JOHN VIRTUE - Oxford Forum [Issue Two]

WHEN PAINTER JOHN Virtue abandoned the countryside of South Devon which had previously been his home and subject to tackle the sprawling cityscape of London, no one had ever imagined that he would undertake such a radical break from his past. Moving from the Exe Estuary to the River Thames, Virtue’s physical paintings took on a scale never before attempted by any other visual artist as he considered in the historic skyline a subject he had not previously focused on.
    In December 2002,Virtue became the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. His relationship with the Gallery goes back a long way. He vividly recalls his first visit as a schoolboy in 1964, when encounters with, amongst others, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable and Rubens, left an enduring legacy. In addition to his fascination with European landscape, Virtue draws inspiration from other traditions, including the Japanese art of Zen calligraphy: “The Oriental tradition is to do with movement, and the Western tradition is to do with stasis, so it’s as if you could capture with line and speed something so autonomic as breathing and walking and somehow freeze it in the way the Western tradition thinks.” This frozen energy permeates Virtue’s work throughout.
    His pictures are executed in a modernist painterly language inherited from Abstract Expressionism. He is fond of quoting from E.H.Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, where Gombrich discusses a line drawing that can be read as either a rabbit with its long ears, or a duck with an opened bill. Gombrich points out that we can perceive it as either the rabbit or the duck, never the two at the same time. Yet Virtue argues that you should be able to see them both together: “The actuality comes from trying to lock into the two; one’s to do with movement, of being, existing, of living, the other is to make a contemplative object that has an aesthetic quality, an aesthetic value.” Taking his cue from this, Virtue insists his paintings are made as reference-free abstract marks, but allows they can become the topographical features to which they relate.
    During his time in Devon, his work focused on the Exe Estuary and Virtue would undertake a weekly 16-mile walk, right around the estuary, filling sketchbooks with rapid drawings. Whatever the weather, he would complete the 16 miles, often with his sketchbooks and himself saturated with rainwater. This walk and its resultant images would act as source material for the next few days’ painting. In London, Virtue constructed a new routine. He would start weekdays by drawing outside, from two specific locations: the roof of Somerset House – overlooking the North Bank of the Thames, facing eastwards towards the City – and on the South Bank at ground level, also facing east. He later added a new location: the roof of the National Gallery, overlooking Trafalgar Square.
    When making his London drawings, as with the walks around the Exe estuary, bad weather was not a deterrent. New drawings of the same views were made on every working day, with the same buildings being drawn – often in fairly meticulous topographical detail – literally hundreds of times. This almost obsessive routine seems to show the need to draw for Virtue is not solely about gaining information, but is also to do with the desire to enact some kind of ritualistic procedure that bonds him to his subject.
    The contrast between the artist’s previous rural surroundings and central London could not have been greater. However, Virtue says that all this is incidental to his method of working: “Obviously, you’d be a fool to say that you’d not be influenced and changed, you may well be castrated by this situation, it could strangle you – I mean, your studio is in Trafalgar Square, not some back-street of Exeter or the middle of Dartmoor. That could be quite a frightening thing, but my career has been one of movement, not one of stasis. It’s not been about settling and having a cosy background; it’s had a lot of violent changes … I will be very much affected but the actual discipline and the way I work will not be affected. And it doesn’t matter whether there are 20 million people around you, or a few sheep and cows.”
    Virtue claims he is trying to make abstractions that derive from a visual reality. He is not consciously dealing with the history of a place and its peoples. Yet London is emphatically not a neutral subject. By choosing to paint the view towards the City, following the flow of the Thames rather than looking back upstream towards Westminster, he is representing one of the most potent symbols of London and its history: the instantly recognisable dome of St Paul’s.
    Virtue works solely in black and white, but cites practical rather than theoretical reasons for this. Yet despite the artist’s conscious intentions, black and white can never completely shake off their psychological and symbolic resonance and inescapably have other implications. White is hope, life, light. Black is despair, death, darkness.
    Virtue is uneasy about such interpretations. However, on the regular open days that he held as part of his time as Associate Artist, he encountered many students and members of the public who identified this element in his work, and admits that “usually what people say about your work is not what you wish to communicate”. A common response was to find the pictures menacing or foreboding – apocalyptic even. Virtue’s reply was always the same: to state that he is simply making abstractions from the visual data he has recorded and he is certainly not attempting to invest the paintings with any emotive content. He concedes, though, that “I don’t put atmosphere into my pictures but people seem to say it’s there.”
    People do not feature in Virtue’s paintings. This is especially noticeable in Landscape 709: an enormous canvas measuring twelve feet square. Virtue made the drawings for this painting whilst standing on the muddy foreshore of the river at low tide. The viewpoint is thus set dramatically low. The picture is divided horizontally by the wide span of Blackfriars Bridge, which separates the viewer from the buildings on the other side of the river. Despite their distance, the dramatic perspective makes them dwarf the spectator. On the near side, a black scaffolding of lines represents a construction of wooden piles used for mooring. Virtue has rigorously observed this construction and placed each element with painstaking accuracy. It provides an area of abstract stability, whilst hinting subtly at the lives of those anonymous men who put them there.
    The paintings made from drawings executed from the roof of Somerset House are almost bird’s-eye views. We look down upon the great curving arc of the river and can follow its progress as it sweeps towards the distance. The broad sweep across the London skyline gives these pictures an epic, visionary quality although they never lose touch with visual reality.
    Like St Paul’s, the Thames has a powerful symbolism. Rivers have an unavoidable and almost clichéd connotations of the journey through life and of our common mortality. Although Virtue is reluctant to have his own paintings discussed in a similar metaphorical way, the black sheets of paint with which he shrouds the city’s buildings powerfully elicit a sense of the inevitable. The great metropolis is literally and metaphorically overshadowed by the irresistible dark forces that loom above it, and is split in two by the band of white energy that flows through it.
    Whilst working towards his National Gallery exhibition, Virtue read Peter Ackroyd’s acclaimed London: The Biography. Ackroyd, like Charles Dickens before him, understands the city as a huge living, breathing and evolving organism. Virtue found Ackroyd’s book utterly compelling and admits that it affected the way he viewed the city that had now become his subject.
    Dickens himself, when writing of London in Our Mutual Friend, also uses a visionary language that seems apt to Virtue’s paintings: “It was a foggy day in London and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.”
    Dickens is referring to the industrial coal produced pollution that choked 19th-century London. When making his drawings, Virtue was often struck by the beauty of the sunlight as it struggled to penetrate the pollution of 21st-century London, and this has inevitably found its way into his paintings. Looking at the surface of this new work, the Dickens reference seems especially pertinent. Much of the architecture is indeed “between being visible and invisible”. Virtue’s method is carefully to delineate all of the buildings, window by window, chimney by chimney. All of this detail might then be completely or partially obscured by veils of black. The process is cyclical: these black layers in turn might then be covered with dense white acrylic, enabling the artist carefully to redraw the architecture, which will once again be buried. He employs a wide variety of mark making methods. Using the point of a small brush, the fine architectural details that have been noted in the drawings are transcribed with care. On the opposite extreme, a whole bucket of black ink might then be emptied over the picture from a distance of several feet, at times with the painting on the floor.
    Virtue’s new paintings, like London itself, are built layer upon layer, with previous images buried but still occasionally revealing themselves through the translucency of subsequent layers. A symbolic connection with the history of the city is unavoidable. Each generation of London’s inhabitants leaves a mark on its appearance, which either survives for posterity or becomes buried beneath the additions of later generations.
    The city has been burnt and rebuilt, blitzed and rebuilt, with the only constant feature being the River Thames. During his time at the National Gallery, the Thames became Virtue’s leitmotif. The fluctuating weather and the changing London skyline, marked during this two-year period by the completion of Swiss Re ‘Gherkin’ Tower, provide a contrast with the constantly flowing river, which is the one note of permanence. It was of course alongside that river that the first human inhabitants of what was to become London chose to make their settlements, thereby beginning the countless generations who have contributed to its development and evolution. Virtue’s paintings record that evolution and at the same time, become part of it.

Colin Wiggins is the curator of the exhibition John Virtue: London Paintings, running at the National Gallery until June 5th. He is also co-author of John Virtue: London Paintings [Virtue, John W004. Landscape No. 706, 2003-4. Oil, acrylic, black ink and shellac on canvas. 244 x 244 cm. Hiscox plc, London. © John Virtue. Photo The National Gallery, London]

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