RECENT EXHIBITIONS
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Kenneth Draper transforms small things into worlds, wanting to draw our attention
to the huge natural forces behind the existence of even the most inconspicuous plant.
That romantic insight has always hovered around his work, and in the new pictures
he tries to grasp it and give it a physical, three-dimensional reality. Going into
the landscape to observe the facts of nature does not “obliterate Imagination” for
Draper, as it did for William Blake. Rather, it increases his freedom to compose.
The new constructed landscapes are not visionary in any transcendental sense, but
they are certainly works in which Draper’s mind and vivid imagination play a key
role. As the Menorcan landscape takes closer hold on his emotions, his pictures
are still invigorated by repeated looking, but now more poetic invention than topographic,
they are coloured and exalted by memory.
His journey to this point has had a career-long period of gestation, in which Leonardo
da Vinci and J.M.W. Turner, in particular, have profoundly affected his thinking.
Looking back over forty years, the transformation in his work has been one of gradual
unfolding, rather than sudden change. Moving between sculpture, painting and drawing,
and blending the three in his constructions on paper, he has brought his ideas to
recognisably new conclusions in the recent landscapes. In this essay I want to
give a sense of the look and pulse of the Menorcan environment, which, as Draper
says, “continually fires my imagination”.¹ And I want to explore the fine balance
he achieves in his new constructions on paper and his pastel drawings between the
actual experience of Menorca and his imaginary, but none the less real, explorations,
in which each discovery on paper must surprise him as much as it does us.
Since his return from London after serious illness at the end of 2004, Draper’s close
kinship with the landscape has become more meditative and more expansive. For the
time being he has given up working directly from a motif. Instead he revisits spaces
where he has already worked, looking intently, absorbing the colour and what he senses
as the energy of the place. He may sit in a quarry all day until the light fades,
walk along the coast collecting occasional objects thrown up by the tide, spend the
day in a boat or snorkelling. Memory has become his sketchpad. By trusting more
to memory he allows the whole experience of the landscape to inform him in its many
small details and, as he imagines, its grander galactic configuration.
The concentrated effort involved in extracting the essence of this expanding experience
has focused his recent choice of subjects. He is more conscious of particular kinds
of events that interest him, such as seasons, times of day, weather, the nature of
rock and earth, and the plant life dependent on this environment. The emergent work
is not about specific locations. Each is a fresh composition around Draper’s overall
experience of Menorca, as well as about the emotions that he projects into the landscape.
For him, it is these concerns that lift the work beyond the facts of an actual event.
“If you’re an artist of place and the feelings about that place, then those feelings
are also being created when you’re making the work of art. I don’t want to make
a construction or a drawing that reminds the viewer of a place. I want it to be
the place. The event is in the picture.” The question he addresses in the studio
is, “Where does that event start, and where does it finish?” Since each of his pictures
is a continuation of the last, and since each is prompted by different thoughts and
feelings, the full experience will only emerge from some sort of summation, which
he calls a “total event”. To capture something of it, his tendency is to work on
at least three or four pieces at a time, often finishing relatively quickly a set
of pictures that he has been working on for a long time.
Although for lengthy periods in Draper’s career his work has concentrated exclusively
on either sculpture or painting, drawing continued to form an important part of his
practice. Like many artists, he enjoys its immediacy, and has always used the tradition
to work out his sculptural ideas directly on paper. All the coloured works on paper,
whether in pencil, gouache, or pastel, have this same directness for him, aligning
them more closely with drawing than with painting. He sees this integrated and unhierarchical
approach to his media, moving between drawing, painting and sculpture, as a way of
achieving his ambition to grasp, as he puts it, “the totality of my experience”.
¹ All quotations in the text, unless otherwise referenced, are taken from conversations
recorded with the artist in June 2005.
² I am indebted to Dr. Roger White for information on the island’s geology.
activity and in its many prehistoric monuments, resonated with work he had done in England. The movement of rocks caused by plate tectonics produced folding and deeply textured surfaces of a kind he had attempted to capture in earlier landscapes. The “edgy skyline”, where the rugged contours of rocks make an active encounter with the atmosphere, and which Draper finds peculiar to Menorca, had been something he had sought in his English landscapes by a different route. “It was something to do with the cut edge and the frayed edge and the amorphous edge in my attempt to get a solid to disappear into space.” He had explored these qualities in sculptures such as Eclipsed Labyrinths and Spring Tide, but now discovered similar effects everywhere in the coastal landscape of Menorca. Recognition was mixed with further surprise, again sprung on him by the sensation of colour. The north of the island is famous for its multi-coloured rocks, a juxtaposition of mudstone, silt and shales with purplish slate and Devonian Old Red Sandstone.² This last is conspicuously bright by Mediterranean light and made the more vibrant by green growth pushing unexpectedly through crannies in the rock. Nothing in Dorset, Devon or Cornwall had prepared him, or impressed him so forcibly.
In the studio Draper must make decisions about his response to a landscape experience. How much of that experience should he include, what should he take out? The range of feelings and allusions still contained in his pictures explain the complexity of the new work, and the reason for his experiments with constructions on paper. In his sculpture he has always tried to build a sense of illusion into something solid; Mountain, prompted by a visit to a glacier north of Basle in Switzerland, and Light through Dark / The Fall, by West Burton Falls in Yorkshire, are two examples on a landscape theme. His pastel drawings, although built up heavily with oil pastel, exhibit the solid surface and weight of paintings, as well as representing illusory three-dimensional forms. A sequence of quarry drawings done in 1993, featuring loose blocks of stone, is a prime instance. The drawings remain, nevertheless, two-dimensional works on paper. The constructed pictures spring from an urge to give emotional experiences tangible, physical form, with, for him, the “feeling of painting. I wanted something more painterly, more elemental, more intimate, more emotive.”
Draper’s constructions are precisely framed within an edge of white paper. From that demarcating edge through shifting colour movements they focus and hold our attention, rather as some incident might grab our eye while walking in the landscape. Their making merits close scrutiny because the mystery, which Draper senses in the landscape and which he tries to instil in his own, is carefully conceived. The preliminary concept is structured and formed into pictures, which are the combined result of calculated procedures and intuitive decision-making. He starts a picture by building and texturing the surface with layers of moulded polyurethane or resin. To this foundation he applies casts of found objects, or actual feathers, flowers, driftwood and other beached objects, all transformed to a new meaning within his conceptual landscape. To colour his pieces Draper has devised a method of layering powdered pigments, exploiting the versatility of pastel. The complex mix of exciting contrasts and harmonies shows the intricacies that he can achieve. The soft luminosity, which he finds impossible to realise with oil paint, is remarkable. The techniques used in his three-dimensional work owe much to his practice of pastel drawing, giving the veils of colour a
spectacular translucency, with the effect too of introducing light from behind an object. Such effects strengthen the impression that Draper’s small, iconic images are intended as objects for our meditation.
The overriding mood in all these new works on paper is one of optimism and celebration. The animation we sense in them is Draper’s response to light and weather effects, and more generally to the underlying energy and movement he is alert to in the natural landscape. They may suggest many things, but the titles give us a clue to what filled Draper’s mind as he composed them.
Among the new constructions on paper, Sapling and Autumn Sacrifice celebrate seasonal change. The first, in cool greens and mauves, evokes the island springing into life, and its complement or opposite, in reds and orangey ochres, its drying and dying. Draper charges each with his feelings about a current time of year. As
with all his work, these two pictures are lived as they evolve, and their intricate, painstaking construction bears close inspection for the way in which every detail contributes to the overall mood of the picture. A seemingly incongruous choice of found materials, half a rubber wheel from a child’s toy, a scrap of driftwood, garden netting, a cast taken from a car mat, is imaginatively reworked to a new coherence. Autumn Sacrifice
is less clearly defined than Sapling. Built into a much higher relief, its loaded surface appears burnt out. “The piece is about decay. Everything is on the move, breaking down, and crumbling.” Sapling has a strong upward movement. In Autumn Sacrifice the pull is diagonally downward. Elements bend and even fall from the paper. And yet, for Draper, the elliptical, stabilising forms in its top right-hand corner, “almost an image of a heavenly sun and cloud” bring a note of optimism into the picture.
Solid Shadows is an experimental piece, recalling an uncanny experience on the way to his studio one early evening at the beginning of June. The corn had been cut, and as he
drove round a corner he saw a flash of yellow stubble littered with black objects, which on reflection he interpreted as deep, clearly defined, shadows cast by the Mediterranean light. He decided to give the “edge” that so intrigues him between dark and light a solid presence. The shadows become calm, pyramidal forms, equivalents to navetes, ancient structures found on the island. As Draper worked on, the literal corn colour turned acid yellow, and the picture took on an eerie life of its own, suggesting the odd tricks played on the mind at twilight.
Dark Reef was inspired by experiences in the northern part of the island. It draws on his experience of looking down into the sea from the tall outcrop of rocks, the Pa Gros, which embraces one of the island’s beautiful, beached coves, Cala Mesquida. This work continues his thinking in a series of pastels done in the 1980’s and early 1990’s drawn directly in the landscape, in which he looked down vertically into the water. It is the first time he has tried to use this breathtaking view in a constructed piece. He says that he wanted to capture “the sense of water moving, breezes crossing it, objects floating off it, of purpley-grey slate, and, of course, the depth and intensity of the blue Mediterranean water”.
Draper snorkels in this and other areas along the coast, wherever the sea is shallow and brilliantly illuminated by the
sun. The experience draws the world above the surface into another of seaweed, coral, fish, and underwater currents, recalling the enormity of the ocean. In several pictures he envisages the particular forms of anemones, weed and water globules, as magnified fragments from the sea’s bed. These particulars are very keenly observed: the intensity of the colours, particularly the vivid fluorescent green, are those of someone who has experienced the effect of a sudden flash of sunlight underwater at first hand.
Heaven’s Breath represents Draper’s imaginings about the surface of the moon, stimulated by visits to Cap de Favàritx, the strangely grey, weather-beaten promontory on the north east coast. Virtually nothing grows in this “lunar” landscape except spiny patches of ground-hugging thicket called socarrells (Launaea cervicornis). The mood of the place
Cala Pregonda, a beautiful cove of old Devonian Red Sandstone on the northern coast, is another area Draper likes to visit by moonlight. Silver Moon Golden Light conflates his experiences of the place in bright sunshine and on calm moonlit nights. There is a further ambiguity in that we appear to be looking down on the reef in the centre of the bay from above, and yet a horizon is suggested in the upper half on the picture, drawing our gaze across an expanse of sea. The water ripples lightly, and a single “wisp of air” drifts to the right. The exaggerated colours, and the impression that the island is floating off the surface, makes this one of Draper’s most wishful memory pictures, a golden dream, which for him is “all about islands, moons, suns, light and sea.”
One of Draper’s first and unforgettable sights on the island was an area of red rock, which he stumbled on deep in the countryside just north of his home in Es Castell. This site is a spectacular natural formation in the landscape of Devonian sandstone. Its strange overhanging forms, rugged hollows and eroded lattice-like screens suggest a glowing molten mass, petrified in the very process of transformation. Draper still feels as though he is walking through fire when he visits the place. Intrusion exudes this feeling of dense heat in which, against all the odds, something organic sprouts from the rock and bursts a seedpod over the arid surface. Since walking and looking in the landscape supplanted drawing, he has become conscious of the small plants and lichens growing everywhere like miniature gardens in the rock.. Where the circular forms of lichen line the stone niches, he imagines a constellation, filling the whole area
with suns, moons and stars. Something of the new significance, which this red rock area has assumed for him, comes across in this homage to the regenerative power of nature.
Draper’s choice of medium at any one time is impulsive. When he started constructing his landscapes on paper in January 2004 he stopped drawing in pastel. Working entirely in the studio, he was combining colour and materials in a very immediate way, by comparison with his slower sculptural processes. He felt no need to draw. Then, in March 2005, he felt “a renewed urge to go back into the landscape, and feel areas of Menorca.” It was not to work directly in the landscape, simply to refresh himself, and his memory of it. As he continued to construct pictures in this way, he allowed the image to develop with the often unpredictable momentum of his remembered feelings. His need to articulate an idea through immediate contact with drawing soon became pressing once again. He was also attracted back to the more
illusory nature of two-dimensional picture making from the attempt to construct reality. Most importantly, he wanted to work directly with pastel colour, rather than apply colour to the surface of a sculpture or a constructed picture. Returning from a walk in mid-March 2005 he drew Pregonda Light, not knowing whether the drawing would continue. In the event, Draper has made a number of important pastels, which form part of this exhibition.
What is interesting about Draper’s new pastels is the way the physical, three-dimensional nature of his constructions has inspired a new technique in the drawings. Working with oil pastel through templates he raises and embosses the surface, not with the high sculptural relief he introduced in a series of pictures in 2001, but in what he feels is a “more illusionistic and gestural” way. In Pregonda Light, for instance, the raised orange slash, rather like a cheloid scar, achieves greater definition and prominence in the picture using this technique. These raised marks are now a firm part of Draper’s repertory. This pastel and Towards Pregonda both take their inspiration from a striking area of Devonian rock on the north coast of Menorca. They are not descriptive, but convey an
Quarry Celebration was one of several pastels drawn in April and May, the result of a quest to rediscover the spirit of a disused quarry he had not visited for some time. Santa Ponça, a spectacular stone quarry in the centre of the island near Alaior, has now been tidied up by Líthica, a regional conservation society, and designated a national heritage site. The great empty space, with signs of its former activity still clearly visible in the wall markings, resonates with his childhood memories of the coal mine, where his father worked. There he experiences a sense of history and a spiritual home. One day in mid-April he walked to the quarry at dawn, and spent five hours alone in the silence, just sitting and observing the shifting light, and noting its history through the changing tool marks. The attraction of quarries for Draper is something like the enclosed, meditative
Broken Stones is based on a late evening visit towards the end of May to another disused quarry, somewhat off the beaten track near Cala Galdana on the south coast. The quarry was not maintained. The place was overgrown, but a shaft of eerie light penetrated the well. Draper found a heap of shattered blocks. His memory drawing of this derelict space is intended to convey the sense of a fall from a great height, and its explosive impact on hitting the ground. The colours and markings give this drawing a somewhat hellish aspect, and Draper acknowledges that he was thinking of “fall” in more ways than one.
Draper draws on the conversation that goes on continually in his mind between the reality of the island and his remembered thoughts and emotions. In the new work he has moved away from the British
tradition of moody, elusive landscape. He has questioned his responses and the way he wants to convey them. Feelings of transience are still very apparent, but with a determination to seize these phenomena and give them a more sculptural presence. In the catalogue to Draper’s first retrospective at the Warwick Arts Trust in 1981, Bryan Robertson wondered at the nature of Draper’s gift to try to “express almost impossible things with sculpture”. As viewers we can hardly follow the line of Draper’s thoughts along all the channels of his imagination, but we can wonder at the results, at the daring attempt to solidify wind, the colour of throbbing heat, the ambiguity of half light, the sensation of a wisp of air, or the experience of being under water. His feelings are induced by his involvement with his work, and by his passionate response to the island. The reality of the landscape remains an important source of inspiration, but his constantly stated intention is to transcend it.
Eclipse is again about the spring, made in March when the fields are radiant with buttercups and Vinagrella. The spring in 2005 was particularly cloudy and Draper recalls that “all the light was coming from the colour of the flowers”. The idea occurred to him to combine this impression with his fascination for eclipses, about which he has made several images. Some years ago he witnessed an eclipse of the sun. Here he conceives the extraordinary notion of a black sun and a myriad black stars, as though they were thrown into shadow, silhouetted against the brilliance of the earth’s flowers.
NEW WORLDS IN A MENORCAN LANDSCAPE
compared to the agitated geographical features of the north, which are caused by the erosive impact of the sea and the violent tramuntana, a wind that sweeps across the land, sometimes reaching 90 mph and whipping up dramatic storms. The electric energy generated by these frequent storms fuels his own endeavour, accounting for the aggressive underscoring to much of his work, and its active, near bristling surfaces, even at its most celebratory. For Draper, natural forces have a dark and light aspect that give the island its polarised character. The tramuntana can bend trees almost prostrate and beat bushes to the shape of nearby rocks. One wind- and sea-battered outcrop of black slate, Cap de Favàritx, has created what Draper refers to as a “lunar” landscape, the inspiration for several of his constructions. However, within a few miles of rock or blasted flatland, you can find yourself among tropical palms and cacti, or lush, floral meadows. These contrasts, heightened by the drama of heat, wind and sea, have a profound influence on Draper’s work. The landscape itself is not especially dramatic in that its mountains are relatively small, its coasts and ravines, ruggedly picturesque, rather than awesome. For Draper and his partner, the island’s attraction lies in its moody “intimacy”, a quality which has to be sought out, and it is an intimate relationship that Draper has formed with it. His eye searches the surface of the landscape, almost rubbing it as it were, for every change and variation, and then lets his thoughts fly.
Eclipsed Labyrinths : 1978
Light Through Dark The Fall ) : 1990
Silver Moon Golden Light
2005
haunts him, particularly on clear, moonlit nights in autumn, and this construction conjures “the experience of something rocky, arid and mysterious”. The ridged and heavily encrusted surface is built up of many layers, making its shifting depths oddly insubstantial and shadowy.
explosive sense of colour, heat and light, in celebration of the first sunny day after an unusually long, harsh winter.
Quarry Celebration : 2005
spaces of cathedrals, and he sometimes titles his quarry works as such.
