Foreword to English Cathedrals: drawings by Dennis Creffield, exhibition catalogue, Southbank Centre, 1987
THESE CATHEDRAL DRAWINGS BY CREFFIELD must be the best things of their kind since Mondrian's church façades. My experience of cathedrals is very limited and often had to do more with people I happened to journey with – Chartres, Lincoln, the great nave at Gerona come to mind... I tried to sketch Notre Dame a few times because I lived near her for a year but I failed. My heart was not in it. My experience of Dennis Creffield is also limited – we've only met two or three times. Like many beautiful places, you must make a special trip to see both cathedrals and Creffield's exemplary work, and, as someone said, travel is associated with the word travail. Creffield is one of England's closely guarded secrets and it's about time someone blew his cover. This exhibition, this commission was just such a brilliant idea. The drawings are wonderful and Creffield's great gift can't be hidden away anymore.
Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis wanted a place where "silence and a perpetual remoteness from all secular turmoil compel the mind to meditate on celestial things". Panofsky says he (Suger) foreshadowed the showmanship of the modern movie producer and raised pomp and circumstance to the level of a fine art. Creffield's drawings load this celestial pomp as Turner might have if he had drawn in blunt charcoal as he made his way across England, stopping at its great houses of God. These drawings are that various within the play of charcoal's strike, smudge and daring. Ingres would not have drawn like this but yes, Turner might have The drawings swell and sway in great dusks and almighty storms of every kind of light and charcoaled mist. The holy structures are structured where they must be and dissolve to heavenly choirs when their masses are abstracted and misted. Creffield has a way with contouring - a splattering of formal detail quite breathtaking. I've forgotten the names of those cathedral details I knew in my youth but Creffield restores their specificity to memory...memory imagery... The great Meyer Schapiro, writing of "The Northern European fantasy of intricate, irregular, tense, involved movements", mentions the generalised rendering of distinct parts, subordination of modelling to descriptive contours etc, as characteristic of "memory imagery", which Schapiro calls "aesthetically or morally valued aspects of an early style, consciously imitated by a later artist". Is this not what Creffield has done?
Creffield has brought these Leviathan creatures of men's minds into stunning new light, a light where he himself belongs now.
R. B. KITAJ
London, 1987