Biography – page 3
influences
Like many of the painters he admires (Piper, Sutherland, Vaughan, Nash) Grant is an accomplished writer and articulate about his own aesthetic concerns.
He has always kept journals and twenty six of them are now deposited with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
These offer insights into the man and his work and provide anecdotes, both chilling and amusing, about his adventures.
They are a valuable resource for any author, especially when studied in tandem with the sketchbooks also donated to the Fitzwilliam.
These record struggles to capture in pencil and colour notes his immediate experiences of breaking waves, clouds, shadows crossing mountain sides, ship's portholes lashed by spray and the breaking up of ice floes.
These sketches, the word pictures in the journals and his numerous photographs are the humus from which the big studio pictures grow.
Back in the tranquillity of Gvarv he attempts to recreate for us his awed sense of the numinous before an Arctic sky shimmering with aurora borealis, or an Antarctic�Ocean in which drift icebergs the size of cathedrals.
The artist feels he is in the final period of his creative development, moving from mimetic portrayal of landscape towards a more abstract formalism
, shedding detail for the sake of emotional impact, saying more with less.
Now a single birch tree, a solitary beacon across a vast sea, a star, a thin moon, a lone albatross, speak of man's existential dilemma before the void.
Who amongst his contemporaries confronts such cosmic themes? Whilst not�ostensibly religious works they have a spiritual dimension and refer directly back to the eighteenth century philosophy of the Sublime.
Grant is well aware of his place in the North European Romantic movement in art and poetry and is not afraid to be labelled a literary painter
if this means he is grappling with what Wordsworth called intimations of immortality
.
following
Grant has always had a wide following amongst connoisseurs including Kenneth Clark, Jacquetta Hawkes, Benjamin Britten, Alec Guiness, and several Cabinet Ministers.
David Attenborough wrote: I know of no other painter who can convey the wonderful world of the Poles more vividly, accurately and thrillingly.
It is time a wider audience also had access to these stunning works, even if only in book form.
read more..
Dr Malcolm Yorke is the designated author, a specialist in modern British landscape painting.
His previous books have dealt with the work and lives of Eric Gill, the English Neo-Romantics, Keith Vaughan, Matthew Smith, Mervyn Peake, Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone.
December 2006