Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

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

Tress works out in the landscape, often in rough weather, as can be seen in ‘Sketchbook Study: Langdale Pikes from Blea Tarn (Rain)’. This lively atmospheric watercolour was made in driving rain, and as Tress says it was ‘a battle to put pigment on to the paper faster than it was washed off’. Quite a contrast to the painting of Harlech Castle, a favourite of Turner, Varley and Cox, but now surrounded by a road rather than tidal inlets. Tress paints the pub sign ‘Food Served Daily’ in the foreground of his picture, a red-lettered intrusion on the picturesque. A notion of the sublime is what powered those 18th-century artists, who went to wild landscape in search of the awe-inspiring. Tress can still find it, though our senses are somewhat blunted today by constant global images of the terrifying retailed through the media. A particularly fine prospect (and little changed since Cotman visited it in 1809) is captured in ‘Light Passing (Llyn Llydaw towards Snowdon)’. It’s a dark and stormy painting with light feeding through the clouds, carefully structured despite (or because of) the complex drama of the elements.

The exhibition is on a lengthy tour: Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold (23 August to 12 October), Gallery Oldham (17 January to 18 April 2009), Keswick Museum (April to May 2009), Worcester City Art Gallery (September to October 2009), National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (October to December 2009), Oriel Ynys Mon, Anglesey (January to February 2010), West Wales Art Centre, Fishguard (March to April 2010), The Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr (May to June 2010), Stowe School, Buckingham (September to October 2010). In the meantime, there’s an exhibition of Tress’s recent paintings and drawings at the West Wales Arts Centre in Fishguard (until 23 August). Unlike so many contemporary artists, Tress deepens his own work with a thorough knowledge and appreciation of the art of the past. He engages passionately with landscape in a way which enriches our own experience.