We do not begin work as soon as we disembark in a strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves. And each day was for me a different country. – Marcel Proust
Art is born of humiliation. – W.H Auden, to Stephen Spender
During my five years at Seoul’s Sangmyung University as ‘Professor of Western Painting’ other foreign lecturers from art schools in the UK or US would visit on exchange programmes. One of them, preparing his installation, suggested that artists from the West enjoy an advantage, in their initiation into the Korean environment, because its strangeness affords the freedom of an ‘innovative’ response. This struck me as lazy thinking; an artist ought to be impressed by the strangeness of everything everywhere. And if, for the last thirty or forty years, art has counted for nothing if it has not been ‘innovative,’ then I’m no artist. I associate the word with certain corruptive ideas.
But the only features of this environment and culture that I found truly strange, and unlike anything in a former colonial power like Britain – or even postcolonial Ireland, notwithstanding some historical parallels – came of the disfiguring legacy of devastating events: a hundred and fifty years of annexation, subjugation, division (proposed by the Japanese at the turn of the twentieth century, well ahead of the Americans), war, famine, dictatorship; an ongoing chain of calamities that commenced with the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war. The physical traces have only begun to be overlaid (and institutional relics, like the Prosecutors’ Office, gradually and arduously disassembled). The emotional, social and political ones persist. As for the ‘exotic,’ my fantasy about Korea was that the utterly unfamiliar would provide a stimulus so powerful as to revitalize my work. This was wrong-headed; my problem wasn’t a lack of stimuli. Nevertheless I have made progress. But what is at first strange gives way to intimations of the deeply familiar, while my country of origin now seems enormously stranger than the one I adopted.
Twenty years before leaving the UK I visited a small gallery to see the work of a local group of painters I was getting to know, some of whom had been students of Dennis Creffield. He in turn had been a student of David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic in the late 1940s, along with Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach (the last two of whom he called ‘giants in chains,’ seemingly petrified in the shrine of public acclaim). The gallery was unattended but for an elderly invigilator. Since I took an interest in the work and lingered long, we fell into conversation, during which I was fairly free with my opinions. I then realized that the man was Creffield himself (then about the age I have reached at the time of writing). On learning this I became less forthright, which he noted and reproved me for. This was the only occasion on which he and I talked at such length. Fortunately for me the meeting took place just as I decided to give up my stone-carving and restoration business in order to return to painting, and was lamenting the time I felt had been lost. Creffield, whose publication of English Cathedral drawings had dazzled me a few years previously, took the view that, on the contrary, my experience of working so closely on the fabric of those structures, touching them, learning about them, changing them, was an invaluable one for a draughtsman; he even envied me. For Bomberg, ‘the cultivation of tactile values was crucial in helping him disengage from ordinary perception and discover a more intuitive way of grasping reality.’* In the statement provided with his drawings Creffield describes himself as ‘of the progeny of Cézanne’ – who, like Van Gogh, put gravity back into painting after the impressionist experiment – and adds:
‘The medieval artist’s idea of the perceptual was as of a faculty of imaginative understanding. And so in his art space, time and distance are not governed by measurement but by the relative significance of the constituent parts…
‘I am not interested in creating an illusion of reality – nor in making a symbol of it. But in trying to find a substantial form for its substantiality – an image of actual experience – the wound unbound.’†
In Korea I set out to find motifs among which to do the same; a majestic mass of nature, a mountain, an impressive building. I wished to immerse myself in my subject as purely as Creffield. There is nothing damaging about being in thrall to a teacher, if that influence is one among various others, and the student thereby works towards an independent critical identity. But for Creffield, growing up and studying in post-war London with his love of Wittgenstein and English cathedral builders, the subject was anything but ‘irrelative.’ I too loved those buildings, which was why I became a stonemason; I too loved my country, in a way I could not acknowledge until I uprooted myself – although in many respects the place I left no longer exists. Korea and its architecture (the little that was left to stand in front of, by the twenty-first century) was the exotic; for a long time, it made me only think of my uprooting. Love, in a comparable sense, took nearly half a lifetime. But I can say that drawing advanced my knowing and understanding.
For the first year of our marriage my wife and I lived in Samcheong-Dong, half a mile from Gwanghwamun, the outer gate to Gyeongbuk palace. The western-style Japanese colonial government building, eighty years old, deliberately imposed on the native aesthetic and ousting most of the ancient structures in the compound, was demolished in 1996; painstaking restoration then began and is still in progress. Venturing out with my materials at six in the morning, I began drawing the first of the two inner gates standing behind Gwanghwamun (the outer gate) which in those days it was possible to access freely from the street. This is Heungnyemun; the third gate, Geunjeongmun, is beyond. I did not know that the reconstruction of Heungnyemun, on the site of the colonial building that had temporarily displaced it, had just been completed. Ten minutes into the drawing I was approached by two Buddhist monks from the nearby Jogyesa temple, grey-cloaked and bearded, who studied my work, excruciatingly, while I apologized for my poor Korean and the crudeness of the drawing. But, finding that I was British, they mostly wanted to talk about Manchester United Football Club. Working out of doors in the UK, I had been used to being given a wide berth and left to get on with it. Not that it was understood that I had to concentrate; people there are less curious. The monks were the first in a continual series of genial passers-by who didn’t imagine that I could not do whatever I was doing and hold a conversation at the same time. The next person to stop was the first of many parents I have met, while out drawing, whose child was at art school and who wished to show me photos of their work.
Sungnyemun, formerly one of the eight gates in the historic city and the oldest wooden structure in the country, a mile from Gwanghwamun, was destroyed by arson one night, by a known miscreant, before I made any undertaking to draw it. My failure was a serious dereliction (I had had three years) but so had been the decision by Lee Myung-Bak, the former mayor of Seoul who won the presidential election, to relax security to the site. Typically he rushed the construction of an ersatz replacement, declaring that it would be ‘better’ than its predecessor. This could not be; the mature native pine used in the original, available when repairs to war damage were made in 1961, was harder to come by, the requisite skill likewise. Fresh paint soon peeled, new timbers began to split. During the conflagration firefighters did not know where to direct the water, aiming it uselessly at the roof until experts in historic structures, roused from their beds around the country, phoned in the correct instructions. In the morning people gathered at the ruin, many weeping, some in penitent prostration; children left notes of apology to their Cheosun ancestors.
I have made drawings of, or from, other sections of the city wall, around the home we later moved to in Seongbuk-Dong, north and east of Samcheong-Dong. I tried to draw in the grounds of Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung, as tour guides with loudspeakers, entirely unnecessary and audible in every corner of the site, escorted small groups of visitors through them. I had a bitter altercation with an Australian tourist who claimed the right to stand at my shoulder and watch me work for as long as he pleased, because he had paid the entrance fee. Our wives separated us before traded insults led to blows.
This is a noisy country, perhaps just in a way I’m not used to. Even when I’m not trying to draw, the rails are blown up under every train of thought, as it were, before it can leave the station. Sudden, completely unexpected crashes make me jump out of my skin, while no-one around me appears to turn a hair. Nothing of any considerable weight or mass, once picked up, is placed back on the ground, but must be thrown. A reckless cursoriness, certainly a shocking disregard for safety, bred in the frantic pace of industrialization, has long become the normal mode in which to go about anything, whether or not the haste is really justified. So a middle-aged landscape painter from the relatively sedate English Home Counties is put out to find that Seoul is not quite as conducive to creative meditation as Godalming, or the Côte d’Azur. I even think of Beethoven trying to compose during Napoleon’s advance on Vienna. I’m no Beethoven, of course. All the same: ‘If they could make more of a racket, they wouldn’t be Korean,’ remarks an older French friend whose own patience is also continuously tested, despite his having lived in the country long before I knew the first thing about it.
In the post hard Lines I mention my wife’s former tutor, who laboured to secure me the post at Sangmyung University. He had been appointed the first curator of the National Museum of Art at Gwacheon at the end of the military dictatorship, but eventually gave up the position owing to constant political interference. Towards the end of the Roh Moo-Hyun government – at which time I had been in the country three years – it happened that he was on good terms with the curatorial team at Gyeongbok Palace, and so able to arrange my access there on days when the grounds were closed to tourists, allowing me to draw the buildings uninterrupted.
The English cathedrals are modelled around the human frame and built with stone, the geology of that country being unusually diverse. A Creffield drawing is remarkable for taking in the commanding verticality of those monuments in a complete impression of the subject:
‘…it is possible. To look up and look down… to unite these separate moments of time and physical movement, by means of the continuous imagination of memory.
‘I do not look at the cathedral as if through a letterbox – neither do I draw it so.’**
But the Korean buildings do not stretch into the sky, nor press down on the earth with such force. Instead they seem to have alighted on it, wings still unfolded. They are made largely of wood and their contours follow that of the landscape, blending into the mountain layers. But drawing the mountain, as tough as that may be, is not as perplexing as trying to draw one of these structures. A mountain has height and mass, like an English cathedral; my perception of it, for which I seek an equivalent in the drawing, includes the tension between its mass and my own. Standing before these buildings, however, one doesn’t feel that connection in gravity, in relative mass; their ethereality can’t be internalized in the same way. Although Geunjeongjeon, for example, the largest edifice in the centre of the Geongbokgung complex, does loom over one, which is why I attempted so many drawings of it, the essence of the thing is not in its height; in being drawn, it is neither quite like a mountain nor a large boat.
I set out to create a gesture – as Creffield calls his drawings, after Wittgenstein – that comprehended the mechanics, dimensions and directions of thrust with the same effectiveness. But in the attempt I was continually driven to make horizontal lines, rather than vertical ones, being sensible more of volume than weight, and of layering rather than compression. The tendency of horizontal lines is to close down the form because they recede into the picture space, rather than advance out of it; vertical marks bring the mass forward. In any case, to treat this structure as though it were the west front at Wells – somehow turned on its side and hovering in the air – was to miss the point; its grandeur is stated in different terms. After blundering through a number of drawings, I began to understand better how the building is assembled. If I found myself starting to describe or construct the form – when my eyes became tired and attention slackened – I erased the marks I had made and paused, and looked, until I could re-engage more intuitively. Eventually something of the thing’s ‘substantiality’ seemed to look back at me from the drawing; a distillation of its energizing materiality, its immediacy and mystery.
However, just as this small progress became evident in the work, the officials who granted me special access to the palace buildings were replaced by others. With the arrival of new chief executives, administrative personnel tend to change, down to the lowest rung; politics infect everything. The privilege of the drawing pass was not extended at the end of the agreed period, and I have not returned.
During this period my wife and I twice visited Cambodia, where I drew the temples in and around Angkor Thom.† The Khymer buildings, though of sandstone, were as unlike the English structures as the Korean. I used graphite on watercolour paper, of the largest size that could be easily transported. As usual, I worked on the one drawing at each site, erasing and reworking for some hours. But I could not help striving for ‘expressiveness.’ Out of about a dozen drawings, two or three seemed less assured, somehow less complete, than the rest, which I framed and exhibited back in Seoul. Not that any appeared to represent an obvious advancement, but the best of them, I thought, were strong and worthy of the interest they attracted; no one else was making such drawings. It took several years for me to understand that the few drawings I had left aside were in fact more successful. In these the marks were less forced and more honestly observed, and the the power of the lines to carry form and depth was not cancelled by dark patches scrubbed in here and there, where unity across the image required more subtle modulations. They have the same effect on the drawing as a hole torn in the paper. In those more hesitant drawings there was less explaining, more unity and something of the sense and mystery, beyond the telling, of the experience of seeing, only retrievable in the consciousness of that presence. It would be impossible for me to formulate, for the benefit of a reader, any practical means of achieving this; for a long time I wasn’t aware that only the works I had rejected at the time came anywhere near.
By that urge to ‘expressiveness’ I mean that I was driven by a desire to make a drawing that directly attained comparability with the mastery I saw in Creffield’s work, and others, as if it were enough to feel as much as that artist felt, and to receive the same impressions with the same intensity, because – regarding the actual execution – somewhere in me was a fellow consummate draughtsman who only had to be lured out to perform equivalent wonders. To make a brief detour, I am reminded of another project very early in life, when I once took it upon myself to bake a cake – my mother being occupied in a telephone conversation and safely out of sight – by throwing together on the kitchen table (which I could just about reach) some ingredients I had seen her use previously, without placing them in a bowl, and adding other substances that seemed agreeably consistent: ash from the grate, creams and unguents from the bathroom, powders and fluids from various cupboards. This mélange soon transferred itself to the floor. Had I been a genius – there are supposed to be one or two in each generation – I might there and then have become the youngest proponent of Tachisme, in the last days of Art Informel.
After Cambodia I spent a summer working in Deoksan, an industrial area of Seoul south of the Han river where an artist friend had a studio. I made more charcoal drawings, and an oil painting, from the roof of the building. But I now began to appreciate how powerful fine pencil drawings can be, regardless of their size, and from this point made fewer large works, either with charcoal or those blunt clubs of graphite I had used in Cambodia.
Of the many tutors coming and going at the old independent Camberwell School of Art, Sargy Mann was one whom I had relatively little to do with. But he was an accomplished figurative painter, then still in his forties, who unbeknown to me had begun to lose his eyesight a decade before and would be completely blind within a few years. I learned this later, when I was myself teaching painting in Korea, and that, extraordinarily, he had nonetheless found it possible to continue his work. His training and grounding as a sighted painter enabled him to visualize, appraise and marshal the arrangement of colours and tones in the body of paint; and so, given the means to locate the respective materials and their intended position on the painting surface (a measuring apparatus, someone to tell him where things were), he went on, as before, successfully transforming those materials into systems of depth, light and form. He found it necessary to continue to roam the landscape – accompanied, naturally – in search of motifs, which seems to me very significant. I daresay that the reader who is interested to know more about Sargy Mann will discover, in videos made of his late work in progress, as comprehensive a lesson about the business of painting as can be found anywhere. For myself, particularly notable was the painter’s realization, on becoming totally blind, that he need not have limited himself to the same subject matter as his chosen teachers (Bonnard, for example), as had been his habit; in his primarily tactile interaction with the world, and the expanded dominion of imagination and memory, he now saw no reason to neglect ideas that were peculiar to his own life and experiences.
If there is such a thing, the ‘physic of the irrelative’ did not, after all, have the effect of opening my eyes. Sargy Mann achieved much more by his tragic misfortune. Spellbound by Creffield’s drawings, perhaps I could not help looking for an English cathedral in a Cheosun palace. My closeness to the English buildings as a former stonemason would hardly have hindered me, had I myself ever seriously undertaken to draw them, and to have done so could only be helpful when I came to draw in Korea. But unfamiliarity, or otherwise, with the subject does not come into the matter. The more drawing, the nearer the realization of potential, and the issues are unchanged wherever you are or whatever you’re working from. I started drawing again after a long hiatus and it happened that I did this in a strange country. But it might as well have been among the things I had known all my life. My drawing has improved notwithstanding, because as I went on drawing I started to look. It has taken me most of my life really to understand what Picasso meant by claiming not to seek but to find, and how seldom I can say this for myself.
*Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987) p.266
**Dennis Creffield, English Cathedrals (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987) p.7
† An account of the first visit, written at the time, is published in the Addenda.