The Millinery Works Art Gallery

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PAINTED SEA

PAINTINGS BY ERIC RIMMINGTON

November 30th until December 18th 2005

        Left: Still Looking Back Oil on linen canvas 16ins x 36ins 2001

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     Left: Wide Oil on linen canvas 26ins x 26ins 2001
        
'I sometimes have a curious notion that I am painting the sea as if it's a still life and a still life as if it's the sea; in the sense that although the sea is always in movement it stays and returns to the same, while the still life, although it doesn't move, the head moves, as you paint it, and the light moves as you observe it and the objects change.'

                                                                                                        Eric Rimmington, 2005

It is on the basis of his still life paintings particularly that Eric Rimmington's reputation has been steadily growing over twenty five years, though patrons of the Millinery Works Gallery will also be aware of his paintings of North London and of the Tube, and his series of Kings Cross and Mildmay drawings. These 'outdoor' projects have always been pursued in counterpoint to the studio work, complementing but also in contrast to it. The present exhibition, arranged around a focussed group of small and medium-sized pictures whose subject is the sea, brings these two aspects of his work together.

Still life is the supremely 'indoors' genre in Western painting; intimately linked to the life of the house and concerned with the contents of table, kitchen or larder. Often the objects are presented in a cupboard-like windowless space which seems sealed off from the outside world. Rimmington's still lifes, in this respect (as in others), have always departed from the norm; objects sit on a table or a shelf in a studio whose window onto the street is always at least implicitly present in a reflection on a shiny surface, or shadows cast by objects in its light. The studio, however, is a room; a solid casing, sheltered from the weather, in which things can be expected to remain as they were placed until the painter decides to strike the composition. Nothing could be further from the wind-blown sand and sea spray, the changeable temperature and advancing or receding tide levels of a beach. Just as nothing - in terms of genres - could seem to be further from the world of still life than the seascape; essentially concerned with fluctuating, unstable elements - water and air and, historically, second only, in its potential for drama, to battle scenes (with which it has often been combined). Rimmington's approach to the seascape, however, also diverges from the expected.

        Weighing the Catch, Scarborough Oil on hardboard 9.75 ins x 8.25ins 1956

His connection to the sea goes back to birth. He was born in Portsmouth and his earliest memory is of; 'Pushing a toy boat along the table - I was, perhaps, two - when this man arrived with his long black serge legs - I'd never seen him before ...' This was his seaman father, whose own father had been a Royal Marine (the artist's two older brothers were also in the Navy). The sea was a continuous presence throughout his childhood; family walks would be taken along the Front at Southsea, school holidays spent swimming off the beach. During his teens a recurrent dream had him coming up over Portsdown hill and seeing - with a feeling of devastation - land stretching out, instead of the water. Evacuated to the countryside at the start of World War II he began to copy magazine illustrations of the sea; fascinated by the artists' ability to depict the surface while also suggesting the transparency through which one looked to the depths. The actual 'immensity - and also the fearfulness' of those depths was brought home to him as a young soldier, over several weeks travelling on a troop ship to the Far East.

Returning to Portsmouth before going to the Slade, Rimmington painted the Solent (the Channel between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight) as a backdrop in his large mural for Trafalgar House. But the sea only began to appear in its own right in his work when, on leaving the Slade, he went to live in Scarborough. This early period is represented in the exhibition by a study of fish-cleaning on the quays and by views of beach and cliffs; paintings or drawings done on the spot or from the windows of a nearby house.

The daily contact with the ocean which comes from living in a seaside town was broken by a move to Bradford, followed by the English Midlands and London. For many years it was only renewed on holidays; mostly at Benajarafe, southern Spain, where the artist spent successive summers during the 1960s and '70s. After which the sea almost disappeared from his work, except indirectly; as in the paintings of the Thames which show the tidal waters of the river as it widens towards the Estuary.

  Woolwich Ferry, Looking Towards the Thames Barrier, Oil on linen canvas 16ins x 20ins 1994

From the late 1980s onwards, however, family circumstances began to take the artist back to the South Coast, specifically to Selsey Bill, a little to the east of his birthplace. Selsey is a seaside town on the Manhood Peninsular in West Sussex, part of the coastal plain between the South Downs and the Channel; it appears on the map as the right hand curve into which the Isle of Wight would fit if the land could be put back together like a jigsaw puzzle. The Island is visible on clear days, looking south; as is Portsmouth, looking west; and the Downs, Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, looking east. It is an unremarkable and mostly unremarked-on stretch of coastline with little, some might think, to sustain interest (certainly compared with the dramatic potential of the cliffs at Scarborough). Yet each side of the Bill has its distinct character; on the West a long sandy beach is separated from sea-level meadows by a man-made gravel embankment; on the East, a slope of partially vegetated shingle leads down to spits and sandbanks which reveal themselves as the tide goes out. Further east, there is a small natural harbour; landing point initially for Roman invaders and later for a Saxon saint. On both sides, features have changed, even within living memory, as erosion has led to the engulfment of fields and buildings.

Rimmington began to spend a lot of time in this area; 'Just absorbing and observing and hardly daring to sit down and work ....' A hesitation overcome when, in the late 1990s, he formulated a definite project to paint the beach and sea on the spot. The resulting canvases, generally completed in a single sitting, differ significantly from conventional marine painting. There, characteristically, a human element - figures or a boat - is introduced to convey scale or to suggest the danger of a stormy sea or the solace of a calm one; as if the sea can only be described in terms of its relation to the human predicament. With only one exception, Rimmington's paintings show neither boats nor people; the water, beach and sky are examined purely in relation to each other, as if these elements were quite indifferent to human existence, as is indeed the case. Waves run forward, break and subside; clouds darken, disperse, regroup; the water transmits the colour of the sand beneath it, as well as reflecting the shadow and light of the sky above; it is towards the appearance of these phenomena that the artist's attention is exclusively directed. The one exception is Swimmer, 2004, where a man's head can be seen among the waves. According to the artist; 'I mostly wanted the sea only to be itself in its infinitude. The man appeared in this painting almost without me intending it.'

Laura Gascoigne, in her catalogue introduction to Rimmington's exhibition at the Mercury Gallery in 2000, remarked on the presence of 'a stone, a sea-worn brick, … a beach-combed wooden pulley' among the various objects depicted. Her speculation that 'the sea was coming into the still lifes' is corroborated by the still lifes in this selection. It is now, however, more than a matter of flotsam and jetsam replacing household objects on the table top: here we find the sea itself included as an object, in the form of a painted canvas or board. In Turned, 2001 (page 14), for instance, the shadow of the turned wooden vase bends upwards across the corner of the seascape behind it and onto the back wall, suggesting analogies with the shadows cast by clouds on the waves, which are both themselves being turned over and are part of the 'turning' tide. Both conceptually and visually it constitutes for the artist - and observer - a sort of 'second level' examination of the sea; an examination, literally, at one remove.

        La Gaviota Oil on linen canvas 48 ins x 32ins 1997

Two paintings in this exhibition stand apart from the others, on account of their size and Mediterranean brightness. La Gaviota, 1997, and Painted Sea, 1996, re-capitulate the artist's preoccupations of the 1960s and '70s in the context of the intervening decades but also set the template for the later still lifes. 'La Gaviota' in Benajarafe was the house in which the artist stayed each summer, spending his days walking, swimming and working in a makeshift outdoor studio. Both the found wood assemblage depicted on the back wall and the oil sketch above it were made there. These, along with a snapshot of the beach, taken on a brief return visit in 1997, and the echoing colours of the objects on the table lead the observer - with the artist - backwards and forwards through different spaces, times, and modes of representation.

        Left: Painted Sea Oil on linen canvas 48ins x 32ins 1996

In Painted Sea a glazed cream and blue jug (evidently the 'parent' of the small glazed pot in La Gaviota) stands alone on a table with nothing but a few drops of water on the cloth; these, however, alert us to the fact that it is filled to the brim. Glimpsing the wainscotting at the base of the studio wall one realizes that rather than - as it might first appear - standing on a balcony in front of a dizzying expanse of sea, the table is in front of a large painted canvas. Brother Turtle, dating from 1973 was, in the artist's words, 'a simple representation of a remembered moment; extreme heat and quiet in southern Spain, on a summer afternoon'. Here there was a definite concern with the relationship of the human to the sea; 'the oceanic feeling of life and death ... the terror of the sea ... At times the notion of swimming out and allowing oneself to drown has a curious compulsion which I suspect is not unique to me.' Indeed, even in this studio room, with its weighty ceramic jug, foursquare table, wainscotted walls, there is a sense of an imminent overflowing; as if the contents of the jug, so globe-like in its shape, might at any moment spill over, not in drops but in a flood.

© Mary Michaels, 2005

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