Maurice Sheppard
PPRWS
Maurice Sheppard and Landscape
To Landscape… A Review of Some Works Exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society in 2002 by Paul Newland VPRWS
At the beginning of his book 'Landscape and Power', the editor, W.J.T. Mitchell writes:
The aim of this book is to change 'landscape' from a noun to a verb. It asks that we this of landscape, not as an object to be seen, or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.
At first sight this group of twelve watercolours - completed during 1989 - 1990, never before shown and forming part of a much greater series - speaks of gaiety, warmth, ease of execution and delight in looking. These significant pleasures should not mislead us, however, into seeing only moments, wonderful though these pictured moments are. The series is constructed on the basis of a long and complex artistic experience and upon deep thought about visual communication. Throughout his career, Maurice Sheppard has been aware of - has revered - the great practitioners of watercolour and of landscape. One could name Richard Wilson, John Linnell, Samuel Palmer, Peter De Wint, the members of the Barbizon School, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian. These are some artists that he and I have discussed and looked at together. There are many others.
The kind of care that has been expended here also seems akin, in some ways, to musical composition. Key, tonality, chord, variation: just a few of the terms that have come to be shared between music and painting and are apposite in any discussion of Maurice Sheppard's work.
The twelve watercolours are drawn from two sets, completed a year or so apart. These two sets represent not only England and France but also two different meanings of that verb, to landscape. At Belcombe Court is the landscape of plethora, cultivation, order, geometry, rule and power - bluebell woods, walled gardens, irises, espaliered apple trees and the Palladian house itself.
At Beg Meil is landscape of the uncertain elements, the sublime - the place of man's persistent but strenuous tenure where the ocean meets the land. The two localities have prompted in the painter two quite different approaches to picture structure. The English house standing amidst its broad acres, protector of recondite arts and paradigm of part of English history, generates images that are enveloping and nurturing. We are invited to penetrate the veils of warm colour to find, as the artist found during hot summer days there, the evidences and shapes of order. The Breton coast, however, with its bright, clear light calls out a bracing clarity in which the transparency and flatness of the colour are emphasised by the cloisonné arrangement. (The word refers to the separation of areas of colour as in stained glass or in enamelling.) This technique was used with vigour and purpose in the late 19th century by the Symbolists who, as artists/tourists, sought the primitive, the mysterious and the continuity of simple faith in this Celtic land. Maurice Sheppard might tell you that this development in his drawing is due in part to the example of Henri Moret (1856 - 1913), an artist of the Pont Aven school whom he admires.
The sense of structure, stratification even, which is explicit in the works made in Brittany may be thought of as implicit in the Belcombe pictures (implied in the chronology, history and ordering that the landscape itself manifests). Stratification furnishes a useful metaphor for Maurice Sheppard's practice as it has evolved over the years. One may delve like the geologist - but into drawings, studies and sketchbooks of many shapes, sizes, colours, papers - who finds slates and sandstones, Silurian and Jurassic deposits. Meetings of the mysterious and the topographical are recorded in these sketchbooks: we see natural forces but also the palimpsest of people's activities on the land. One little sketchbook, home-made of dark blue paper, was filled with the sparest drawings imaginable during a night journey to Wales to attend the funeral of a beloved grandmother. The beams from a lighthouse swing towards, then away from the watcher: they arise from the horizon, trace a great arc across the sky, and fall. But the pale pastel on one of these dark pages show beams that appear to falter in their procession. They reach up - and will fall out of the sky, it seems, from the exhaustion that follows struggle.
The shaping of ideas through materials which is apparent in many tiny drawings (often using pen and sometimes a very little colour) represents another strand in this artist's activity.
As we look again at the Beg Meil pictures we see that the washes almost float off the surface, so translucent and vigorous have they become; so knowing of themselves and of the paper on which they were laid.
Paul Newland VPRWS, MA
2002