Alan Gouk
Recent Paintings, 2012 - 2017
Series Mandalay Reprised
© Patricia Gouk
Introduction
I am delighted to welcome a new exhibition by painter and HSoA
patron Alan Gouk.
Since Alan’s last exhibition here in 2014 a new generation of
learners have engaged with his ideas and processes, a raft
of requests to Tate Modern to arrange viewings of the 4.381
x 1.708 meter painting ‘Cretian Premonition’ in the national
collection since 1987, and in our studios new work has
developed with the physicality and directness typical of the
American Abstract Expressionists that inspired Gouk, and which
Gouk, amongst an exciting number of painters and sculptors
continue driving British Abstract Expressionism forward.
Geoffrey Smith, BBC Radio 3’s Jazz critic once described
Gouk’s pictures as “Rothko with a rhythm section”. And Clement
Greenberg – influential art critic of the mid-20th century, who
Gouk met in New York in 1972, was, along with Anthony Caro,
an important influence at that time.
Looking at Gouk’s paintings is a huge emotional experience, they
make me feel like a giant.
This beautiful catalogue has been made possible by the kind
support of the Hitchin Family, thank you.
Isabel H Langtry,
Principal HSoA
A word from the artist
I first titled a painting The Road to Mandalay way back in 1986,
because as I was working on it the phrase “where the flying
fishes play, and the dawn comes up like thunder outer China
crost the bay” came into my head. I’ve no idea why, since I
scarcely knew the poem at the time.
But I happened to notice on YouTube last year a marvellously
idiomatic reading of the poem by the actor Fred Proud, which
encouraged me to revisit the idea of a group of paintings
related to the earlier one, which I was never entirely happy
with. Proud doesn’t just read the poem, he enacts it, and
understands the emotions pressed between the lines.
I don’t know what it says about my taste in English poetry, (I
prefer the French) but The Road to Mandalay has become one
of my favourites. Far away from the “half in love with easeful
death” proclivities of the Romantics, or the Etonian/Harrow/
Oxbridge inculcated Latin and Greek Classical references, (or
the debt to Milton, who can’t write two lines without working
in a classical allusion) --- Kipling opens up a draught from a
much wider world, and through mimicking the voice of the
ordinary British soldier, ( who may in reality never quite have
shared the feelings Kipling supplies him with), he channels his
own nostalgia for the excitements of his childhood, and the rich
bombardment of sensations which assailed him on his return
to India as a young journalist. Despite the distrust commonly
held amongst the Anglo-Indian set following the Mutiny, Kipling
seems to have “gone native” in one aspect of his life there, to
the great enrichment of his art.
The nostalgia of the poem is rendered no less poignant given
the world events which engulfed Burma so soon after Kipling’s
brief visit. But where in the world has not been engulfed by
atrocities and barbarisms.
My paintings do not relate to any specific imagery generated by
lines in the poem. They are not literal in that sense. But they do
attempt to convey a richer,a more abundant world of sensation
than we normally experience, the after-shock which occurs when
we experience something more than the senses can readily take
in, and the perturbation of spirit which follows. Perseveration is
how it is known in psychological parlance.
As Charles Allen says in his biography of Kipling,
“Kim was the last real victory of the intuitive, Indian side of his
head. It was also Kipling’s farewell to India, to his childhood,
perhaps even to his Daemon ---.... India had been the paradise
garden of his childhood , his land of lost delight. He had
returned at sixteen but with his Bombay childhood locked and
hidden away, finding his parents’ India to be a land of darkness
filled with night terrors and lurking death. But by degrees he
had rediscovered the art of moving between worlds as he had
as a child -- and in doing so he had learned to love India again,
despite himself; discovered also the delights of risk-taking and
shock-making and how to exploit his fears by turning them to
his advantage. He learned also to listen to both sides of his
head, one of which told him that all was chaos without the Law
while the other said let go and let your instincts be your guide,
drawing strength from both sides.”
The paintings from 2013-15, such as Helmsman to Odysseus 2
and Domination of Black 2, (both illustrated) are the very last in
a sequence which began with the Ulysses Series in 2001, and
they are oil paintings. Beginning with Mandalay Reprised No
1 in 2015, I overcame my antipathy for acrylics, after a period
of experimentation with them on the large gouaches shown at
HSOA in 2014, --- partly for financial reasons. To use as much
oil paint as I am currently applying to these new pictures would
be very expensive indeed, and this freedom from inhibition
which the use of acrylics has allowed is reflected in a certain
cavalier boldness of attack, often me at my best, but with
perhaps a loss of subtlety which only a direct comparison of
the two modes would bring out.
© Alan Gouk
Notes on an exhibition
“Whatever narrows the limits of imagination – let some
turbulence sweep it aside.” Alan Gouk, Principle, Appearance,
Style; a Career Survey, 2009.
The recent history of abstract art on both sides of the Atlantic
has seen quite a number of painters who in their later years,
having lost a little faith in the minimal values of sixties
modernism that had formed them, sought to connect to some
deeper human need or grander metaphorical content. But
despite having so flung about a little with wilder gestures and
bolder colours in order to try to match these new desires, they
have for the most part been exposed by the conservatism of
their formulas as the clement characters and mild-mannered
formalists they always were.
is in some of this new work a rather different kind of freedom;
a further loosening of control of drawing and design, perhaps
even of colour – yes – which allows for parts to have a little
more room in which to reverberate and to open out towards
us, and to act in concert. But this all comes about without
contingency, capriciousness or conservatism. In “Mandalaysian
Orchid” and “Baltimore Oriole”, to pick out two of the best
works in this show, there is a convincing balance of control and
release, where movement prospers without skidding away, where
gestures become facts with both weight and significance. Gouk’s
unaffected turbulence of spirit does indeed seem able to sweep
aside the “limits of imagination”, but without damage to what
is genuinely and comprehensively visual, or the least resort to
metaphor. Such painting carries unexpected powers.
By virtue of a certain ferment of spirit that stirs his work,
Alan Gouk avoids the familiar dulling tendency of decreasing
invention coupled to inflated grandiosity. He has always been
an uncommon painter, and is perhaps becoming increasingly
so, and something of a loner too. I doubt there is another who
combines in their paintings his blazing effrontery of colour, or
such a Brobdingnagian reach and facture, or such a nerveless
attack, without looking in the least bit unwise or losing grip on
the whole of the architecture. Gouk has a forthright approach
which both allows for and guides the most spontaneous of
impulses, even when carried by sweeping movements of the
arm. Alan being Alan, there is too a significant intellect at work,
exerting control over each series of paintings as they arise; yet
seldom does it get in the way of what is often quite exposed
and sensuous feeling. And, to bring us bang up to date, there
The quotation from his book (2009) that starts off these notes
finishes a discourse (in the book) on his own work, wherein
Alan suggests at one point that he is developing a desire to get
back into “some sort of relationship with the natural world”. I
was a little apprehensive when I read that, but as far as I can
tell it either hasn’t happened or nothing bad has come of it. In
fact, something perhaps more challenging has occurred. Far
from having “the taste and smell and substance of work in the
open air about it”, the best of this new work feels somewhat
subterranean – more like a dive into a sodium-lit world of
distorted reflections and darkened chrome surfaces. It matters
not one jot, unless one is prejudiced against such sights, since
it’s a world that convinces. This new show has examples of
Alan’s very own darker-than-most abstract world. I use the
analogy hesitatingly, and jokingly, and only to neutralise Alan’s
own. But it’s true that in these paintings there is barely a sniff
of fresh air or natural light – and who needs it? (Well, maybe
that pale blue corner in “Baltimore Oriole”, but I’ll come back
to that.) The paintings are of course decidedly not depictions
of space, naturalistic or atmospheric; nor are they objects in
space, or even painted daubs in a spatial arrangement – in fact
they are not really spatial at all in that conventional sense of
a “picture” (and I’m thinking still of “Baltimore Oriole”, but
most especially of “Mandalaysian Orchid”). The illusions and
distortions of colour and shape (which are not the least bit
optical) are the things themselves, the whole active content
of the work. And having really little regard to a picture plane,
there is nothing else that is needed to integrate into. But they
warp and bend spatially, make powerful movements in many
directions, yet somehow still within themselves, and they do
it, not by part-to-part relationships, but more as non-relational
totalities – and this is of the essence of the new freedom. They
are only and wholly the fully articulated colour-spaces that
they are, and yet this content is so far beyond the scope of
what is customary in abstract painting that its sensual impact
leaves one slightly breathless at the last. And it leaves the
quotidian pursuit of aesthetics and good taste for absolute
dead. “Mandalaysian Orchid” is a brooding, rocking vision that
resonates more deeply with the artist’s own temperament than
perhaps even he would care to admit – certainly deeper than
the lighter moods of “Mephistopheles” or “Road to Mandalay
No.8”, or many of the other recent works that got him to this
point. Not that they are bad, mind you, since all the paintings
in this show are strong. But “Mandalaysian Orchid” is a great
painting.
and see what happens. Such is the pressure generated by the
abstract illusion in these works that without these little releases
the paintings might just have imploded back into themselves.
These corners say, yes, we’re in a world of our own, but we are
just about clinging on to your world too. By our fingernails...
Phew! And I think... I think that these corners are OK.
Alan has written in the past about the results in his work of a
fusion of influences: the overlapping painterliness of Cézanne
and Hofmann on the one hand, and the flatter planarity of
Matisse and Heron on the other. Maybe it’s the tension between
these two influences that operates to his advantage in the
fermentation of unrest. Two quotes by Alan, from recent,
separate, but consecutive comments on the Abcrit website,
serve to illustrate the competing impulses of Gouk’s sensibility:
“There is no substitute for composition and architectural
conception, however much the subversives may rail against it.”
and: “Ipso facto, painting should not be ‘driven’, or laboured,
but have room to develop ‘a life of its own’”.
There is in both “Mandalaysian Orchid” and “Baltimore Oriole”,
in amongst all this pressurised warping and weaving, a little
let-out, an escape valve, a small let-up in the intensity, as in
the previously-mentioned pale blue corner of the former, and
the mid-blue rectangle to the top right of the latter. Both rather
look at first like oddments, maybe leftovers from a previous
state, not participating in the general melee; but take them out
Hurricane Patricia I
November 2015. 65” x 100”, acrylic
on canvas
Domination of Black II
November 2013. 78” x 189”, oil on
canvas
These two statements seem to me to be in many ways at odds.
But by virtue of embracing them both, perhaps Alan is able
to espouse the implacable contradictions of making abstract
painting now. There are no simple solutions any longer – if ever
there were – to the questions of spatiality, structure and feeling
that abstract painting continually elicits in all of its worthier
practitioners. After all, in the making of abstract painting you
must first have to divide, in order to then combine. You must
have to both open the painting outward, and to lock it down.
You have need of complexity and tension in order then to go
on and find a resolving unity of form. We’re a long way from
modernist ease here. We’re a long way from singularity.
But actually, Alan has got well away from both of his former
influences. I can see neither Hofmann nor Heron in this new
work, and I think it is all the better for it. “Mandalaysian
Orchid” and “Baltimore Oriole” are two of Gouk’s best paintings
from a long and very productive career that is littered with
exceptional works, and they reach a place of achievement that
few other painters have the temperament to aspire to.
I do miss, perhaps, the texture and density, the layered
interpenetration, of oil paint (these new works are all in acrylic),
familiar from so many Gouk paintings from the past; and I also
miss a little the facture of the brush (they appear to all be made
with some sort of knife or spreader), with which Alan has often
brought subtlety to his sometimes brutal mix. That aside, I’m all
for them. With work of such originality, how can one not be?
© Robin Greenwood,
December 2016
Reading An Alan Gouk Painting
Is Not Like Reading A Book
Degas said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others
see”.
Looking at an Alan Gouk painting is a never-ending process.
And different every time. Sometimes I see references to a surfer
barreling waves, birds in a tree, or a marching robot.
Gouk’s paintings aren’t religious icons, neither was Malevich’s
Black Square (meant to be). Sometimes I see nothing but the
painting as an object – and the necessity to paint; this is painting at its most serious. Defying gravity, paint hangs to the canvas for dear life, modernising the tradition of Abstract Art. Only
Gouk paints like Gouk. For that, he is probably the best abstract
painter in the UK today. But that’s just me. What do you see in
Alan Gouk’s painting?
Must you look at Abstract Art to ‘get’ clandestine meanings,
allegorical symbols or narrative subject matter, when it doesn’t
require definition? No, see it as an experience, since whichever
way you look at it, is the right way to look at it. As you listen to
music without lyrics, understand that it doesn’t need ‘understanding’, in the same way we appreciate looking at fleeting
fireworks, the sunrise and the choppiness of the sea. It exists
within time, as much as it possesses time. It’s not a representation but a re-presentation. Reading a Gouk painting isn’t like
reading a book. You don’t judge it; it judges you, your emotions
and intellect. You cannot fool your consciousness. As Dorothy
said to her dog, in the ‘Wizard of Oz’, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re
not in Kansas anymore”.
© Estelle Lovatt, FRSA
Which way is up?
Looking at the work that he makes today, one would struggle to guess that Alan Gouk began his professional life as an
architectural draftsman. In so far as “drawing” manifests itself
within his painting it is in the lines formed where one block of
colour encounters another, never as autonomous mark-making.
The artist recalls that, half a century ago, he was employed to
produce setting-out drawings for the “coffin-shaped floor tiles”
of a new building at the University of Leeds and it is hard to
imagine a task more precisely gauged to frustrate his natural
inclinations. There is nothing decorative about Gouk’s paintings. They are free not only of line but of repetition: each is an
adventure, pursued without the roadmap of a premeditated
structure.
“Decorative” and “domestic” are closely aligned terms in
Gouk’s critical lexicon so it feels appropriate that my introduction to the work in the current exhibition takes place outdoors,
after the canvases have been hauled out of temporary storage
in a North London garage and propped against a garden wall.
Unconventional as these viewing conditions may be they prove
ideal for looking at objects that eschew any representational
mission in favour of operating as full-scale presences in the
world. Of a height approximating our own and a length that
resists their apprehension from a fixed viewpoint, they invite
our bodily engagement.
And yet large as these paintings are, the unstinting concentration with which the artist has cultivated their varied surfaces
stops them from slipping into grandiloquence. They mark the
first time Gouk has employed acrylic paint at scale for some
decades – a change motivated in significant part by the ma-
terial’s relative affordability compared with oil paint. His past
resistance reflected a conviction that acrylic was incapable
of producing surfaces that compared in animation with those
which he could achieve in oil but the new work’s fantastic
vitality of handling testifies to his success in transforming the
material both through the introduction of thinners and gels
and through its application by different instruments. Prominent
among these are the cardboard boxes in which his brushes
come packaged, reused as tools for smearing the paint in long
sweeps. The energy of the artist’s attack is palpable. He describes his method as one of “striking the canvas like a drum”.
On the back of each painting we find a note of the number
of sessions – ordinarily in the order of seven to ten – over
the course of which the work was produced. But the painted
surface is also an index of time, registering a sequence of
improvised actions, each consequential upon the last. Above all,
these judgements are driven by the artist’s exceptional sensitivity to the capacity of colour to conjure space. In contrast to
the recessive space of European perspective, the high-key areas
of Gouk’s paintings advance towards the viewer establishing a
field of operation that might be thought of as a form of shallow
relief. This reading is supported by the fact that, as in Egyptian
or Assyrian relief-work, each form maintains a frontal relationship to the picture plane. In some paintings these elements
accumulate to almost wall-like effect. Others present a greater
permeability without ever quite delaminating into distinct foremiddle- and back-grounds.
It would be true to say that Gouk’s commitment to the cause of
abstraction surpasses that of many of the artists featured in
the Royal Academy’s recent Abstract Expressionism exhibition.
Where de Kooning’s abstractions are hung on the framework of
the female form or Gorky’s on the image of landscape, Gouk’s
seem to lack all figurative armature. And yet, there remains
a critical moment in his working process that suggests these
images are not entirely free of a model. While the paintings are
made initially on the ground, with the artist stretching over the
canvas from all sides, before long they are inevitably lifted vertically, presenting what one might imagine would be a significant
conundrum: which way is up? However, the artist maintains
that this issue is never a source of anxiety and, looking at the
completed paintings one can see why. They are composed with
an inate sense of structural stability, the lower edge of the canvas serving as a ground-plane on which each successive block
ultimately bears. Gouk’s career in architecture lies long behind
him, but he retains a builder’s sensibility.
Mandalay Reprised No 8
October 2015 53”x 95”, acrylic
on canvas
© Ellis Woodman,
Director, The Architecture Foundation
2012–14
Domination of Black II
November 2013. 78” x 189”, oil on canvas
Helmsman to Odysseus II
October 2012. 80”x189”, oil on canvas
Grey Entry
June 2013 76”x 166.5”, oil on canvas
Bronzed Winged Jacana
November 2012. 75”x166”, oil on canvas
2015
Theebaw’s Queen
March 2015. 36” x 84”, acrylic on canvas
Mandalay Reprised No 10
October 2015 61.5”x136”, acrylic on canvas
Mandalay Reprised No 8
October 2015 53”x 95”, acrylic on canvas
2016–17
Baltimore Oriole (Mandalay No 17)
June 2016 66”x 100”, acrylic on canvas
Mandalaysian Orchid
April 2016. 66”x100”, acrylic on canvas
Mephistopheles (Mandalay No 15)
May 2016. 67”x 118”, acrylic on canvas
Hurricane Patricia No 2.
March 2016. 67”x 118”, acrylic on canvas
Mandalay Reprised No 9.
October 2015/ March 2016. 67”x 144”, acrylic on canvas
Mandalay No 16.
June 2016. 66” x 108” acrylic on canvas
Acknowledgements
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
HSoA Publishing ©2017
HSoA Publishing
Penrose Gardens
London
NW3 7BF
Many thanks to Alan Gouk for his generosity in sharing his
paintings with us and to Pat Gouk whose constant support and
enthusiasm makes everything possible.
HSoA was founded in 1946 by a group of local artists, including
Thank you to the art school office team, Shane Porter, Charlotte
Shinerock, Eleanor Chapman, Sabrina Scolaro, and Lesley
Robb for all their help and dedication to the school and to
our designer, Camilla Small who created and coordinated this
beautiful catalogue.
Today the school is an independent centre of artistic excellence,
A special thank you to HSoA Trustees especially Angie Franklin
and Reg Boorer.
Henry Moore, Bernard Gay and Jeannette Jackson, who believed
T: +44 (0) 20 7794 1439
that art should not be the exclusive domain of the avant garde.
E: [email protected]
providing first class, affordable tuition in traditional observational
and experimental creative skills. Our branding includes the line
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced or
‘Unleashing the artist in everyone’, a direct reference to our
transmitted in any form by any means without prior permission in writing
founders’ original mission.
from the publisher.
Hampstead School of Art is a registered charity, governed by
ISBN
978 - 0 - 9931047 - 6 - 3
a board of trustees who have ambitious plans for the school’s
future. Central to this has been the move to a state-of-the-art new
building, designed by Allies and Morrison.
Design: Camilla Small
Photography: Mike Davidson, Positive Image photography
Printing: Ex Why Zed, Printing
Isabel H Langtry,
Principal HSoA
Reg Boorer
Vice Chair, Board of Trustees
HSoA Publishing is a division of Hampstead School of Art