What and So What?
John Virtue was an artist unknown to me before I started this course; however, as soon as I was directed to look at his work, it struck a chord with me. I liked his black-and-white images – no muddying of the waters with colour – and the organised core of me enjoyed his earlier tessellated works (which satisfy my innate need to prepare grids and charts) as well as his later, looser drawings with their repetitive quality born from his repeated study of the same area.
Unable to get to the university library during lockdown to find the books I had taken out on him before, an internet trawl revealed a new retrospective of his work – Paul Moorhouse, (2019), John Virtue, Albion RidingHouse, Oxford and London – and so I treated myself to a copy. It is a weighty tome but I have been fascinated reading it, and it contains a large number of reproductions of his artwork, which are otherwise tricky to track down online. The book follows his life and work in chronological order, looking at how he worked to develop and grow a style, or styles, which are his own. Any quotes which follow are from this book.
His method of working is almost ritualistic and it is based on repeated regular walks in/to a particular site – “These repeated walks, and indeed the wider progression from one place to another, underpin his artistic development.” He walks, he looks, he sketches, and brings his sketches back to work into and work from; however, these sketches are often unrecognizable, scribbly, and are intended more to remind him of a moment or experience than as an actual topographical record, and it is that experience which he aims to record in his completed works – “So it’s about being in a place, about movement within the place. The landscape presents me with a foundation…a structure, and that structure allows me to take all kinds of liberties to get some actuality.”
In his early work he would walk a particular location, sketching as he went, then would work into these sketches at home with pen and line, creating dense images. He started pinning these up on the wall until it eventually occurred to him to arrange them into a grid, which was a bit of a Eureka! moment for him – “Instead of a single view, a completely different evocation of the subject evolved. This presented the same motif from different positions. As the eye traverses a surface of different images, there is a sense of moving around and through space, as if seeing a particular place from successive positions. Experiencing the works in that way echoed the walks….”
This example is Landscape No 10, 1982-83, black ink, shellac, pencil and charcoal on acid-free paper, laid on board, 110x110cm. Private collection, UK.
It depicts his walk at Green Haworth, which was the first site depicted in his new method.
He then moved to South Tawton in Devon and began another series of walks, experimenting with his grids and layouts in different configurations and sometimes dropping or dribbling white gouache over the drawings. A few become less frantically dark, such as this example, Landscape No. 133, 1990-91, black ink, shellac, acrylic, emulsion, gouache, pencil and charcoal on acid-free paper, laid on board, 98 x 97cm, private.
Subsequently he moved to Exeter and began to walk the Exe estuary, where he could often walk without meeting a soul – but he is still not walking for contemplative pleasure – “Wherever he is based, the ritual that he establishes provides a structure that focuses his experiences. It wrests the flux of passing time into an order and, through drawings made at regular intervals during the course of the walks, a succession of transient moments can be arrested and preserved.”
These extracts from his sketchbooks – Studies of the River Exe estuary canal and sea, 1997-2002, black water-soluble ink on acid free paper – give an idea of the sorts of marks he was making (and give me hope that my more scribbly pages in my own sketchbook are not completely out of the way).
It was here that his method of working changed – he still amassed huge quantities of drawings, but used them to try and create a single image, usually large and now on canvas, that encompasses these experiences.
Many of them are hard to read at first and look almost abstract – but he always includes the church tower – often extremely small – but this one part of the picture seems to pull the rest into focus and make it understandable. One of the more figurative examples is Landscape No. 657, 2002, black ink, shellac, acrylic and emulsion on canvas, 183 x 183cm. Private collection, USA.
Virtue moved on to create other series, notably a group of London drawings which were the outcome of his time as Associate Artist with the National Gallery; his routine continued, but his walk now had to start at 6 a.m. to avoid the rush hour!
Now What?
Hopefully what’s gone before has given an idea of my enthusiasm for John Virtue’s work. There are two strands that I want to have a go at developing – the large and loose ink drawings, and the tessellated presentation, to see if either of these is where I want to go for a final outcome to this investigation.
Large and loose ink drawings:
I started this off with the Fine Art Group studio day on 25.4.20 (for details of which, see separate blog post), but just include first effort here for the sake of completeness:
This was drawn without a particular reference point in mind, but was derived from my experiences walking along our little stretch of the Tavy, staring at and sketching the movements of the river which, because of the time we usually walk (and a regular time of day for walking was one of Virtue’s key ritual aspects), is usually backed by a dark bank and reflections, the sun coming more or less straight into our eyes from across the water.
I extended this experimentation further by dropping black Brusho into water dribbled and sprayed onto thin packing paper (see also the reference to Alison Churchill’s work in the Studio day blog post); once the water and Brusho had been applied, I picked up the board and moved it around to encourage the direction of particular dribbles. I also thought I would try dropping white ink in from a Derwent Graphix marker but this proved a little unreliable and was also tearing the thin paper, so I moved to dilute white gouache for my dribbling and swirling.
The effects are interesting….it definitely looks like fluid movement, and the white dropped into wet has given the impression of those sunlit sparkles you get on particular peaks or troughs. To be experimented with more, I think….
Tessellation:
I’ve had one go at this so far. I made a series of 2 min rough sketches (my husband helpfully timed me) with a sepia Pitt drawing pen in my A5 sketchbook as we walked. Frugal habits run deep and I had not thought to put them on separate pages so that I could tessellate them – doh! – so I drew myself a grid on A3 rough watercolour paper and copied the sketches into the grid – same pen. John Virtue worked into his with black line, but I decided instead to try ink washes in a limited set of colours – Pebeo Colorex Green Gold and a little FW blue acrylic ink – I wanted them to harmonise with each other as part of the same set. I have various places where I stop and draw (as per John Virtue) – from top left to bottom right, the weir, the lookout, the pylon, the beach, the fishermen’s steps, the bridge, the leat, the tributaries and the salmon leap.
I think they are effective as a group, although I just drew them in as they came in my book, and so didn’t try moving them around to see which was the optimum visual arrangement – something to experiment with. Somehow the colour makes them look more like a group of individual drawings rather than parts of a whole, as in Virtue’s homogenised black-and-white …so plenty of things to try out.
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