Review, ‘English Cathedrals: drawings by Dennis Creffield’, published in Modern Painters, vol 1., no. 1., 1988
DENNIS CREFFIELD RECENTLY COMPLETED a remarkable and ambitious project which, surprisingly, no other artist had ever attempted before. Creffield visited all twenty six of the great medieval cathedrals of England – and, in addition, Bath Abbey – and made drawings of them. The exhibition, which is currently touring, consists of a changing selection of these works.
The drawings are outstanding in their quality, range and variety. Creffield has looked, seen, felt, and drawn with a revelatory clarity. He has, for example, captured the spectral massivity of Ripon – like a rock seen through mist; the cascading, mountainous sublimity of Salisbury; the grave majesty of Winchester; and the scandalous magnificence of Lincoln, that most extraordinary of buildings which John Ruskin described as being 'worth all the English cathedrals I have ever seen put together.' Creffield's drawings, 'put together', surely constitute one of the most significant achievements of English draughtsmanship, indeed of English art, since the last war, and perhaps since long before that.
In 1947, Creffield drew in Westminster Abbey alongside David Bomberg, whose classes Creffield attended. Creffield acknowledges a great debt to Bomberg, but, he insists, Bomberg did not so much teach as engage in a 'collaboration' with his students. 'You would start making some marks,' Creffield recalls. 'He would help you to get it clear; help you to see what was there.'
It is this clarity of vision (in both the visual and the visionary sense) rather than any stylistic affinity with Bomberg which impresses itself upon us when we encounter Creffield's drawings. Creffield rightly emphasises the fact that it is impossible to depict the cathedrals through looking, or imitation, alone. Rather, the draughtsman is compelled to translate the structure of these glorious and awesome buildings into the plastic terms in which he, himself, is working: and these, of course, are in no sense 'given' in the view.
Creffield recalls a statement of Ruskin's that it is impossible to draw an apse, if only because you can't see it without moving your head in a vertical line. Turner got round the problem by producing two sets of drawings. Creffield resolves it by creating a drawing which does not so much look like, as feel like, that which it depicts.
Creffield's draughtsmanship is so effective because of his intuitive feeling for the structure of the mass at which he is looking. Creffield tries to render his sense of the experience of a space rather than the surface look of a thing, or indeed than a view or a vista: and so, when confronted by the cathedrals, he rarely chose those view-points which would appeal to the topographer, or maker of picture post-cards. Rather, again and again, he opted to draw the cathedrals from a point of view which intensified a dynamic and physical relationship with the particular building he was studying.
The great Gothic cathedrals offer the finest examples of functional architecture ever created; and yet every element is part of a spiritual whole. In the fabric and structure of the buildings, practical function, and spiritual symbolism, cannot be separated one from another; the buildings serve the function of bearing witness to the glory and majesty of God.
Similarly, with Creffield's own work, the intense physicality of his broad-stroke, charcoal drawings – they have a quality which seems as much haptic as optical – cannot be meaningfully distinguished from the realisation of his spiritual vision. For Creffield holds fast to a traditional idea of art not as the exaltation of the individual ego, nor as the equivocal 'expression' of modernist angst, but rather as a means of revelation and celebration of that which lies beyond the reach of sense.
Creffield is understandably reticent about the relationship between his work and his religious beliefs; but he does speak of his 'abundant confidence in God'. Creffield's faith, like Cézanne's, permeates every aspect of his draughtsmanship. In this sense, Cref- field's drawing can also be compared to that of Turner. Indeed, Turner, Cézanne and Bomberg were all, in a pictorial sense, modern painters; and yet the power of their work derived from a thoroughly un-modern idea: they all believed – in their differing ways – in a created universe.
Whether or not we share these beliefs, we are compelled to recognise the importance they had for their art. In Ruskin's terms, these artists held to a concept of art which went beyond mere aesthesis (or the 'purely visual') which he dismissed as the tickling and fanning of mere sense while the soul slept. Indeed, these great cathedral drawings by Creffield make abundantly clear what Bomberg meant when he insisted that the eye, on its own, was a stupid organ.
Creffield is now contemplating a tour of the cathedrals of France: given his proven achievement with the English cathedrals, to which this truly exceptional exhibition bears witness, Creffield should have no difficulty in finding a patron.
8 March—8 April, 1988, the Winchester Gallery, Winchester; 16 April—22 May, Library Arts Centre, Wrexham; 1 June—29 June, Norwich School of Art Gallery, Norwich; 9 July—13 August, Museum and Art Gallery Peterborough; 1 Oct—6 Nov, DLI Museum, Durham.