William Black is the kind of painter who produces a new canvas with each exhalation of breath. The output of the man is stupendous – the ten canvases in Outpost were produced in as many days, and it is said hereabouts that canvases are stacked 8 feet deep in his studio. The grim meat of his subject matter – environmental degradation, social inequality, creation, evolution of scientific theory – flowers into paintings of beauty, colour and energy so that the viewer swings between gloom at the message and pleasure in the paint. He has enough to deal with in the bulky topics that inspire him – when I met him at Outpost he described the work with the catechism of nouns that an artist has to keep ready for private views. Tall, affable, while talking about his work he runs his hand through his hair as though to keep in check the need to rush off to his studio.
Although I intended to write about the exhibition at Outpost I was urged to visit the exhibition over the road to get a sense of where these paintings have grown from. The overall effect of entering the larger gallery at Stew Studios is of a regularity of size, a mass of marks in vibrant colours, of motion and energy. At Black’s shoulder is de Kooning, Cezanne, Blake, Baselitz (the right way up).
The paintings are broadly Impressionist in style, massed vigorous marks in luscious colours pulsing with an equality of attention over the surface of the boards and canvases. There are flying and fighting birds, single nudes, many landscapes. Heavily textured and highly coloured, there is a messy energy and sensuality that has been reorganised in the ten Outpost pieces. The palette Black uses is, he says, often driven by his craze for a certain shade; close to you can see the relish with which he pulls and pushes his brush through the texture of the paint.
The titles of the ten newest paintings are ‘spontaneous poems’ such as “Eroded Reclamation Arcade’, ‘Omniverous Pantheist Escape Velocity’. The overall patterning and single images of the paintings at Stew Gallery are transformed here into paintings with separated formal elements. I would imagine there are missing links in Black’s studio that fill in the gaps between the icon-like figures and the overall compositions these two different ways of composing. The ten paintings have compositions of opposing, intersecting and reacting shapes more Blake’s arrangement of separate elements than de Koening.
You can identify mountains, skies, rivers, people. The emphatic composition is a blend of aerial and viewer’s perspective, threatening angular shapes that cut into the softer elements like roads through turf, peaks that could be mountains or industrial roofing. In an attempt to remove any obstacle to actual painting-time wasted by choosing individual canvas size, Black mostly opts for bulk-bought canvases of 120 x 100m. This also sets up a rhythm of scale so that you feel you are in his footsteps, conversationally near the nude, half a day’s way from the top of the mountain. The bird’s eye view suits the ecological concerns of his work, giving the viewer a feeling of distance while the richness of the paint lures you in to peer more closely at his world where beauty and threat meet on a thrilling trapeze.
by Stephanie Douet
William Black
‘Nature’s Ideological Landscape’
Outpost, 10b Wensum Street, Norwich NR3 1HR
2 – 21 June 2014
Also at 2 – 19 JuneStew Gallery
40 Fishergate, Norwich NR3 1SE
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