“IN LANDSCAPE” An Introduction by Dr Jeff Amos [October 2019]

……..It was Paul Nash who mused in 1932 on the possibility of "Going Modern and Being British", simultaneously demonstrating through his work that, for him, it was not a prospect. And here is the pugnacious British critic Lawrence Alloway writing in 1954:

In St Ives they combine non-figurative theory with the practice of abstraction because the landscape is so nice that nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out of their art. (Nine Abstract Artists, 1954)

Alloway's scepticism was directed at the so-called 'middle-generation' painters who had converged on St Ives in the 1950s. Begat mainly by the older Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, whose own most 'extreme' abstraction had become modified by isolation in Cornwall, these painters were spearheaded by the artist Patrick Heron and all rehearsed their particular forms of abstractionism. Heron's archetypal forms were clearly inspired by elements such as the granite rock formations of his garden; Peter Lanyon, native Cornishman and friend of the Hooper family, evoked the geophysics of his environment via his atmospheric expressionism; Terry Frost transmuted the rocking movement of boats in a harbour to rocking movements in his pictures, and so on. Even the painters themselves were rather sheepish about the practice but in truth they had no choice: you can't suddenly do non-objectivity because a historical moment has arrived. Picasso knew that and never tried.

To observers such as Alloway, and to many of the new wave of hip London painters who graduated at the turn of the sixties, all this was unacceptable. Their asceticism allowed appreciation of fifties “concrete” constructivism and the paint-on-surface spatiality of the New York School. But the duality of the St Ives pictorial experience along with its seeming parochialism-nay, its possible undermining of the tenets of the International Modernist Progression - was viewed by them as phony and damaging to British art's prestige (such as it was). Fairly or unfairly, this stigma has stuck, and contemporary Cornish abstractionism has received little critical consideration in recent years.

And so, back to Jonathan S Hooper. Why do these indigenous and referential works seem so valid and right, here and now?

Here is an artist who is unapologetic about what used to be called "the constellation of conditions” governing his paintings. Hence, we are directed to Newland Island and Hantergantick as places; Waveform, Erosion as phenomena; and Dropsonde and Solid Air as acknowledgements of Lanyon (a key figure for Hooper in every respect). Sometimes the titles are incredibly specific - Autumn Daybreak: East to Kellan Head (cat 13) - so that a single day spent by the coast is evoked, as with early Impressionist painting. But this intimation of allegiance is belied by how cool the paintings look – cool in the sense of self-contained, comfortable in their own skin.

The earlier, diptychal Headland pictures are the most literal here, redolent of cliff-edge drama as they are. But in no time at all, Hooper's mature manner emerges: edge-to-edge impasto, careful use of colour, consistent spatial depth. Typically, he will rub in a broad paint-drawing of a motif - say, a granite outcrop - and begin by working it up, starting to make a painting of it. Then follows what is described as “a longer, middle aged phase” characterised by correcting mistakes and the repeated, attritional application and removal of paint… Importantly, this unfetters the work from its origins and occasions a period of aesthetic reflection; following this envisioning, it is adjusted to become the pictorial entity that we see before us.

None of this amounts to a technical revolution, of course, but the end products of the process are extraordinarily coherent and (for want of a better word) contemporary. Silent Pool (cat 8), with its almost too literal title, is surely a painting you could find a new home for many times over. There's more than a touch of Monet's Nymphéas about it, but it does not recede in that way; the surface is held taut, and blips of red prevent space from leaking out at the top. The iridescent Hantergantick (cat 9) is another triumph of surface-depth tension, its pictorial origins emphatically transcended and replaced by a degree of all-over crystallinity that can have little to do with a quarry.

There's expansiveness, too, engendered by the creation of these palimpsests. The majestically veiled Dropsonde No 5 (cat 12) is surely a colour-field painting, an intuition confirmed by the abstract title of its sister work, the voluptuous Cerulean and Pink (cat 14).

But, however abstracted, what Heron called 'the difficult references' to reality are crucial and somehow persist. Although there is no predilection for the former's graphic distillation or Lanyon's Expressionistic mapping, you do sense that Hooper's pictures have been occasioned by his sense of place. They subsist In Landscape. That notwithstanding, the works are neither recordings nor indices - rather, they are realised analogues, additions with their own microclimate and history. In an era of cold gloss paint abstraction and trite, cartoonish narrative, that atavism now seems rather complex and, of all things, relevant.

One of the most abstract and rigorous of the paintings is Solid AirNo 14 (cat 19), its atmospherics counterpointed by a monochromic, striped scrape of a surface that is remindful of Heron at his best. When asked about his song, "Solid Air", John Martyn replied: “It's got a very simple message, but you'll have to work that one out for yourself.” It seems that the layers of meaning in Hooper's paintings compel us to do the same thing.

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