Most of us would agree that the world is unfinished, but Graham Sutherland with his ‘working and reworking of familiar landscapes’ seems to have brought the finishing as near as possible in his lifetime. For all curator George Shaw’s optimism that ‘Sutherland is an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him, a world forever unfinished’, his world, when before us, seems to have totally finished, marching off as it did along with the soldiers towards the Second World War. Sutherland seems to be ‘one for the experts’, rooted in a specific time and place. This could well be just a quirk of unfinished history, but there is something about the look of the paintings that consign him to the England that stretches back to Boudecia and didn’t survive the 50’s.
Sutherland possesses a Larkin-like sense of earthly propriety, evoked in his dark-tinted, non-brilliant shades. All his works (especially the pre-war Welsh landscapes) have that slight ‘30s’ hint of brown, no matter the prevailing colour. He wears his age on his sleeve.
Curator Shaw seems to have drawn most heavily on Sutherland’s strongest, more abstract work. Sutherland is a painter of line, not colour. Shape and contour are his tools, and it is from these tools, that his subjects take figuration. From close up Sutherland’s paintings suffer from perspectival flaws; his best paintings are the ones that can withstand the inevitable “flattening out” of the gouache upon the viewer’s approach.
Consequently, the pictures in which he allows himself freer rein with the relations of colour and shape on canvas are his best work, when he allows the sun (or anything movable for that matter) to act as counterpoint, as in Sun Between Two Hills. He never quite dispenses with figuration, but his strength is in taking the landscape in front of him and letting imagination take hold, laying on the Welsh hills in that signature sloping arc of the brush.
Sutherland then manages to get these small-scale works to open up, to unclog themselves, and defy the restrictions of their own scale to throw us open to the vast landscape. His best pictures open out for us, giving a sense of space that is not to do with perspective but is all to do with an abstract form of expression. Something not wholly organic but slightly and carefully found. The landscape must be in harmony and compromise with the artifice, just like Welsh Standing Stones. The joy is in almost seeing something that you recognise
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These Standing Stones are a poetic summoning of the Celtic, instinctive people-land relationship, but as we move into Sutherland’s paintings executed during his period as War Artist, the sloping arc, the smooth earthiness of the Standing Stone, is pushed aside for ruler-straight line. Never such innocence again. Bombed buildings are not made of ruler-straight lines, but the association of the mechanical, un-feeling line with the destruction the machines of war have caused is a dramatic poetic gesture. Such gestures can be noted in a glance and as such are moving haikus as much as they are paintings.
In the finishing comes the assertion that all is unfinished. Sutherland’s late work doesn’t maintain its earlier promise of Romantic harmony. His wartime work is all past participles: ‘twisted’; ‘fallen’; ‘blasted’. For Sutherland, what lives on is certainly an unfinished world, but it is damaged and leaking oil.
