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]