September Painting of the Month: “Pendennis Cup, Falmouth – Mariquita & Mariette”

A maquette, watercolour on paper 15 x 20 inches

August is holiday time. Time to get away from it all. Here in England much of the population rushes lemming-like to the coast, enduring serpentine traffic-jams in overloaded cars, greasy egg sandwiches and warm fizzy drinks on the way. The exodus is powered by reverence to a quasi-folkloric tradition and fuelled by an innocent optimism which is capable of turning grey skies blue. On arrival – finally –  the cars disgorge their occupants who, with puppy-like enthusiasm overcoming tiredness, are immediately ready to plunge headlong into a pool of activities never undertaken at home in everyday life. Yipee it’s the holiday!

For our family Cornwall is the grail, the south coast, Helford River near Falmouth. Weeks of waterborne thrills replace the trudge and onus of the rest of the year. On anything which floats we escape from land-based reality and navigate the waters of adventure, doing, well, nothing really; picnics on a beach, exploring rock-pools, fishing and sailing, rowing to the pub, and back again. Boats and I go back a long way. My first boat (a 36-foot motor-sailer) had the foreign-sounding name Gafita. I took this name to be an omen of adventure and sailed her to France and to the Med and back. Much later I discovered Gafita was merely a prosaic acronym for Get Away From It All. I’d done that. For years I ‘d got away from responsibilities like work and earning a living. It didn’t work. I sold her in 1988. Ever since then I’d limited my sailing activities to vacation rather than vocation.

Twenty years on, that all changed. I started painting classic yachts racing alongside my usual subject of architecture, discovering the vigorous similarities between the two and enjoying the challenging differences between them, the static and the active. It had been in Cornwall, on holiday – getting away from it all – that this discovery had presented itself; the first regatta for the Pendennis Cup was in full sail in Falmouth Bay and I’d followed these beautiful yachts – huge over 100 foot in length –  bouncing along in a RIB while trying to sketch. The resulting watercolours were shown in London and New York to great acclaim. Last year the second Pendennis Cup took place and I played a more active role presenting a number of works as prizes to the class winners in the regatta, while also showing paintings at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth and at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes.

As a result of the Pendennis Cup I was asked to put together a set of paintings of the big classics racing in British waters, a group of large watercolours which would form a narrative of iconic images in the great tradition of British maritime painting. These were commissioned as a group by a family. Like members of the family the paintings would be closely related to one another even if they don’t all live in the same place.

This Painting of the Month is one of the small maquettes made to establish the form of the set. It shows the beautiful Mariquita (who celebrates her centenary this year) being pursued by the schooner Mariette, four years younger but equally sprightly.  They are shown charging downwind in a north-westerly with Pendennis Castle in the background, a wonderful English summer scene, Cornwall at her best. I am looking forward to working this collection of paintings. It’s unusual to create a family of works which will remain together, related, of the same blood.

I love to work with my subject and being in Cornwall is where it’s at; with the smell of the sea in the nostrils, blustery showers rattling the windows, maybe a little sail on the Helford in the evening to feel the tug of the wind.  A fresh crab from my pot for dinner perhaps. Just as fish tastes better when eaten in sight of the sea, so these paintings must be shown in sight of Falmouth Bay. They’ll be an impressive collection. Maybe we’ll show them at the 2012 Pendennis Cup where I will be chasing these beauties again and with them the J Class who will be in Falmouth. We’ll certainly show them on the website. Meanwhile the set of maquettes will be shown in my October exhibition alongside work from my recent Italian adventures to Rome & Venice.

Not to be missed – 8th September

Watts-Gallery 2011, Hanging 'Peace & Goodwill'. copyright Alexander Creswell

On Thursday 8th September I will be in conversation with Mark Bills, Curator of Watts Gallery. The talk will be in the newly restored Watts Gallery surrounded by Watts masterpieces. Mark and I will be considering and discussing G.F. Watts as an artist of today and exploring my work in context. It will be a great opportunity to look at the Watts collection in some detail and it will be fascinating to Mark’s knowledge to hand.

Thursday 8th September. 7pm.

Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey, GU3 1DQ .  BOOK TICKETS

August Painting of the Month: ‘Redentore – A study of Fireworks’

Venice Redentore - Fireworks Study 3, Watercolour on paper 22" x 30"

There is a great sense of liberation when painting fireworks. Beyond the oohs and aahs is a curious profanity about the spectacle: at first you sense a childlike fascination with flashes and bangs, then as the spent sparks fall back to earth and the smoke clears, a carefree disregard for order and correctness fills the night.

Evidently Whistler felt this freedom in 1875  when he painted ‘The Falling Rocket’ and when Ruskin later accused him of “flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public” by exhibiting this painting, Whistler felt compelled to sue for libel, and to strike a blow for artistic freedom. It was actually a great painting, entirely free from the confines of veracity or what we would call photographic accuracy today.

I have been commissioned to paint a large portrayal of Venice lit by the massive firework display which marks the passing of Saturday night into the Sunday of La Festa del Redentore. Traditionally the people of Venice mark the day by giving thanks for deliverance from plague, crossing to Palladio’s church of the Redeemer on Giudecca island. To get there they would lash all their boats together to form a bridge across which the populace could walk. Now a floating bridge is installed, and the night before the festival the Venetians take to their boats to celebrate out there on the water, between San Marco and San Giorgio and along the Giudecca. It is the most important evening in the Venetian calendar.

Eagerly we got our little boat ready, stowing an anchor, torches, chairs, a mattress for sleepy children and a bucket…. also my drawing machine loaded with dark blue paper and some vivid crayons.  Then we loaded up with good Venetian dishes of marinated sardines, some crab pasta, pimento salad with pecorino cheese, plenty of wine and some grappa for emergencies (e.g. running out of wine). Then we dropped anchor in the best spot to dine and cheer with the locals as the sun went down, waiting for the fireworks to start at 11.30pm.

I had painted fireworks before in Venice but from on land, from rooftop vantage-points and once from the terrace of the Cipriani, but to be on the water right in with the action was breathtaking. I wanted a clear view which stretched from the Salute on the left, past La Dogana, The Doges Palace and around to San Giorgio on the right. This was a tough drawing which I worked on in daylight, with plenty of detail and accuracy necessary. But when working on the colour sketches and larger watercolour studies (such as this Painting of the Month), I discovered that the light effects and the drifting smoke of the fireworks allowed, even encouraged, a disregard for the detail. So the sacred reverence for architectural precision to which I had become entirely loyal in the development of my work, was beautifully corrupted by the profanity of light and colour. And no critic could accuse me of rendering the Doges Palace in the wrong colour, for example, or getting the light wrong on San Giorgio. I was free to do what I liked. And if I felt like leaving out some building or part of the view, I could obscure it with smoke or with the gouged flash of an explosion as another salvo of rockets fired off the firework barges. In short, Venice was merely the context or backdrop, the subject of the painting was light and colour. This was liberating! I scratched away with a razor blade slicing the exploding trails of fireworks across the night sky.

When I had been painting the ruins of abandoned country houses, twenty years ago, I had been similarly liberated. Ruins allow the loosening of the facts in order to place the emphasis on the mood of the painting. The absolute truth is rarely poetic, and reality is seldom lyrical. Turner reputedly berated a spectator who had been dismissive of one of his landscapes, suggesting that they had never seen a sunset such as the one Turner had painted; his reply was along the lines of “ah yes, but wouldn’t you love to?”.

If you’d love to see Venice as you’ve never seen her before, I should have the finished painting ready in a month or so. It will be the largest representational watercolour ever painted, at ten feet by five, just over three metres wide! In the meanwhile some more of these firework studies can be seen here.

Buona Festa!

 

July Painting of the Month: ‘Porta Maggiore, Rome’

'Porta Maggiore, Rome' 40" x 60" © Alexander Creswell

A trip to Rome is, for the artist – well, this artist at any rate – a necessary ingredient in artistic good health; like regular tooth-brushing, it helps prevent the onset of decay, of the eyes, the brain and the soul.

It had been some years since my last visit to Rome so in June I took the family for a week, a trip to revisit old architectural friends for us and to introduce our children to the origins of our culture and architecture. On arrival, our first point of pilgrimage was to the Pantheon, that perversely simple and geometrically charged temple to whichever deity you revere. Ours rewarded us immediately with a surprise treat as, while gazing upwards into the dome, we physically bumped into our great friends from New York, Richard & Alexa Cameron, also gazing upwards in awe! This serendipity set the tone for our peregrinations over the week together, around the Eternal City, to Hadrian’s Villa and Tivoli with the Camerons, then north to Villa Lante, Bomarzo and Caprarola on our own.

Sketchbooks in hand, this tour spawned a fresh series of large scale watercolours of my core subject – the ghosts of great architecture. This image is the first painting I have completed since my return. On Richard Cameron’s suggestion we had driven out of Rome by way of the Porta Maggiore. Hidden in a scruffy area on the wrong side of the tracks,

In conversation with Oliver Everett – Thursday 30th June in Watts’s Great Studio

This Thursday 30th June I will be in conversation with Oliver Everett, Royal Librarian Emeritus in Watts’s Great Studio, Compton, Surrey. This will be the first of three colloquia to mark the re-opening of the Watts Gallery and to celebrate my tenure in Great Studio:

30th June 2011: Creswell Colloquium with Oliver Everett, Royal Librarian Emeritus
Watts’s Great Studio, Limnerslease, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey GU3 1DJ
Drinks at 7.30pm followed by a talk 8 – 9pm

Windsor Castle - St Georges Hall after the Fire © H. M. The Queen 1993

This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear two renowned speakers Alexander Creswell and Oliver Everett, Royal Librarian Emeritus in conversation; they will be exploring the legacy of the Royal Collection and the historic commission for Creswell to record Windsor Castle after the fire and restoration in a remarkable series of watercolours and touching upon the connections with G.F. Watts.

Oliver Everett CVO is Librarian Emeritus of the Royal Library, Windsor Castle where he was Librarian from 1984 to 2002. Oliver knows Windsor and the Royal Collection extremely well, has written the official guidebook and audio tour as well as contributing to books and television on aspects of the Castle and the Collection.  His knowledge of the Royal Collection’s 485,000 objects spanning the reigns of Henry V111 to our present Queen is superb. He is highly sought after as a speaker at home and abroad; lecturing on all aspects of the collection, the Palaces and their Royal occupants and the relationship between the Monarchs and their collection and much more.

Windsor Castle - St Georges Hall Restored © H. M. The Queen 1993

Before becoming Royal Librarian Oliver Everett was Private Secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, 1981-83, Assistant Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales, 1978-80 and served in the Foreign Office 1967-78, including postings to India and Spain. He was educated at Cambridge University and undertook post graduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA; and at the London School of Economics.

TO BOOK TICKETS

Fine Art Connoisseur magazine – ‘The Art of Alexander Creswell’

Watercolour and the World: The Art of Alexander Creswell

BY PETER TRIPPI

The British wastercolourist Alexander Creswell (b. 1957) does not permit grass to grow beneath his feet, so this month finds him opening his latest exhibition at New York City’s Forbes Galleries.

A defining feature of Creswell’s art is his lifelong desire to explore the world, which surely began the day he was born in the British embassy at Helsinki, where his father served as ambassador. He grew up shuttling between various capitals and his boarding school in England, Whinchester College, where he discovered his passion for art.[...]

LIVING LINKS WITH THE PAST

This season Creswell has finally found the perfect space to execute large works. His benefactor, oddly enough, is the once-renowned Brtish academician G.F. Watts (1819 – 1904), who lived and worked in the village of Compton, Surrey, a 30-minute train ride south of London. Following a sensitive renovation and expansion, the Watts Gallery is set to re-open to the public on June 18, filled with the master’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Just across the street is the Great Studio, and this April Creswell became the first painter to use it since Watts’s death in 1904.[...]

Fortunately, American admirers can see nine Creswell works from The Forbes Collection, plus a dozen others, at New York City’s Forbes Galleries between May 6 and September 10 2011.

To read the full Fine Art Connoisseur article: FAC_Creswell_article May 2011

May Painting of the Month – Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey, the Henry VII Lady Chapel. Alexander Creswell. Watercolour 30 x 40in

This is one of the finest interiors in Britain, an ecclesiastical edifice of breathtaking delicacy and a softness of spirit which is perhaps surprising at the epicentre of London. It is also perhaps surprisingly unknown.

I have been fortunate enough to have been sketching the interiors of Westminster Abbey since January, as the raking low light of winter explores the darker recesses in this treasure house of British history. As a touchstone in a hectic life, Westminster Abbey provides a constant and peaceful place of continued study and reflection, from a historic and an architectural point of view and also for its spiritual importance. Its busy interior is made up of a collection of delightfully intimate spaces, each part separately identifiable from the whole in the same way as were the individuals interred and commemorated there: king & queens, statesmen, poets and politicians.

It is a busy place, Westminster Abbey, both below ground and above. On Sundays between services I have found peace to explore with pencil and paper. By contrast I am thrilled to have the opportunity to see the Abbey doing what it does best, namely the pomp, pageant and ceremony of state. I will be sketching the Royal Wedding during the service.