Works

Precise Ambiguity 1975 - 1990

Landscape with Rocks

  • Acrylic collage on canvas
  • 95 x 153 cms
  • 1976

Landscape with Rocks

The theme of Landscape with Rocks (1976) is one that harks back to Greaves's candid approach to viewing landscapes when travelling in Italy in the 1950s. On a walk through the Abruzzi mountains with his peer from the British School in Rome, Peter Lanyon, his prosaic response to trees and rocks was in direct contrast to Lanyon's metaphoric and poetic interpretation. This particular work is situated between the earlier matter-of-fact approach and Greaves's later more expressive style.

As James Hyman notes in From Kitchen-Sink to Shangri-La (Lund Humphries, 2007) in the latest of these works Greaves makes the subject specific in form but not place. Hyman proceeds to describe how this approach is specific to Greaves's personal style:

This impression of a subject sensed but not seen, of a thing encapsulated but not described, of a glimpsed view rather than a sustained gaze, is a leitmotif of Greaves's approach to landscape. But if Greaves is, above all, a rural artist then he is a particularly unusual example. His painting is the antithesis of English landscape painting with its romanticism and love of metamorphic transformation, and it is distanced, too, from the anthropomorphism of a range of artists from Graham Sutherland to Peter Lanyon. As in the poems of Seamus Heaney, which he admires, Greaves does not romanticise the farmer on the land. These are modern images rooted in today and the nature of Greaves's response is far removed from the extremes represented, on the one hand, by the gestural imprecision of Ivon Hitchens and, on the other, by the topographic fidelity of Michael Andrews. Nor does he concern himself with genius loci like Paul Nash or a 'spirit in the mass' like David Bomberg. (p.158)

Landscape with Rocks (1976) has stepped away slightly from the frank pictorial renditions of the 1950s to a slightly more representational work, but precedes the more abstracted symbolism of the twenty-first century.

History

Loughborough and tour, Loughborough College of Art and Design, Forty from Ten, 1986

Literature

Loughborough College of Art and Design, Forty from Ten, 1986, p.10 (illustrated) (wrongly dated 1976)

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Enquiries: JAMES HYMAN GALLERY