From Dennis Creffield: Impressions of Castles, exhibition catalogue, globegallery, 2002
HAVING DRAWN ALL THE ENGLISH Medieval Cathedrals for the South Bank Board 1987-88 and most of the major Northern French Cathedrals, thanks to David Astor in 1990, I thought I was finished with medieval architecture as a direct inspiration and subject for work. However, the invitation by the globegallery in Hay-on-Wye to draw the Welsh and English Marcher Castles re-aroused my interest, because most of them were probably built by the same workers and masons that constructed the cathedrals.
What has been called the second Stone Age was begun by the Normans. (According to Jean Gimpel from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries more building stone was quarried in France than had been mined throughout the whole history of Ancient Egypt!).
Castles must be built quickly, strongly and soundly; this accelerated the technological knowledge that extended from quarrying, recognition of good quality stone, transport and the swift and masterly working of the material. So, ironically, the expertise needed to build the cathedrals was what we would now call a 'spin-off' from Warfare.
I had great difficulty in drawing the castles. I prefer to draw functional buildings and whereas the cathedrals are still used for their original use and are generally complete structurally, the castles (except where they have been converted to domestic use), are redundant in function and ruinous as structures. We don't even know very much of the detail of how they were used, except that they were centres of power and commanding physical presences in a then lightly populated countryside. They are almost as mysterious to us as Ozymandias's "...vast and trunkless legs...". In consequence they have become places of our imagination - an imagination largely dominated by a nineteenth century vision of – Fantasy, Romance, Symbolism and the Picturesque.
I have followed this fantastical line but been not only inspired by Tennyson and Turner and Maeterlinck but also medieval paintings, my own remembered toy castles and also those innumerable sand-built-bucketed structures, which took half a day to build - and if you were lucky, slowly eroded (the moat filling up) by the incoming tide - if you didn't have to go home before! But more often by horrible boys who leapt over them and kicked them down. A small sad echo of what did eventually happen to these great buildings.
Dennis Creffield May 2002