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Light and shade

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October

David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light
Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July

As a landscape painter and draughtsman, David Tress (born 1955) gets better and better. Unafraid of long-term projects that require patience and research, Tress embarked in 2001 on an investigation of the landscapes of northern Britain that had been so fruitful an inspiration to 18th-century painters such as Turner, Girtin and Sandby. Retracing their journeys, he placed himself wherever possible in the same spot from which they had drawn or painted a scene, and recorded it as it appears now. In some cases the landscape was virtually unchanged after two centuries, in others car parks, commercialism and traffic had encroached ineluctably on a previously unspoilt vista. The project is of historical and sociological as well as artistic interest, and many venues around Britain will be hosting it over the next two years. Half of the exhibition — the section dealing with Cumbria and North Wales — is currently on show at Petworth House, a highly appropriate setting as Turner used to paint there. A day in the Sussex countryside is much enhanced by Tress’s depictions of wild romantic scenery elsewhere.

The single quiet cream-painted exhibition room is dominated by a large and masterly drawing of Grasmere. This magnificent rendition (a museum-quality drawing if ever I saw one) is a powerful evocation of the famous lake in Cumbria so beloved of Wordsworth. The deep blacks of the graphite sink below the ripples of light as Tress orchestrates a complex interplay between the white of the paper, the top layers of which are occasionally ripped and scarified, and the mark-making which brings definition to the subject. There is violence in the making of the work, yet Tress has won through to serenity, like the calm after storm. Although there are superficial parallels with the Auerbach and Kossoff approach, Tress has evolved a method of drawing very much his own which results in some of the most exciting landscapes being done today. Emotion is balanced by thought and his elemental attack on the paper (a sort of speeded-up erosion) is checked by delicacies of touch and shading.