Remembering Gwyther Irwin
Nick Wadley

Ispent a lot of time talking to Gwyther in his studio, and being talked to, about
how his paintings came to be what they are. He was always open and easily
accessible; no pretension except in the form of games, plenty of wit. Between
the mid-1970s when I first knew him well, and the mid-to-late-90s when the
demon Alzheimer’s began to take him away, his studio became a familiar world
to me, as normal as watching cricket with him. So familiar and normal that it’s
only now, going back to Tooting Bec after a decade, and without him, that I can
see all over again just how eccentric and invented the abnormal world of his
‘formalist’ art was and is. And I am reminded how easily its formality embraces
playful perversity and the absurd, just as he did, and how full it is of unlikely
extremes, at almost any level you might consider.

A contrast between his sociability (missed by many friends) and the isolation
of his obsessive life in the studio is not uncommon in an artist. But the paradoxes
of what went on inside Gwyther’s studio are not common. His art exists in an
uncommon sovereign world.

I remember asking him, early on, about what other art impinged on his own
work. He told me there was little of significance, consciously. If he was enthusing
about the dynamic formal energies that absorbed him, he might mention anyone
from Stuart Davis, to Audubon, to Uccello, but in the formative years he was a
relative innocent. He remembered an inspirational visit in the 1950s to Alan
Davie’s studio (suddenly anything seemed possible), but when people like Rotella
or Alloway or Ralph Rumney visited Gwyther’s studio in those days, they often
assumed references or received values that didn’t exist in his art at all. These
experiences inevitably nudged him towards a greater self-awareness.

As part of the inventive generation of ’sixties artists in Britain, his work
became comprehensible within avant-garde currents of the time, and for a while
he was swept along by them. He had three one-man-shows of his lyrical
collages in London, late 1950s, was associated with the Situation group, and
was then invited into a succession of major group exhibitions world-wide. In the
later 1960s, he was asked to carve a very large abstract relief for the new
London offices of British Petroleum. It was a bizarre commission and he looked
back on it as three years lost to painting. And then -- out of the frying pan – in
the following year, 1969, he took on the post of Head of Fine Art at Brighton
Polytechnic. He was to be there fifteen years.

During the 1970s he took stock of where he was as an artist, and from this
point began finding his own eccentric path. By his own perspective, that’s when
he started to be a painter, and for the rest of us, this is when his art ceases to
relate to almost any other art.

A series of 100 watercolours painted between 1978 to 1982, witnessed
his blossoming as a painter, and we are allowed deep inside the process by a
very frank ‘journal’ that he kept during the painting of them. He described it to
me as ‘all about failures, about my bemusement’. The blow-by-blow accounts of
each picture – sometimes a paragraph, sometimes two pages – were usually
written at the end of a day. His despair about progress on the current picture is
laced with self-mockery as a strategy, and regularly gives way to high elation.
It’s a manic, often comic switchback. He mentions frustration over time spent at
Brighton, but mostly treats the constant problems of making art at all. We gather,
for instance, that the scribbling and then typing of the notes is one way of
escaping the knife-edge pains and joys of painting, but then – in the next breath
– that he paints all the time, like a junkie after his fix, to escape the monotony of
daily life. This long, Woody Allen-like soliloquy mirrors the introverted, obsessive
world of the paintings themselves.

If the ‘100 Series’ was about learning to be a painter, it was an apprenticeship
of dazzling virtuosity, embodying both his meticulous craftsmanship (as
technician and colourist) and his instinctively cavalier attitudes. However unlikely
these bedfellows, it is precisely their coexistence – needling each other all the
time – that generates the knife-edge on which Gwyther liked his art to be
poised. It didn’t need any other subject than this, absorbing his energies so
completely that he stopped playing poker. ‘The artist has a compulsive need to
put himself at risk,’ he said.

Risk was involved at almost every moment in the making of the watercolours,
and more so as the series progressed. Each mark in this unforgiving
medium is there to stay. His network of white lines was made up from intervals of
bare paper, after the completion of one mark and before the start of the next.
There was no planning, nor was there any easing into the picture by setting up
tentative colours across the whole surface. On the contrary, his eccentric
procedure, as with the early collages, was to start in the top left corner and put
down his first finite mark, and then right beside it the second finite mark, and
then the next and the next, until he reached the right hand edge of the page.
And then, like writing a letter, he would start a new line. It was finished when he
reached the bottom right corner, where he sometimes signed the sheet.
Everything was flat on the surface: a taut rectangle of great clarity and calligraphic
life.

Given the regularity of the little vertical units (he called them ‘striations’), the
character of successive paintings came chiefly from changing colour harmonies.
These gave the artist as much intense pleasure as they offer us. He became
increasingly refined in his handling of colours, physically and aesthetically. The
risk lay in decision/indecision about each successive hue; the craftsmanship lay

in the colour-mixing and the precision of the edges. The drawing of his network
of white spaces was complicated enormously by other meandering wave-like
shapes of bare paper which float across the sheet at random intervals.
Everything, each relationship is invented on the hoof, and however it turns out
will have its say about what happens next. It’s a shifting world, but with little
room for error.

Listen to some of his comments:

‘Each entry I make is as tense as the showdown at poker. I live in a
permanent state of apprehension.’

‘I’m not prepared to plan. I’d rather schlep around in an unpremeditated
way dealing with thousands of minor crises as they occur.’

‘It should be impossible to paint a picture by making carefully finished marks
one after another, and with no real idea in mind … But that’s how I do it.’

‘Don’t try. Don’t strain. Don’t think. Just respond’.

‘In painting, nothing ever happens to disadvantage one … Everything is
always for the best.’

Towards the middle of the series, he relaxed the vertical regularity of the
marks, and at the same time progressively eliminates the whites until all the
colours touch, making the surface a tumultuous display of jewel-like shapes. He
even broke a lifetime’s habit in number 47 and started from somewhere other
than the top left corner. His palette also changed, more sophisticated and
varied. He learned to over-paint colours if necessary, and took enormous
pleasure in holding his eccentric, changing colour harmonies in balance. His
blacks were never just black, always a mix of Payne’s Grey with a choice of
other pigments, depending on context.

From number 48 onwards, there appear more dramatic changes, when the
mosaic of similar elements gives way to an animation of larger organic forms
moving among smaller, implicitly background forms. The dramatic re-introduction
of off-blacks and the white paper as dominant colours heightens the animation of
the drawing, and reinforces a new sense of depth. Twenty pictures later, the
surfaces are full of overlapping forms in space and he’s beginning to add
associative titles, some of them place names [Sydney Harbour, Bondi Beach].
He even started a painting about Trebetherick, his favourite Cornish beach, but
the project failed and he later regretted even considering it, since reflections of
his familiar world were what he painted without thinking all the time. At the same
time he recognised that these new paintings were being pushed by other
impulses.

Since the early collages of the 1950s and 1960s, Gwyther’s work had
often been linked to the landscape of the north Cornwall coast where he grew
up, and which remained his second and natural home. While insisting upon the
abstraction of his art, he acknowledged submerged influences on his aesthetic of
the movements of wind, sea and sand; the flight of birds; stratifications of rock
faces. He knew that coast intimately all his life, was a prodigious swimmer and
a hungry observer of all visual phenomena.

Now, in the early 1980s, a quite different visual world started to inform
and then openly enter his paintings. ‘I’m beginning to suspect that some of my
imagery could come from television … I find myself watching what could be my
pictures flit across the screen.’ He preferred to watch the screen on its side or
upside-down, with the sound switched off. He remembers watching an orchestra
for hours: ‘Great shafts, dapples, chunks, stripes, angles, curves and whorls of
black white and raw siennas.’ On another occasion, without recognising it, it
was the close-up view of a railway truck in a western: ‘Colour was sensational.
A great wedge of cadmium yellow … I couldn’t suppress a scream of jealousy’
(December 1981).

He recognised similar qualities in the glossy magazines, Vogue especially,
and in advertising images at large. He became attracted to an advertisement for
Cadbury’s chocolate in Clapham, made a drawing of it one day and hurried
home to the studio. ‘Poster hoardings are my gallery … rectangles as large as
the Veroneses in the Louvre, larger – full of dancing colour, amazing sometimes
idiotic space … Everything I see now is a picture, every photograph, everything
on TV, everything in nature. I have no idea what I’m going to do.’

What he actually did in the rest of the watercolour series was to make
paintings which gave ‘the strange feeling that I’m suddenly making “real
pictures”.’ The new compositions operate in a pictorial space, not coherent
necessarily but with overlapping forms and occasionally a semblance of
narrative order – in the last few, even with figures. It proved to be a moment of
transition, but brought with it an exhilarating sense of freedom that lasted.

Following his retirement from Brighton, Gwyther embarked on a series of
big, energetic horizontal paintings in acrylic, some of which were shown at
Gimpel Fils in 1987, marking his return to the London art world. In these, the
innovations of the 100 Series were coherently digested into his formalist world.
They still include diverse quotations from other worlds. Two recurrent motifs are a
panama hat from a magazine and the three crossed swords from David’s great
painting The Oath of the Horatii. The artist’s attraction to such ready-made
elements was a lust after their formal energies, and they are embedded into the
pictorial dynamics of the painting, often inverted or cropped, flattened into the
surface. He talked of these ‘real’ images as abstract forms. For me, a lot of the
character of the painting always obtained from the double identities as image
and form. The hat is still a hat. Maybe his disavowal was partly a game of bluff.

A new entry to this repertoire of double-images underlines its inherent
perversity. The framing edge of his working rectangle had always played a
significant role for him, and now he pulled images of the frame inside the
picture, and subverted its identity by burying it among other forms and images,
or by bending, breaking, and generally undermining its role as a frame in a
succession of ambiguities. The generous orchestration of these pictures is like a
holiday. I suggested earlier that there was a self-portrait element to his art. If the
formal speculation of the watercolours portrayed the gambler, the wit of these
paintings reflects the raconteur and games-player. ‘Life is so ridiculous that theonly chance one has to be serious is within the framework of art, or in games.’

He prepared himself for the complex games of the 1980s paintings by
improvising maquettes. These were collages of cut papers, some pieces of flat
colour, some decorative, some photographic. They were small collages, about
20 x 25 cm, squared-up for transfer. Another type (all of which have
disappeared) were even smaller. Fragments of image were pasted on thin
cardboard, cut and re-cut, arranged and rearranged, and finally primitively
glued together. Once the configuration was resolved, its simple outlines were
transferred to the canvas or paper in a light pencil drawing, and the painting
commenced in much the same way as in the watercolours. The precise form and
colour of each mark was ad-libbed en route, as were the elaborately
polychrome pointillist textures he started to invent at this point, inspired he told
me by the screens of colour-printing. He was also excited by the ‘electric’
double-edges of badly-registered colour separations in the glossy magazines,
and pirated those effects as well.

These animated effects gradually took the place of ready-made images and
by the end of the 1980s – unless you were very familiar with the repertoire – the
quotations became so scrambled or dismembered that they virtually
disappeared. This was largely because he now made his preparatory collages
out of colour-photos of his own work. In an incestuous cannibalisation his
previous images were cut up into vertical strips, then shuffled and recycled into
new and increasingly fractured configurations.

The large horizontal compositions of 1993, pictures like Action Stations,
Holy Orders, Tiger Tiger, are crowded with vertical forms, still animated by
whites and blacks but clamorous, colourful exchanges, with a sense of scale
worthy of the poster. Everything presses towards the surface in a very animated,
but flattened space. Even the edges, above and below the verticals are packed
with rectangles of striped or spotted colour, like flags or window boxes. There
are fleeting glimpses of space between the standing forms, but always thwarted
by another coloured form elbowing forwards. Gwyther likened them once to a
cocktail party or a conversation of forms. It is almost as if his earlier ambition to
‘use real objects as abstract forms’ had been turned on its head.

From these pictures lies a direct path to the large, majestic vertical watercolours
of the last years that we all know. These were composed of horizontal
tiers of vertical elements, one above the other on two, three, sometimes even four
levels. If that sounds familiar, it is. He resumed the old practice of starting in the
top left corner, finishing each level as he went along.

Looking at them again, I’m assailed by the same gamut of sensations as
when he first painted them, and reminded of his accounts at that time. In some
ways they are like all of his art, both continuation and consummation of
everything that his art had been. By this time he talked of achieving ideals –
ideal formal balances and rhythms and speeds of change, ideal colours even.
His means and his strategies had become second nature and, although painting
was still alive with risk for him, he worked with great authority. After 1994, there were seldom preparatory collages. Following the slightest pencilled indications
of vertical shapes, drawn as he went along, each irrevocable statement that his
brush made on this vast sheet of virgin paper was a step into the delicious void,
a footprint in the snow – the same old paradox of the gambler’s speculation and
a craftsman’s exactitude.

Finally, they are enormously complex structures, both architectural and
elusive. If the acrylics were conversation pieces, these have more claim to be
towers of Babel, except that there is not chaos here. Order and disorder coexist.
A pervasive sense they leave us with is of slow descent, out of density into more
spacious light and colour. This has always moved me towards two sorts of
reading. One of them accepts his talk of ‘the very formal paintings of a very
formal painter’, and sees the picture as an elaborate manuscript, recording the
painting’s journey, in some strange way making an image of its own life. It
documents all the inventions of line and colour-sequence, the gambles and
games, as well as the simple artisanal labour, hour-after-hour, stooped over the
flat table with a small brush.

The other reading takes a lead from his excitement about the radiance of
the lower registers, their buoyant yellows, in terms of natural light. Echoes of a
Cornish seascape that were already in some of the early collages come back
into mind, a sensation of moving down through darker, opaque clouds to the
sunlit horizon of the sea. He said to me about one of the ‘Colour Me Yellow’
pictures of 1995, ‘I want this to be like the sun. A real celebration of getting
through.’

I have always enjoyed the busy proliferation of pictorial ornament in the
interstices of this architecture, particularly along their horizontal fault-lines,
increasingly inventive, fertile imagery. If I asked where it all came from, Gwyther
might remember that one was inspired by a bit of weathered paintwork, or a bit
of rotten wood he’d seen, or a laser photocopy that went wrong, but mostly he’d
explain, ‘you’ve got to invent little bits of trickery for yourself to liven the day.’ I
connect this mood with a series of very small watercolours he painted around
1997, partly to give his back a rest. He called them ‘sunsets’.

I have only just seen his two last watercolours for the first time. In their
structure of descending ‘striated’ tiers, they are familiar. But they have little to do
with sunlight and are different enough in mood and colour from the preceding
paintings to come as a shock. The lilacs and lime greens are more redolent of a
Viennese interior – a boudoir, perhaps – than of nature. Maybe the colours were
inspired by a flawed laser-photocopy? A surviving collage study suggests that
this may be the case. But Gwyther’s not around for me to ask what he was
doing. I’m reduced to approaching his work as archaeologist more than friend.
On the other hand, I also feel pleased to be left with this unexpected, faintly
perverse turn of events, which doesn’t put all of its cards on the table.

Nick Wadley, January 2009