David Tress: The Reality of Tension

Most artists painting Cerne Abbas would make the chalk giant the focus of their picture. Consider, for example, Eric Ravilious’ 1939 version of the subject. Although the giant is positioned on his hillside in the background, with fields and a barbed-wire fence occupying the foreground, he is nevertheless the focal point of Ravilious’ composition, with his emphatic red-brown outline. In David Tress’ painting of the subject, however, the giant is outlined in white (appropriately for a chalk figure) and given only marginally more prominence than the telegraph pole on the right. Flat to the rolling terrain, the giant sleeps in the spring landscape, a contained presence, rather than imposing himself on the viewer like an importunate celebrity, and dominating the picture. Rather refreshingly, this is a painting about a landscape that just happens to include an ancient and revered monument.

This approach is typical of Tress: he doesn’t take the obvious path to painting landscape, but looks at it afresh and identifies those elements that most interest him. In The Black Mountains (Rain in the Wind), the blue of the sky is drawn down (literally) into the green and brown and black of the landscape through deep scores in the paper. This is not naturalistic, but it is deeply expressive of the way the light of the sky is taken up by the earth and reflected back. It thus expresses a truth of nature while at the same time creating a powerful surface design which is essentially abstract in impetus. This is characteristic of the way Tress has been developing his art in recent years: acting out on the picture plane a dialogue between representation and abstraction, and distilling from their interaction a highly individual interpretation of landscape.

Blue is a strong presence in this body of work. Look, for instance, at Freezing, Brilliant Morning (Monnow Valley). The blue that can be discerned in ice and snow, and indeed in water, is common knowledge, but what Tress does with it here is unusual and interesting. The blue runs like rivulets through the landscape, taking various horizontal or diagonal paths, in contrast to the more vertical and broken white marks, which point up to the great rip of cloud in the sky above the dramatic orange hills.

Green in November Mixed Media on Paper 62 x 115 cm. The whole composition moves and shimmers with light and cold energy, yet has a satisfying overall balance despite the apparent violence of individual marks. Another exploration of blue comes in what could be seen as an oblique homage to Graham Sutherland – an artist Tress has long admired. Winter Blue (Thorn Thicket) seems to evoke the banks and dry-stone walls of the Pembrokeshire landscape that so appealed to Sutherland, both early and late in his career, and to combine with this setting the thorn heads he painted in the mid-1940s. Yet Tress has made of the subject something very much his own, with a distinctive use of collage to structure the work initially, and then a complex intersection of colours and short choppy marks to indicate the visual complexity of what he was looking at.

These paintings are of course made later in the studio, not on site, and are based on memory and imagination fed by plein-air sketchbook studies. Essentially, Tress re-imagines and re-creates what he has seen, editing and interpreting nature into art. A similar blue enters into March Hazel, Loch Kishorn, but here the flecks of yellow-green are the key to this storm of spring energy. With prolonged looking, the maelstrom of marks settles into a tensely structured composition of light, land and water. Tress’ art is at its most pure in the potent graphite drawings, here exemplified by Glastonbury Tor I, Grasmere Lake and Kenmore (Cloud on Aligin). In these, the violence he does to his thick sheets of paper, ripping and scarifying the surface in his passionate search for the true balance between the black of his graphite marks and the white of the paper, is resolved into curiously serene structures of light and dark. As Graham Sutherland put it: ‘One reacts to the reality of tension in a subject, physical and spiritual or psychological; and that tension paraphrased and ordered should become immediate and intensified in one’s painting.’ David Tress is fast becoming a master of that very particular tension.

Andrew Lambirth August 2011

DAVID TRESS

Selected Exhibitions

Beaux Arts, Bath (2002 - 2011)

Chasing Sublime Light Touring Exhibition, Arts Council of Wales (2008 - 2010)

Boundary Gallery London (1995-2011)

West Wales Arts Centre Fishguard (1984 - 2011)

Albany Gallery Cardiff (1993 - 2011)

Victoria Gallery Bath (2010)

Critic’s Choice, the Art Shop, Abergavenny (2006)

Landscapes of Wales, National Botanic Gardens of Wales (2006)

The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries London (2003, 2005)

Denbighshire Arts Travelling Exhibition (2005)

Drawings Travelling Exhibition incl. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, Guildhall Gallery, London (2003 - 2005)

Farming and the Welsh Landscape, the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society (2004)

Oriel Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, Llanbedrog, Gwynedd (1988-2001)

Museum of Modern Art, Wales (2001, 2003)

Hereford City Art Gallery (2003)

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea (2001)

Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford, Republic of Ireland (2000)

British Library, London (1999)

Mountain, Wolverhampton Art GAllery (1999)

Landmarks, National Museum of Wales (1998)

Invited Artist, Eigse Carlow Arts Festival, Republic of Ireland (1998)

Five Artists from Wales, Eleonore Austerer Gallery, San Francisco (1993)

The National Library of Wales

National Museums and Galleries of Wales

The Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Clare Hall, Cambridge

The Museum of Modern Art, Wales

The Contemporary Art Society for Wales

Pembrokeshire Museums

Ceridigion Museum

Awards

Welsh Artist of the Year Drawing Award (2006)

The Discerning Eye Regional Prize for Wales (2003)

Wakelin Award (2001)

W C W James Lauditory Award (1999)

D & AD ‘Yellow Pencil’ award for Millennium Stamp (1999)

Selected Press

The Spectator (18 Nov 2006)

The Times (2 Feb. 2005)

The Spectator (22 Jan 2005)

The Times (3 Dec 2003)

The New Welsh Review (Spring 2003)

BBC Radio Wales (‘First Hand’ 9 July 2002)

HTV (‘River Patrol’ 21 August 2000