Robert Woolner               biography

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Robert Woolner was born in Jamaica in 1946 and was trained at Camberwell School of Art. He lives and works at Chantry Studio in Dorset. 


I make abstract paintings and constructions that aspire to be both quiet and contemplative. Abstraction provides a place where I am able to explore the layered nature of experience and find meaning in the matter and substance of paint and other materials. I often work in series, fascinated by the process of making and the continuous struggle with chance and change, and I use techniques that allow me to make radical alterations to each work through the use of construction and collage.

I use mixed media that include canvas, board, card and texture paste, often incorporating sand, stone and marble dust, oxides and other materials mixed with both oil and acrylic paint. Working on a number of pieces at once allows me to bypass some of the difficulties presented by overpainting and drying. Work accumulates slowly on the studio wall and may be considered for long periods of time, possibly a year, until no further changes can be made in my search for a complete and satisfying whole. My aim is to order the images to achieve a rightness, stability and calm.



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The paintings collected on this website were made by Robert Woolner between 2000 and 2016 in his studio in  North Dorset and from 2017 at Chantry Studio near the Dorset ridgeway. The geographical specificity seems important. These works are not directly figurative but they are, nonetheless, clearly grounded in a deep engagement with the artist’s physical environment: a textured and worked landscape of limestone, clay, greensand, water, and the accumulated scars and scratchings that millennia of human and animal habitation have inscribed onto the surface of the earth. To visit Woolner’s studio is to understand how much of his work is built up in the same organic way, and even out of the same materials. Bits of bone, rusted metal, wire, fossils, seashells lie around the light-filled room, a former farm building whose use might have changed but whose function as a working space has not. Paintings in various stages of completion are hanging on the walls or stacked against them. The smaller constructions or assemblages in low relief that he refers to as ‘boxes’ are laid out neatly on tables, alongside some of the studies from which they are derived. 

 

‘This is where it starts,” he says, opening a drawer of sketchbooks, their pages filled with pencil drawings, photographs, written words, cuttings. He draws constantly, testing compositions, refining details and working out the interpenetration of abstract geometry and organic form that is at the heart of his creative practice. ‘They’re sometimes observed things I’ve photographed or drawn, sometimes notions of how paintings might be, or they may just be notes I might have written about something.’ To flick through the pages is to see how his drawings are constantly evolving into new variants and giving birth to fresh ideas, some of which crystallise into paintings. Drawing, for Woolner, is an integral part of picture-making; his sketchbooks are records of a continuous process of thinking about the possibilities of pictorial construction. ‘I don’t differentiate between painting and drawing. For me, painting is just a richer form of drawing " there isn’t a point where my drawing stops and suddenly becomes painting.’ He points to an unfinished painting on an easel: a network of scored lines on a silvery-grey glimmering surface which seems to weave and trap the light. It‘s a piece he's been working on for some time, developing and reworking an initial drawing. ‘I don‘t know where it will go, but suddenly I‘m getting quite interested in another form of mark-making, almost like scoring the surface of pieces of stone, or bark.‘ 

 

Colour is used sparingly in these recent works. Sometimes a painting will have a preponderantly warm or cool temperature. with shades of terracotta or pale blue coming through as a kind of background glow (‘colour must start to create the atmosphere I want in the painting’). More often nowadays it will be in subdued tonalities of grey though, as he points out, ‘to make grey you need every colour on the palette”. Perhaps an accent of pigment or embedded matter in a more intense colour will stand out, acting as what Barthes called a punctum, a vivid detail that provides a point of entry into the artwork, establishing a direct, visceral relationship between the viewer and the object. Either way; the colour is all the more effective for being so restrained — or, to describe the matter more accurately, for being treated with so much respect. ‘Colour is dangerous,“ he explains; 'I’m wary of it. When you go to big mixed exhibitions you can’t bear it, there’s all this noise that cancels itself out, so that you end up being unable to see the paintings. I’m trying to make something calm and quiet. I’m not saying you can’t do that with a lot of colour —Mark Rothko could do that - but I’m trying to do it not so much with colour as with the physical reaction to a surface.’ One is reminded of what the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies said of seeing the abstract expressionists at the height of their fame, when he first went to New York: ‘They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colours and huge brush strokes. I arrived with grey, silent, sober, suppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.’ 

 

Tàpies (1923—2012) is one artist whom Woolner is happy to acknowledge as an enduring influence. (‘I’Ve never felt that being influenced by someone is bad,’ he says, ‘if their work means something to you and you use what is relevant to you.’) Very different though his paintings are, there are detectable similarities between the two artists in their shared fascination with the expressive possibilities of mark-making, and in their fondness for building up the surfaces of canvases by mixing sand and other materials into the pigments. Among older contemporaries, Cy Twombly (1928—201 1) is another ‘master of the mark’ whom Woolner admires. Twombly’s large canvases, with their highly gestural, graffiti-like scrawls and dribbles of paint, may seem to have even less in common than those of Tàpies with the works illustrated in this book; but the American’s magisterial use of pattern and texture to evoke the accumulated sediment of meaning attached to a place, with its myths and histories, finds a deep echo, I think, in Woolner’s artistic practice. Other names, too, come to mind. As a marked contrast, or perhaps antidote, to Twombly’s expressionistic painting, dripping with rich colour, Woolner cites the delicate and evocative pencil-drawn grids of Agnes Martin (1912—2004) in connection with the lines and lattices that articulate the surfaces of his own recent paintings, catching fugitive effects of light and space in their nets.

 

Even to mention those great names of contemporary art, all from the generation older than Woolner, is to underscore the breadth of his terms of artistic reference. Rooted though it is in the Dorsetshire soil, his work is produced in full consciousness of the endeavours of some of the most significant artists who came to international prominence in the late twentieth century - and precisely those who best succeeded in giving the lie to premature announcements of ‘the death of painting’ as an art form capable of embodying serious thought. Should Woolner be considered, like them, an abstract painter? In one sense, even in his earlier, more figurative paintings, he always has been. ‘When you construct a painting, you’re trying to make sense of the pattern in front of you, whether it’s a wall two feet away or whether it’s five field systems. You’re trying to look at it in an abstract way, so in a sense all painting is abstract. You look at a painting by, say, Piero della Francesca, and it’s a joy to study the geometry of the Baptism because it’s so perfect. So I’ve always been interested in the business of picture-making and the precision of picture-making. That geometry, that space you create is vital. It gives the painting its tension.’ He resists the label of abstract painter, however. ‘I don’t think of my paintings as being abstract particularly To me they’re like very real landscapes.’ He admits never to have fallen out of love with the ‘delicious crepuscular melancholy’ of the English romantic landscape tradition; and at certain times in his career it has not been difficult to see his work in the context of an artist like Paul Nash,  focusing on the elemental features of the countryside, such as iron-age hill forts, and distilling their primal qualities into an almost symbolic grandeur. Even now, when any figurative cues have been, sublimated to the extent that they are no longer recognisable, his starting point is still the world, experienced through the senses (‘You can’t escape it. I’m not trying to create pure geometry - I’m much too sensuous for that’). Nevertheless, around the turn of the twenty-first century the balance shifted  in Woolner’s work. The landscapes illustrated here (let us call them that) are non- figurative, yet it would be wrong to say they were wholly abstract. Their particular resonance seems to come from the tension between two states: the concrete and the abstract, the sensual and the conceptual, the specific and the universal. 

 

Looking at the paintings in these pages, a selection from a very substantial body of work over fifteen years or so, it is evident that this, the latest phase of Woolner’s long engagement with the relationship between landscape and pictorial form, is a significant breakthrough. The step from primarily figurative to non-figurative painting was a liberating one. Its seeds were always there in his work (indeed, his first exhibited works were abstract), but his recent late abstraction has been hard won, after a lifetime of looking at, and thinking about, the landscape. Key works include Touching Light (Page 17) and Hambledon Hill , both made in 2000. In the first, he found a way of combining tone and texture so as to capture fleeting effects of luminosity in a way that transcended description or anecdote: light and darkness are seemingly welded into the mysteriously ridged and gashed surface of the painting. In the second, the topographical reference preserved in the title allows just enough of a handhold for the viewer to grasp that we are, being invited to share in a meditation on human habitation and path-making, on history and geography - but above all on the capacity of worked paint to evoke, not the appearance of a landscape, but the experience of being in it, of moving through it.


The paintings collected here no longer function as an Al'bertian window on the world, limiting us to a fixed viewpoint or a specific location. Instead of looking through the frame to a depicted scene ‘beyond’, as if the picture plane were transparent, our eyes are held by what the frame contains. ‘Containment as an idea fascinates me”, he says. ‘What makes a painting special is the fact that it is a container, in which one is striving to make something quite balanced and right and perfect.” Rather than relying on perspectival illusion, the paintings convey a sense of space and depth through the accretion of strata, their surfaces fissured and scored to allow glimpses of earlier states, of things half-seen: a palimpsest, to use a key word in his critical lexicon. ‘The whole history of what I do is in the layers”, he explains. ‘lt’s held within the palimpsest. That mirrors what happens in the landscape.’ He has started to use metal more — lead, bronze, brass, copper wire, rusted iron dug out of the ground or picked up from the beach, objets trouvé’s —which he embeds into his paintings, or fires into porcelain, and works on, scores and paints until it achieves the ‘rightness’ he is aiming at. These pictures positively insist that your eyes linger on the surface, arrested by its sheer presence as matter. This is more than an aesthetic choice; it is an ethical stance against the constant flow of disembodied and ultimately meaningless images that surround us all. ‘I think we need texture, we need leather, stone, glass, paper, canvas, paint, lead we need all these things to keep us sane, it can’t all be some digital blur, somewhere out on an i-cloud.‘ He smiles. ‘I like it when I scrape my arm on a painting, and as a painter I‘ve always enjoyed the business of paint, and the surface of a sculpture. You react to surface. you touch with your eyes.” Yet however tactile these works may be, their painterly qualities remain paramount — and what they depict, above all, is light, created through tone. It is light, gleaming from the painted surfaces or glowing through their latticed veils, that fuels these pictures from within and gives them their haunting beauty. They breathe a lived experience of the physical environment: the feel of earth and bone between the fingers, the lustre of moonlight on a stone wall, the memory of a chill mist rising off a pond. But what imbues them with their special power is the precise observation and rigorous thought that go into their making, so that they touch us not as records of a landscape but as works of art. ‘In a sense all I’m doing is trying to make calm contemplative objects”, says Woolner. ‘There’s that lovely line that Chirico wrote about the quiet melancholy, the light and dark to be found in a gateway, a street corner the surface of a table or between the sides of a box — those unexpected corners where one has a moment of revelation. I spend all my days staring at these images and trying to order them to achieve a kind of rightness and stability and calm. That’s what I’m aiming at, and if at some stage a person looks at them and stops and feels the same thing I’ve succeeded, I’ve communicated what I want to communicate. In the end all I really want to do is to stop time and visual experience to that moment of quiet contemplation.’ 

 

John Renner, February 2016 

 


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