Dennis Creffield

‘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’ — Howard Jacobson

Dennis Creffield’s synthesis of the carnal with the spiritual is perhaps his most daringly original contribution to post-war art in Britain, distinguishing him entirely from peers such as Kossoff or Auerbach. His nudes and erotic scenes combine the sacred with the profane with an ecstasy unmatched since the poetry of John Donne, a great idol of Creffield’s.

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Early nudes of the 1940s and ’50s, completed during Creffield’s student years, contain the seed of this intensity. It would bloom, after his move to Brighton in 1968, with The Lovers (1970–72), a suite of paintings and drawings derived from a 19th-century photograph of two women embracing in a bordello. ‘These paintings are not anecdotal, descriptive or abstracted but are embodiments of sensed tactile perceptions – naked gropings – thorough the paint – with whiskers, nose and body all alert,’ Creffield wrote. His nudes in later years likewise present the body with both spiritual grace and architectural monumentality – testament to the words of novelist Howard Jacobson that ‘His cathedrals tremble like lovers; his lovers are as mysterious in their nakedness as cathedrals’.