Works

Italy. Mid 1950s

Sicilian Interior

  • Charcoal on grey paper
  • 44 x 48 cms
  • 1954

Sicilian Interior

Signed and dated beneath the image

Drawing was important from childhood and has been at the centre of his life ever since. This is a person who drew since he was five years old, habitually, almost every day. Drawing was almost more natural to him than writing and it was often easier to communicate through drawing. As a small child he found the illustrations in children's books to be more vivid and original than the words around them. If one was to have a grand projet, as Sigmund Freud advocated, then his was always drawing.

From his earliest shows, Greaves was praised, especially for his drawing. Pierre Rouve, writing in 1956, declared: This is drawing almost at its very best - an art that does not aim at black and white substitutes for luscious pigments and relies on a concision of line and candour of emotion. Here the draughtsman is what he should always be - a truth teller With an impressive economy of means and with a vigilant eye for the basic impact of his graphical idiom he avoids the twin traps of academic verisimilitude and expressionist rhetoric. Through the elimination of the superfluous he achieves that overwhelming immediacy without which drawings lose their autonomy to become mere stand-ins for a painting to come. With Greaves, drawings are stars in their own right - for his art, bred on simple integrity becomes more and more a decisive denial of artfulness.

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Enquiries: JAMES HYMAN GALLERY