LIFE AT THE EDGE
Silence and Storm

An essay by Zorn Wilkes

New York; Spring 2012

Hooper is a Cornish painter, not just in origin and subject matter but also in tradition. This tradition is deeply rooted in the St Ives group of artists from the the immediate post- war period to the early 1960s. At the vanguard of this tradition, and particularly relevant to an understanding of Hooperʼs work, were the colourist Patrick Heron, Terry Frost (with his collages and prints) and the landscape painter Peter Lanyon. The Russian constructivist and erstwhile St Ives resident Naum Gabo, and his compatriot El Lissitzski, have also influenced Hooperʼs framing of three dimensional space and its compression onto the two- dimensional plane.

Hooper cites Peter Lanyon as particularly important to his development as a painter. Not only was Lanyon a friend and gliding companion of his father Harry (Hooperʼs early years were spent on the peri- track at Perranporthʼs airfield, a former WWII Spitfire base) but, more significantly, he was a native Cornishman with a particular and, unarguably, potent sense of place. This association was unique amongst Lanyon's St Ives contemporaries.

Lanyon was drawn towards historical events and mythology and used them as metaphorical and allegorical devices for describing his relationship with his origins. in contrast Hooper is more concerned with the mechanics that create his landscape and the forces that contribute both directly and more obliquely to his experience of that landscape. In this sense Hooperʼs are process paintings- of process and about process-  and as such are not intentionally narrative or history paintings.

Having no particularised story to tell, and not being prescriptive, Hooper's paintings instead convey the idea that landscape is something to be in, to be experienced, rather than simply to be observed. Hooper’s paintings pose a challenge to passivity and to the numbing contingency of screen-based imagery. To paraphrase Frank Stella, “what you get is what you see”.

Our visual literacy is increasingly invaded by pixels and unerring multiples and Hooper believes that painting can, indeed must, offer some defence against this hegemony.  Hooperʼs paintings are determinedly unrepeatable one-off constructions. Constructions of paint built up using a variety of tools, often improvised for a particular purpose but also, sometimes, informal and accidental. Using these tools the paint is smeared, scraped, abraded, spattered, combed, poured and even, on occasion, brushed.

Paint accumulates in layers which may be forced, whilst still wet, into previous layers or lightly laid on top of the earlier substrates. Pure colour is allowed to combine on the painting itself rather than the mixing being contrived on a pallet. This methodology is at times chaotic and random, at others more refined and considered, but it is always tethered to an idea, to an underlying sense of structure and process.

Memory is key to Hooperʼs work; these are paintings generated from a distance. They are interested in ideas of exile and, as such, have a fugitive and, at times, romanticised relationship with actuality. In this the layering of paint becomes a metaphor for the laying down of memories. Like witness statements these paintings exhibit moments of clarity, or apparent clarity, within a matrix that is rather more diffuse and elusive.

Hooper does not consider himself to be an abstract painter; his paintings are, in the main, landscapes. Hooper does however seek to re-examine, if not redefine what landscape actually is; how we perceive it; how we frame it; how we scale it. These paintings are not abstract but are abstracted. They may not be easy to reconcile with the readily familiar but they are not deliberately recondite. Their challenge to the viewer is not to unravel some intellectual paradox but to indulge in experience.

Like Lanyon, Hooper uses the device of multiple views. Unlike Lanyon, Hooperʼs variable is not space but time. Where Lanyon moved through his world (often at speed), taking “snapshots” of different views along the way, which he later superimposed or subverted - Hooper's paintings seem to stand quite still; Hooper lets his world move around and in front of him.

Hooperʼs paintings collide sensations and moments of time: the advancing squall; the vibrations of a buffeting wind; the relentless, chaotic conveyor of uninterrupted Atlantic waves; the rush, wash and concussion of these waves as they meet land; the invisible geological processes catalysed by of all of these forces and the sculpting of the land that they provoke; the soaring and wheeling gulls; the changes of light and temperature. All of these phenomena- witnessed or sensed- refracted through some internal prism onto the painting plane. As if every frame of an extended time- lapse film, from a fixed camera position, is laid over the preceding one and then viewed through the filter of memory and the wistful perspective of exile.

At times these paintings exhibit an almost synaesthetic reaction to the phenomena of being in landscape; converting something experiential into a cartesian grid of largely unmediated colour and with few readily discernible points of reference. At others they reduce to rather calmer, “two-part landscapes”, in an exaggerated portrait format.

Despite this apparent contradiction in Hooperʼs output- like Barnett Newmanʼs “zip paintings” or Mark Rothkoʼs colour-fields- his works are, in actuality, all the same painting. That is to say, they are all about the same thing, albeit with the various inputs re- calibrated according to some indefinable set of exogenous or endogenous influences. Hooperʼs “source material” is mainly a small section of  North Cornwall in particular the coastal margin from Port Isaac in the east to the Camel Estuary and Pentire Head in the west.

It would be more accurate to say that Hooper’s source material is his personal and intimate relationship with these locations. The outcome of each painting then being a combination of a considered and an emotional response to a memory or sense of place. Hooper does not paint directly from source - this would, he says,  “interfere” with the relationship. Occasionally Hooper will use Polaroid photographs as reference, but only for the way in which the Polaroids themselves behave; their uncertain and unpredictable outcome. It is not the subject of the photograph itself, but the process by which the image comes to life. The photograph as a formed object and the chemistry that makes this possible.

Polaroids have a particular quality of developing and evolving in front of oneʼs eyes and on their own “time-line”. Polaroids are defiantly analogue, organic almost; they have their own interpretive qualities which can be manipulated and altered- both mechanically or by exposure to light and heat. Their eventual outcome is contingent; a negotiation.

Hooper seeʼs the process of painting in much the same way. It is a constant reconciliation between the desired, the possible, the unforeseen and the unpredictable; it is a continual negotiation with an end point (with all the obvious metaphors for life itself). The process starts out with a set ambition (to a lesser or great extent) but ends with a form of editorial accommodation or acceptance. The painter is the instigator in the first instance, the craftsman and ultimately the editor, but he is not the sole “player”. Other agencies are at work and their input can either be rejected or embraced as part of this negotiation.

Music and soundscape play vital roles in Hooperʼs painting process; more recently he has been recording the sounds that, for him, characterise these places and has coined the term "tuned spaces"* for the multi-factorial resonance of place [*this is an evolving concept]. Sound establishes the mood and rhythm in which his paintings develop. Hooperʼs paintings are, on occasion, sub-titled or series-titled to reflect the importance of a particular piece of music or composer.

It is evident that Hooper is beguiled by the potential of paint. He makes no attempt to disguise the fact that paintings are what he produces. Hooper's paintings are unashamedly analogue in what is an increasingly digital, machine-code world. At times unmannerly these paintings are always human, incorporating mistakes, accident and imperfection,  whatever these terms might actually mean.

The edges of Hooper's paintings lay bare the painting process and confidently exhibit the foundations of the surface- somewhat akin to the colour register at the margins of a printerʼs proof. Hooper uses the term “Edge-Scapes” to describe his work; not landscapes or seascapes but something other. Perhaps the space between or the liminal (if not sub-liminal) boundary of things.

“Edge-Scape”, is not a flippant description but has a philosophical multi-dimensionality. It not only alludes to the point where air meets the sea, or sea meets land (to the extent that either of these interfaces are points or definable lines), but it refers to the metaphysical, particularity of Cornwall itself. It refers to Cornwallʼs position at the edge of things and the attitudes and behavioural characteristics that emanate from this geographical quirk. Hooper sees the role or position of the painter as  standing at the edge of things and looking out.

Cornwall sits at one end of the Gulf Stream, an information super-highway that transports exotica to its north shore and deposits this cargo in strand- lines on its gently shelving, accepting beaches. These strand lines progress back and forth on the rising and falling tides; they are time registers. Time and Earthʼs binary relationship with the Moon inscribed by these shifting edges.

This stranded material was once an exploited resource. Not “wrecking” in the mythological sense invented by Dauphne du Maurier; but “wrecking” as a means of recycling flotsam and jetsam; of connecting with distant unseeable lands. The strand lines are loaded with information; fragmentary and disordered.

There is a sense in which the blurred distinction between myth and reality or between the remembered and the imagined resonates in this idea of “edge-ness”. That things are not quite what they seem. That the edge is a notional concept not a hard and fast rule. That it is fluid or in a continual state of flux. That the edge is the place where the normal rules break down; rules that attempt to give us comfort from uncertainty. There is a parallel in physics; most equations that describe our world, and the universe beyond, have definable limits of applicability beyond which we cannot be certain.

Life at the edge of things is a continual negotiation between knowing and not knowing; of gazing into uncertainty. Hooperʼs paintings invite us to “not know”, in an intellectual sense and to be comfortable with this deficit. Instead they invite us to imagine, in an emotional sense. This is a challenging experience, simultaneously unnerving and invigorating, casting us adrift into the perhaps unfamiliar waters of untutored personal discernment, self-reliance even.

Hooperʼs paintings do not attempt to disambiguate or to reconcile. They are not pictures, nor are they arch in any superior or didactic sense. There is no consoling narrative; Hooper is perhaps more interested in paintʼs ability to obscure than its ability to depict.

Hooper destabilises the viewer by presenting something unfamiliar. The textural quality of the painted surface and the moments of colour and form draw the viewer into an unthreatening, harmonic existential space. Hooperʼs relationship with his subject is descriptively elusive and by obscuring detail these paintings are an enticement to take a journey into a potentially rewarding equivocality.

Hooper's paintings invite the viewer to imagine, to see things that may or may not be intentionally there and in so doing dredge through their own memory to find comparative reference points. Although the paintings must, and do, resolve from a distance they are to be viewed at close quarters. From this distance the paintings reveal the complexity and richness of their surfaces.

These are paintings with which to develop a long-term relationship revealing new things to be seen, felt or imagined with each viewing. They take us to the edge of our own perceptive confidence and compel us to ask questions of ourselves; of how we see our world. They lay bare our predispositions, our prejudices, and encourage us to look beyond them. Perhaps, for a moment or a while, we can all experience "Life at the Edge".

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