About this lot
Description
§ Dennis Creffield (British 1931-2018)
Ripon Cathedral: The West Front, 1987 charcoal 76 x 56cm
Footnote: Provenance: United Oxford & Cambridge Universities Club, London With Flowers East, London Exhibited: London, Hayward Gallery, English Cathedrals: Creffield, 1988-1990, cat.no.53 "No artist has ever before drawn all the English medieval cathedrals - not even Turner. I've dreamed of doing so since I was a student" - Dennis Creffield Dennis Creffield’s artistic abilities were recognised from an early age and in 1947, aged just 16, he was offered a place to study under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. Under Bomberg, Creffield flourished, developing his own distinctive style and in 1949, he was made an official member of the Borough Group. Between 1957 and 1961, Creffield trained at the Slade School of Art, where he was awarded the Tonks Prize for Life Drawing and the Steer Medal for Landscape Painting. Upon the recommendation of Herbert Read, from 1964 to 1966 Creffield was the Geography Fellow in Art at the University of Leeds. In 1987, the South Bank Board, known today as the Arts Council, commissioned Creffield to record the twenty-six medieval cathedrals of England produced between 1040 and 1540. Although the commission took two years and a 10,000-mile cross-country journey in a caravan to complete, Creffield, having become captivated by ecclesiastical architecture, was not satisfied and continued to produce charcoal drawings of churches and cathedrals, both in the UK and on the continent, until the late 1990s. Describing the structures as being like “giants (or angels)” (English Cathedrals, South Bank Centre: London, 1987, p.6), Creffield aspired not to capture the buildings simply as they appeared, but rather aimed, through his spirited and intuitive mark making, to express the feeling of being in the presence of these behemoths, now naturalised like sleeping giants into the English landscape. Unrestricted by the limitations of commission, the charcoals created post-1987 demonstrate Creffield’s increased proclivity towards abstraction. Largely unrestricted by medium and subject, Creffield’s works are reliably vigorous, energetic and marked by their sense of immediacy. Today his work is held in major collections across the globe, including the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Condition report: The West front is supberb and massy - like the outcrops of millstone grit you find in Yorkshire. Even Scott's complete refacing of it with a nasty workhouse grey stone hasn't spoilt it because its proportions are spot on.
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