Review, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Paintings and Drawings’, published in modern painters, vol. 2, no. 1., spring 1989
DENNIS CREFFIELD HAS THE REPUTATION of an outstandingly committed and energetic painter of what he sees, of particular subjects that seize his physical and spiritual eye and engage him for a season. A woman with a baby, flowers banked against a window, the sea and Palace Pier beyond that window. His powerful English Cathedral drawings are currently touring around the country: seen subjects too but stalked and spied upon and at the last moment confronted with courage and occasionally despair, like Moby Dick or the Matterhorn. That expedition occupied him most of 1987 and it must have been a hard pilgrimage, the sort one performs on one's knees, as well as fulfilment of an old wish. Yet all Creffield's work has something of this pilgrimage character: every venture of his has been a passionate affair to be worked through in series of drawings and paintings, the motif being transformed and rediscovered in the process, ever new and ever reiterated like love itself.
I discovered another Creffield when I spoke to him of a television programme and an exhibition intended to tell of the workings of narrative painting. I had decided to centre them on Christ's Nativity because its variable iconography was still accessible to a wide public. He told me that he had been painting Nativities seasonally for some years, working on three canvases to which he returned every successive Advent and set aside after Twelfth Night. Here was an imaginary theme, but one so frequently staged in paintings, sculpture and many sorts of performance, so garlanded with famous productions, that it was difficult to find a personal and authentic formulation of it. One of the canvases went into the exhibition and featured in the film together with studies he had made for it, and Creffield spoke excellently about art's demands. What became apparent to me then was how, for him, sight and the imaginative transformation of seen motifs (here, particularly, a crib motif as shown in a Gothic carving he found in a local church) merge into one kind of creative attention. His procedure is metamorphic more than representational.
The Cathedral series was a climax, something like an apotheosis. What could follow that? In the event, Creffield returned to work he started in 1986. He had been asked to do a painting for a bedroom, and A Midsummer Night's Dream had been proposed as theme. We all know it, or think we do: Shakespeare's monumental and trifling entertainment, a nightmarish comedy full of deception and anguish, that ends in a triple marriage promising endless happiness to all. Tradition, from Fuseli to Max Reinhardt and beyond, pulls it towards pantomime and prettiness, with Mendelssohn on call to add rapturous sounds to Shakespeare's patches of high poetry and to shield us against anxiety.
Creffield's Goldmark Gallery exhibition will consist of paintings that are still being worked on just now and a range of charcoal studies, all on this theme. To grasp it Creffield has turned his back on the theatre and focused on the text and its immediate context. Not actions but an emblem that brings us face to face with Shakespeare's dramatis personae and also with Shakespeare himself and with Elizabeth I, the Faery Queen. Heads and figures are arrayed before us in a curtain call that reminds us of the conflicts and false dotings that occupied the play, though among them the ass's head and Titania form a prominent erotic motif.
As always with Creffield, the imaginings as well as the individual images are born out of charcoal and paint. He is now one of the most powerful painters in the country, chief beneficiary of the licence to recreate through activity which was Bomberg's lesson. There seems to be no gap, no distance at all, between the marks made and the desire motivating them. The result can strike one as disruptive at first: not only 'is this Shakespeare?' but also 'is this drawing?', 'is this painting?' One is tempted to think in terms of historical expressionism, but the association leads away from the core of what is being done here. Away, for one thing, from the stabilized, meditative icons that result, vigorous but dignified, without histrionics. Away also from Creffield's references, which are classical. Much of the Dream happens in 'a wood near Athens'; Theseus, who presides over it, is Duke of Athens; the rude mechanicals as well as the genteeler characters are Athenians. Creffield has turned to archaic Greek sculpture as well as to medieval and Tudor art, bypassing all that Victorian fullness yet charging those austere forms with his characteristic urgency. He returns the Dream to its place amid ancient and modern ideas and models. In his marvellous text for the Cathedrals catalogue, he wrote of the 'Forest of Southwell' (Pevsner had concerned himself only with Leaves and with naturalism), where 'the king, the hounds, the hermit, the birds, the garlanded lovers, the rooting pigs and the green men live, hunt and love'. He sees the Cathedrals as 'the finest works of native English genius' and thus associates them with the plays of Shakespeare, yet, as he draws and paints in that intensely personal way of his, he reminds us of the great stimuli informing that Englishness. The condensed, succinct images he develops speak of a wider world, known intellectually as well as emotionally.
10 March–15 April, 1989, Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham.