Foreword to Dennis Creffield: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Flowers East, 2005
There is an extraordinary statement in Dennis Creffield's notes to his drawings of English Cathedrals which for me illuminates what, as an artist, he is about. 'The line of its contours is electric,' he writes - the 'it' being Canterbury Cathedral - 'alive as if drawn.' It's characteristic of Creffield's refusal of magniloquence that he doesn't fanfare this paradox. If we miss it, we miss it. But we oughtn't to miss it. 'Alive as if drawn' - not drawn as if alive. Drawing, for Creffield, being an assertion of vitality which challenges that of life itself.
I think of Shelley's praise of Wordsworth, that he 'new-created all he saw'. Creffield is a wonderfully conscientious looker, but what he sees was not alive until he saw it.
Only look at his drawings of Lincoln, 'the terrifying cathedral... raging like a bonfire on its hill.' The edifice would seem to be possessed, cannot stay still, flails its towers, turns giddy with its own too muchness. Alive as if – alive because – drawn.
The same vertiginousness of vitality pervades Creffield's conversation, mention of which belongs here only because, as you would expect of a pupil of Bomberg's, the artist and the man are indivisible. His drawing of a mother almost creating her baby with her very eye-beams reminds me of the way the poet Donne concretizes seeing, threading lovers' eyes upon a double string.
When I mention this to Dennis Creffield he immediately calls up 'The Ecstasy' –
– and in the recollection of those lines he shudders, actually vibrates from head to toe, as though the force that shakes Lincoln Cathedral has now taken possession of him.
Call that force what you will – call it electricity, call it ecstasy, call it the exhilaration of the carnal – the wherefores of it are Creffield's subject. His cathedrals tremble like lovers, his lovers are as mysterious in their nakedness as cathedrals. When mothers hold their babies - pictures propagated in their eyes - the embrace is both tender and terrifying. And as for the babies themselves – exquisitely vulnerable and demoniacal at once – there is no accounting for their origin.
All we know is that they are alive. Alive as if drawn.