An Appreciation by Nicholas Wroe
[Nicholas Wroe, formerly an editor at the Guardian Review,
is a freelance writer on Arts and Culture.]
From the clinging mud of Thomas Hardy's Wessex to the blinking
neon of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles; Benjamin Britten's Suffolk
seas to Jean Sibelius's Finnish dawn; Les Murray's Bunyah; David
Bowie's Berlin. Artists across disciplines have always been inspired by
a sense of place to make work that is not only the product of a person,
but also of a location.
For painter Jonathan S Hooper it is North Cornwall, where he joins
the global tradition of human engagement with landscape, while
also connecting to a vivid regional history of art. The painters drawn
to St Ives since the end of the 19th century might be its best known
exponents, but Cornish art extends back through a Celtic language
closer to Breton than Welsh - and culture that has flowered since
before the Middle Ages. Hooper and Cornwall's relationship goes even
further, accommodating the geological deep time of rock formations
and coastlines as well as the appreciation of an artist making work in
the here and now.
More than a century and a half after painting apparently lost its
claim to present the definitive likeness of a person or a place, work
prompted by landscape can still speak to the viewer like no other.
Hooper's art, abstract yet tangibly located, combines painting's
unique trilogy of color, form and surface to produce deeply satisfying
evocations of place and time. Instinctively alluring shades and
shapes are underpinned by robust theoretical thinking. Intensity of
observation is rendered through lightness of touch. A specific subject
becomes a universal object.
[for solo exhibition In Landscape at The Nine British Art, November 2019]