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| Critical comment |
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| DAN CRUICKSHANK taken from the introduction to the catalogue for the 2006 solo exhibition |
Gerard Stamp is an extraordinary fellow. With him nothing is what it seems. I first met Gerard about twenty five years ago but really can hardly claim to have known him well. It was his older brother Gavin, the architectural historian and journalist, that I knew and it was through Gavin that I first met Gerard - a young chap who then seemed to move only on the periphery of his brother’s life. Gerard was the far more reserved of the two, more ready to laugh, a chap who obviously had a life and career of his own and determined not to live in the shadow of his characterful elder brother. All I really knew was that Gerard seemed destined to labour - no doubt with great financial benefit if not great creative satisfaction - in the advertising industry. But throughout that time Gerard was hiding a passionate desire to paint full time, an ambition he realized in 2001. And I was in for a great - and intensely pleasurable - surprise.
This July, after a brief telephone conversation, Gerard drove from his home in Norfolk to meet me in London. He wanted to show me his work and have a chat. I readily agreed. I was delighted to see Gerard again after many years - and was fascinated to see his work. I waited in my house in Spitalfield - the place of the meeting. What, I wondered, would his work be like? I had only seen some reduced-scale printed reproductions - they looked intriguing but I couldn’t be sure if they possessed artistic power and presence, the force to overwhelm and capture the imagination, or were no more than competent illustrations. But I was impressed enough by these reproductions to welcome this opportunity to |
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inspect the original works. Gerard brought a series of large, framed and bubble-wrapped paintings into my house. As the coverings came off a revelation took place. It was instantly clear that in a miraculous and magical way Gerard had - through a process of hard work, experimentation, and critical observation - achieved something wonderful. He had, while toiling alone in Norfolk, blossomed, come of age as an artist of skill, power and originality. The process was also an agonizing one: he had ruthlessly burnt dozens of failed paintings, involving many months of work, along the way.
The images he unveiled were stunning; a series of views of buildings – mostly focusing on telling-detail, and mostly churches. What was obvious immediately is that Stamp is a man with a mission, on a quest to capture, express and communicate his feelings for the architecture and places he loves, that move him. Clearly he is obsessed with the quality of light and muted colour, the sense of space and the architecture of Norfolk - it inspires and fascinates him. The works he showed me all explored aspects of this obsession and all asked the same question - how can the essence of the beauty of ancient architecture be captured? Gerard, inspired by the work of J.M.W. Turner, John Sell Cotman and John Piper, has found a way. Stamp has honed the techniques - indeed pushed back the boundaries - of watercolour painting. Not only are some of his watercolours of a dauntingly huge scale but also they are incredibly detailed and manage to capture both the ethereal light of the Norfolk coast and countryside at dawn or dusk and the |
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quality of centuries-old oak, stone, brick and tile. To achieve this Stamp, through experimentation, has developed a technique in which an initial watercolour is soaked and worked in water to make its colours soft and mellow and then, when dry, reworked in judicious manner. Strange, but it works.
The great thing is that these watercolours give you the eye to see familiar things in an exciting, inspiring, new and strangely unfamiliar way. They are haunting, challenging and reveal the beauty around us that we so often take for granted, are blind to. They make you think and yearn. They make you want to rush out and look at buildings. What more could any artist do?
Although Stamp’s art is rooted in - and has evolved from - a profound feeling for Norfolk, he has moved further afield - with paintings now including buildings in other English counties and in Rome. One of the exciting things about Stamp is that these works, impressive in their evocative atmosphere and sense of place, are clearly part of a process - building on and extending the techniques that were the very foundations of his sell-out one-man show at Grapevine in Norwich last year. There are many territories yet to explore, techniques yet to be forged and developed. It’s exciting just to wonder what the future may bring.
DAN CRUICKSHANK
Writer, broadcaster, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Professor Cruickshank has degrees in Art, Design and in the History of Art and Architecture. |
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| IAN COLLINS taken from the introduction to the catalogue for the 2007 solo exhibition, 'Marshscape' |
What a pleasure to follow the evolution of Gerard Stamp as an artist and the moments of stillness and silence he captures within the great march of time.
Amazingly, this is only his third solo show. See how far he has travelled on a painterly journey since his dazzling Grapevine Gallery debut.
In one sense we have here a wholly 21st century creator: formerly a hugely successful designer and director of advertising agencies, he suspended until 2001 a vow to leave that cosmopoliatan career and weather the storms as a full-time painter out in the sticks.
And yet, on a deeper level, his mid-life leap was an act of returning - not just to Norfolk, the county where he had been raised, but also to the mainspring of his being. A child draughtsman and student of design and illustration had fledged into a man always yearning to express himself in charcoal and watercolour.
Finally he took the risk, settling in the north Norfolk countryside and building first a studio and then a bonfire. The blaze consumed most of his initial pictorial efforts - a sweeping death sentence passed down by a formidable faculty for self-criticism.
Steeped in the work of the East Anglian masters who had looked long and hard at those most elusive of landscapes on England’s eastern edge and found scenic splendour, Stamp was also setting himself the mighty challenge of following in the footsteps of John Sell Cotman. |
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Plus, any meaningful expression had to carry the exhilaration of something freshly conveyed, rather than the enervation that comes from stale pastiches of the past.
Back at the drawing board, again and again, he just got better and better - ultimately producing in a year the often-panoramic works for his first show. Another two years on and he’s flying.
At first glance there seems to have been two artists called Gerard Stamp - one studying the play of light on corners of churches and cathedrals, the other savouring the wild world at its most elemental. But the same aesthetic sense and poetic, painterly passion are being engaged. This exhibition proves the point even though buildings have been obliterated. For a natural architecture can be traced even in the most empty swathes of marsh.
These meditations on saltmarshes from Thornham to Morston evoke Grand Canyons of mud, Saharas of sand and Amazonian forests of sea lavender. Mists and sea frets recall the vaporous dawn of creation.
The more delicate the marks this artist makes, the more he suggests monumentality and infinity. What he loves most - what we love most - is the atmosphere evoked by the beautiful illusion of timelessness. |
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The paradox is intense. Exquisite cloud formations overhead are partly trailed from planes. Below, carefully-managed no-man’s-lands are contested daily in the battle between earth and water.
Much of this fragile fringe has been lost in Britain since the last world war, either to drainage or flood. What remains is constantly changing and all the more so given the growing belief that nature should have its way where wild spaces are concerned. And so the now unrepaired shingle bank at Cley-next-the-Sea, for instance, is being pushed back on average by a metre a year.
A wild battleground seems a strange place to marvel at the greatest glories of creation. Yet we are at home here, for we all come from a wilderness lapped by the sea.
And this is the place where are spirits long to return and where we are most at peace. As the painter named after the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins likes to quote:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
IAN COLLINS
Ian Collins is an arts journalist, author and curator. His latest book is Bird on a Wire: The Life and Art of Guy Taplin (Studio Publications, £29.95). |
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| SIMON JENKINS taken from the introduction to the exhibition, 'Mediæval'. |
Gerard Stamp turns architecture into art. He converts stone and brick, light and shadow, the tilt of a roof and the line of a wall into a living, exhilarating picture. His eye for the power of style is unerring, whether the fluting on a pillar or the tracery in a window. He gives depth and character to the simplest buttress or the blandest patch of limestone. Above all, his pictures evoke the mystery of English churches.
Under his brush, buildings that have often become functional and banal are restored to their gothic glory. He fills space with atmosphere by a shaft of light or a splash of colour.
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English churches have gone without celebration since the days of Betjeman and Clifton-Taylor. They are dismissed as preaching boxes or social centres, properties that present their users with nothing but costly problems. Their historic role as galleries of vernacular art - and the role of their creators as artists - has long been ignored in the onward march of specialist curatorship. Most of England finest ecclesiastical art has been removed to national museums. Only the architecture remains. |
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Stamp is clearly inspired by the gallery of church architecture. He shows that the only true museum - and every church is in part a museum - is one filled by local people who have used and improved it day by day, one that embodies their memories and their achievements. In his depiction of churches great and small he celebrates the most genuine English art, that of the church, and does so in terms that genuine English artists would applaud.
SIMON JENKINS
Journalist and Chairman of The National Trust. |
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