pioneer of British modernist painting, who taught the teenage Creffield at Borough Polytechnic (now part of London South Bank University). Under Bomberg’s wing, a precocious class of young artists, who included Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, became known as the Borough Group.
Bomberg’s teaching methods were unusual: he would request life models to walk around the room or get them to pose in awkward positions, classes would be organised at various times of the day and night to capture different types of light, and more than once the teacher collaborated with his students on a canvas. A room in Tate Britain’s current survey of the figure in British painting, All Too Human, is dedicated to the group’s endeavours.
Creffield was born in south-east London, the son of Donald Creffield, a mechanic, and Christiana Clayson, who was in domestic service. Close to his mother, he was distraught when evacuated to Cornwall during the second world war. Back in London, Dennis attended Colfe’s grammar school before following the advice of his friend Cliff Holden and joining Bomberg’s class, at the age of 16.
On his teacher’s death in 1957, Creffield enrolled at the Slade. A fine student, he won the Tonks prize for life drawing and the Steer medal for landscape painting. He lived in Lewisham during this period and the view from the Greenwich observatory – Creffield had got access to the roof of Flamsteed House – was a recurring subject. In 1961, he received a runner’s up prize of £50 at the first John Moores painting prize, and was included in the Arts Council’s touring exhibition Six Young Painters.
The next decade, and a move to Leeds in 1964, was transformative for a young man who had briefly toyed with ordination (Creffield, who embraced Catholicism in his early 20s, was talked out of the idea by a priest.) He had moved north with Diane Clutterbuck, nicknamed Dilly, whom he had met at a party, and married in 1958, to take up a teaching fellowship at the University of Leeds.
In 1964 Creffield had his first solo exhibition, at Leeds City art gallery. The following year, with his marriage to Dilly over, he left the city and moved to Brighton. He became “enraptured by the light and movement” of the coastal city, and painted the seafront and pier repeatedly. From 1968 to 1981 he taught at Brighton Polytechnic (now the University of Brighton). In 1974 he had his first commercial show, at the Morley Gallery in London, and in 1980 the Serpentine Gallery staged an exhibition of his drawings.
The cathedral series, commissioned by the South Bank Board, debuted at the Winchester Gallery in March 1988 and toured 13 further venues ending with an exhibition in London at the Camden Arts Centre in 1990. Commissions to draw the Houses of Parliament, to tour Welsh and English castles and the cathedrals of northern France followed. A retrospective in 2011 at the James Hyman gallery in London surveyed the lifelong inspiration Creffield drew from William Blake’s poem Jerusalem.
Creffield is survived by his partner of 20 years, Theresa Roche, whom he married last year; and four sons and seven daughters. Another daughter predeceased him.
Dennis Creffield, artist, born 29 January 1931; died 26 June 2018