Harry Voight in 2007
It’s been a journey of discoveries, to find in swift succession that the new neighbour you appreciate is a friend whose company you enjoy, and is practically your favourite artist.
[The same kind of thing has happened, for me and for Eve, with all and each of the Voigts-who-live-on-the-hill. We could compose an ode to Lulu Phezulu, and the warmth and intricate delights of her work and her personality, and to high-flying Walter, crafter of cumulus, our Burton of the BARR bush, my fellow Sampras of Sudwala. But they are for another time]…
I was very taken with your paintings of interiors when I first saw them in your studio, some in progress, a few small reproductions, and then a big canvas at the Everard Read Gallery. Since then I have wondered how we could contrive to light up a corner or a wall of our own vaulting interior with one of yours; to put up a Harold Voigt (original or a reproduction) with its lustrous plays of light on form, one of those arrangements combining exuberance of texture and ranges of cool and sombre tones which bring to inanimate objects the quality of living subjects, hinting that something has just happened, or is about to happen. That – at the risk of straining too much to describe it – is how I see and react to your work.
When you asked me to sit for you, to try and catch the body language and facial geography that interested you I was happy to oblige, but also very interested to see how you would make your play of light, tones and textures work on the human face and form. You said this had not featured in your previous work, so it offered a new stimulus, though you did not know where it would lead – maybe to something unrecognisable.
Harry's portrait of Tony Hall, hanging in Teddington now
When you unveiled to me the full-on portrait last week, with a ceremonial flourish, you said my jaw dropped. It must have done, because I was carried away by one wave after another. The overall effect – the energy, the light, the tones, the size, the likeness – was stunning. For all that the subject is the last to know how he really looks to others, this was monumentally, me.
When I could get past the layers of self-to-self reaction, there – large and clear – were the interplays of light and tone, texture, composition, colour and brushstrokes that have so attracted me to your work, but this time in the portrayal of a person, with all the extra range of interpretation and narrative this may allow the viewer. The figure could be ready for a discussion, or starting on a story, the face is something to which many things have happened.
It is this which will sweep me along as I look at the portrait in the coming years (and I can’t not want to look at a Harold Voigt quite often, even if it is of me); this whole range of possibilities in character and narrative; stories of the past and – why not? – of the future. Perhaps it will give my imagination the shove it needs: to break out of the mould of journalistic observation, analysis and rhetoric and move into writing my own dense and strange personal stories.
Indeed, the most awesome tale is the latest: when you – laughing at my first stunned reaction to the painting – said that after a showing at the Gallery, you wanted to give it to me.
This is an act of monumental generosity Harry – for me, for Eve, for our family. It says so much about your warmth and spirit, and gives me so much, at many levels. Thank you.
There are no words which really match up to what you have done, in the work, and the gift of it. So your medium triumphs over mine…
But your art may have given my own muse a creative kick up the backside.
* [One of Granpa / Dad / Tony Hall's favourite sayings was that 'One word is worth a thousand pictures.' However, this clearly did not hold true when he was talking about Harry's paintings.]
Comments
Post a Comment