| David Tindle RA 'David Tindle is a mere 66, an RA of long-standing and distinction, but again somewhat taken-for-granted and not exactly over-represented in such places at the Tate - where the 1984 catalogue gives him one small still-life canvas and a print. For him the reasons, perhaps, are complementary - figurative rather than abstract; small in scale; modest subject matter; quietist in mood; meticulous in the dry technique of tempera. His latest paintings, now at the Redfern Gallery, at once confirm and confound such expectations. Scale and mood and subject-matter are still pretty much the same, and so too the technique, and yet the feel of it all is markedly different.
The tempera seems more freely-stated now, and rather less assertive an element and presence in the work. And that quietist mood seems to have grown more positive in its imaginative suggestibility - the sense of the empty room, the empty chair, the deserted garden outside the window.
The combinations of mundane objects of still-life now register more strongly ambiguous possibilities - the looking-glass, the bottle, the shells, the cigarette on its packet, the fallen rose, the hat, the egg, the hatter's dummy. Tindle has moved into that area between the symbolic and the metaphysical - we think of Knopff in the interiors, and of the early still-lifes of the metafisici, de Chirico, Carra and the young Morandi. Yet he remains entirely himself, as he too continues to move on.'
William Packer
Financial Times, 31/1/99
'Romanticism, true and false, has been much in the air of late, with, enigmatically, the Last Romantics of one art historian overlapping the New Romantics of another. As one of their number I am prepared to pronounce a pox on this profession of photograph-shufflers, or petty Procrustes each busy in his provincial red-brick university constructing the bed of theory upon which to stretch his evidence or lop short its inconveniences. The generation of inspired art historians who judged theory, evidence, idea and the catalogue raisonne at the bar of quality, who were as emotionally moved by works of art that they might be by music, and whose response to the thing seen was as much visceral as intellectual, has been all but wiped out by polytechnic brutalism, vulgarity and polemic, by art historians who cannot see, do not want to, and never will. I share the layman view expressed by Freud when writing of Michelangelo, that the subject of a work of art often has a stronger immediate attraction than its formal or technical qualities, and that the intellectual response to these is secondary; Freud, however, then confessed that he was unable to appreciate the methods and effects employed by artists - an astonishing admission, for it is these that consolidate imagery and contribute, often with an alchemical confusion of mystery and explanation, the qualities that hold the spectator's interest long after the image has become familiar.
David Tindle, my near contemporary, is no Michelangelo, and without his physical imagery would have defeated Freud. He is a painter in that quietly Romantic tradition of British art that stems from Samuel Palmer and is concerned with small, intimate, domestic subjects that are synecdochisms for the greater grandeurs of Turner's sunset, twilit calms, and as inseperable from method and technique. He was, of course, born far too late to qualify as a Last Romantic, and though one of his few published declarations states that in the Fifties he was influenced by Minton, Freud and Bacon, he was omitted from Paradise Lost, the quirky exhibition that celebrated their New Romanticism well into that decade, easily late enough to include Tindle's precocious early work, rooted, as it was, in an imaginative and spiritual response to the wild moors that were within reach of his native Huddersfield, and to such spiky, graphic and exotic rarities as a pineapple top in that late year of food rationing, 1953.
His paintings bought by the Tate Gallery, the Royal Collection, the Arts Council, the galleries of Manchester, Coventry, Liverpool, Bradford, and a host of other institutions, Tindle seems always to have been wilfully ignored by the exhibiting establishment and by historians and critics. The celebrated Private View by Bryan Robertson and Lord Snowdon, surveying the bright hopes of the mid Sixties, omitted Tindle, but included dozens of artists now deservedly forgotten; the Contemporary Art Society rejected him from their encyclopedic survey of British Painting in the Sixties in the very same year that the London Museum bought one of his major early works; in 1980 neither the Royal Academy nor the Guggenheim Museum perceived him as playing any part in their capricious view of British art as it then was; in 1984 he was overlooked by both the Arts Council's British Art Show and the Tate Gallery's Hard Won Image, though their sub-titles, 'old allegiances' and 'traditional method and subject', should have confirmed his presence; none of us was surprised at his absence from Norman Rosenthal's insouciant survey of this century's British art at the Royal Academy, though Tindle was elected an Academician in 1979. Tindle, it seems, has never been the creature of fashion, conformity and preconception, and has too often in shrewd self-criticism and assessment recognised the approach of exhaustion and the need for change, and in changing has unmanned the critics who prefer the ready convenience of the familiar pigeon-hole.
The most radical of changes occurred some twenty years ago. His handling of paint had become heavy and gestural, his compositions fallen into formula, and Tindle was trapped in a doldrum of his own making; many English painters have run dry in their mid thirties, but he, recognising the stale custom of his landscapes in broad brush and slabs of tone and colour, went into retreat to work out his salvation. He emerged from it in 1972, a skilled practitioner of the painstaking early Renaissance technique of tempera and fine sable brush - with extraordinary diligence he had disciplined both hand and eye until he could reappear on the London scene an entirely new painter owing nothing to contemporary fads and mannerisms. He had not become a slavish medievalist, a latter-day Prodigal returned to a Pre-Raphaelite fold, nor had he taken up the banner of the desuetudinous Society of Painters in Tempera, some of whose members, Eliot Hodgkin and Maxwell Armfield among them, were still practising; he had certainly not rejected the interests expressed in his early oil paintings - any analysis of his London views of the Thames makes clear that his concern was not with topography, but with shadowed power stations belching against the dying light of a grey winter, enlisting no dramatic grandeur to justify the urban smirch, but asking the spectator to share his quiet pleasure in the disembodying effects of light, in heavy masses reduced to abstract screens of luminous tone. With tempera he tightened his drawing, reduced the size of his pictures and the scale of their subjects, and turned with reined excitement and deliberate enquiry to domestic interiors, still lives and portraiture; the technique of tempera slowed their production.
Looking now at a portrait painted in 1972 and another in 1988, I am astonished at the consistency of Tindle's concerns, but where in the earlier picture the transparent eye-shade is green and casts only a faintly tainted shadow, in the later it throws all its colour strongly down upon the face and is itself neutral in the strong fall of light; this shift of emphasis is characteristic of the enhanced complexity of Tindle's recent work, the twists of observation that with angled mirrors, open doors, planes that are subtly out of parallel with the picture's surface, ground plans that defy ready analysis, remove everything from immediate reality and translate all into a world of translucent shadows in which hang screens of light, mysterious and magical. The direct observation in the pictures from his last exhibition, more than three years ago, in which he saw the things and places about him with a heightened realism that edged towards the surreal, a world of unseen presences, of rooms lately occupied, has developed into more abstract, more mathematical compositions in which the warm stillness no longer implies a hidden narrative - it is as though he has made a palimpsest of the empty rooms of Hammershoi and the later landscapes of Feininger, of painterly devices with the detail lost in the light of strong sunset yellows and the rich transparent purples and opaque blues of shadow, all applied with a much broader, bolder touch that is rare in the handling of tempera, occasionally enlivened by surprisingly high points of colour.
Not all detail is discarded; Tindle still introduces neatly graphic notes that are specific in atmospheres that would make sets for Werther. He has long been a painter of windows, the mysterious zone that is both indoors and out, offering two qualities of light, two tones of colour, with the glass screening, reflecting, muting, closing, opening, confusing - the confusion resolved by the simple device of opening the window a few inches, offering the keys of unglazed reality and the unhindered fall of light, the sudden intense small focus locking all the seeming vagaries into pictorial logic. In a compelling portrait of himself holding his cat, we see Tindle from behind, looking in a mirror; the serpentine line of the reflected animal is central to the composition, the element about which all others flow. Tindle's face we see reflected, but with the cat we communicate directly over his left shoulder; we see the inside of the right lens of his spectacles silvery-white against the shadow-blue of the mirror, opaque as a petal of the honesty that used to be a favourite subject, and then we see it as a shadow in the reflection. He finds the same delicate character in the pierced filigree of porcelain and the rococo rhythms of a white narcissus, paste and petal. He is specific in his description of the eggs, crumpled paper bags, tripod tables, straw hats and bottles that are the stuff of his still lives, their nature unmistakable even though they are subordinate to light and atmosphere; unlike the Dutch masters of still life, most of these elements have no particular symbolism - though the perfect and mysterious egg retains its ancient image as the origin of life, and the strawberry, denied the phallic implication of the medieval north, implies corruption; unlike the Victorians his flowers speak no particular language; if there is a message, it is of undefined romantic melancholy, of the mood and spirit of the place.
To discuss Tindle without repeated adversion to Romanticism is impossible. Without obvious references to Caspar David Friedrich and the Petworth Turners, to Menzel, Carus, Kersting and Dahl, Tindle shares something of their purpose; in his new broad handling of tempera he seems even to share the stippled light-filled grounds of David. As a very young painter he carried Neo-Romanticism to the Kitchen Sink; as a mature painter he has rejected almost everything that belongs to his contemporary world, looking instead to the spiritual essence beyond appearances, a visionary in an intensely English tradition that Peter Fuller rightly promotes as unbroken and continuing, needing no definition as New, Last, Late or even Lost - Tindle's empty rooms illustrate as perfectly Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes as did the crisp vignettes of Minton.
Let me now declare an interest: I first saw Tindle's paintings when I was a student at the Courtauld Institute and, having watched his progress ever since, I own seven, spanning the years 1953, from which I still learn, as the seasons change, to see strange beauties in the commonplace. Three years ago, Marina Vaizey observed that his pictures grow 'ever more refined - ever more beautiful' - I have no better words for them.'
Brian Sewell
Catalogue introduction to: David Tindle - Paintings 1987-89, 11 May - 15 June, 1989
Fischer Fine Art Limited, London
La forza poetica che promana dalle opere di David Tindle e l'effetto della difficile equazione, che egli di volta in volta affronta, tra la minuzia, quasi da primitivo fiammingo, della tecnica impiegata (la tempera a uovo, ora su tela ora su legno) e l'esito magicamente inquietante di una rappresentazione di cose e luoghi quotidiani, semplici, finanche banali. E giustamente in un suo testo del 1987 Marina Vaizey evoca per Tindle il mistico, magico realista, Samuel Palmer, oltre a Chardin e a Morandi.
La puntigliosa esattezza con la quale egli restituisce poche cose sopra un tavolo, un albert, una giacca stazzonata sopra una sedia, un volto, un corpo, un fiore, ci porta insomma a infinita distanza da qualsiasi verismo. Si tratta invece di dialoghi muti fra le cose che non hanno parola, e fra esseri umani (che rinunciano alla parola: al rumore della parola) con se stessi. La presenza frequente della forma emblematica costituita - da Piero della Francesca in poi - dalla nivea nudita dell'uovo segna le lontane ascendenze della cultura figurativa di Tindle: la prospettica quattrocentesca che con Caspar David Friedrich si raggela per riapparire nella metafisica immobilita di Seurat.
In un famoso passaggio della Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, Diderot scrive che 'Colui che passeggia in ina mostra di pittura recita, senza saperlo, la parte di un sordo che si diverte a guardare dei muti che discorrono di argomenti a lui noti'. Se cio e vero per qualsiasi pittore, per chinque faccia parlare la 'voce del silenzio' che Malraux riconosceva nell'arte, lo e forse in modo specialissimo per Tindle. Nel senso che la sua pittura accentua, anzi esaspera, il proprio silenzio. E in questa accentuazione ed esasperazione, il 'sordo' di cui parla Diderot vede un muto discorrere di argomenti chi gli sembrano noti, ma di cui sospetta subito, e sempre di piu man mano che il suo sguardo insiste su di essi, una misteriosa natura. Nella sospesa immobilita della rappresentazione - nella quale non e illecito vedere anche una lontana eco della temporalita sospesa di De Chirico - il 'muto' infatti ha gesti cosi rari e misurati da turbare il 'sordo', e da fargli intendere che qui d'altro si parla che di cronache o descrizioni della banalita quotidiana.
E su questa immobilita interviene una sottile frammentazione pulviscolare delle cose; la luce omnidiffusa penetra cosi dentro la materialita delle cose in modo ancora piu radicale di quanto era accaduto gia nel 'pointillisme'. Al tempo stesso, a rendere inquietanti questi interni, queste nature morte, questi personaggi interrogativi, interviene qualcosa che fa pensare, non per analogia di linguaggio ma per una segreta analogia di contenuto, a Valloton, che Roberto Longhi aveva acutamente chiamato l'"ugonotto feroce'. Una ferocia del quotidiano, appunto, e detta anche qui, compensata pero da un rimando metafisico, dal rinvio del riguardante a qualcosa che e al di la del cerchio stringente del quotidiano, e che invia ardui segnali, sommesse allusioni ad una possibile perfezione di stato spirituale.
Uno stato a definire il quale altro termine non trovo di quello di estasi, per tutto cio che il termine indica e a cui allude, sulla linea verticale che congiunge I piu strettamente fisici rapimenti del corpo e I piu spiritualmente eterei rapimenti dell'anima. E sempre (l'ho gia accennato a proposito dei personaggi dipinti da Tindle ma l'osservazione vale per ogni suo 'argomento') una qualita interrogativa, trepidamente ansiosa, come se l'artista fosse in permanente attesa di messaggi invocati, o sperati.
Credo di essere abbastanza noto, fra i critici italiani, come uno di quelli che meno credono alla 'post-modernita', e tanto meno alla regressione verso il pre-moderno. Il 'modernismo' non fu tutta la modernita, e questa non ha ancora chiuso il proprio arco se I traumi caratteristici che consentirono a Baudelaire di descriverla sono ben lontani dall'essere superati. E un dato certo della modernita e la compresenza simultaneo di linguaggi diversi, tanto diversi e opposti fra di loro quanto diverse appaiono, coesistenti, le apparenze e le realta del mondo contemporaneo. Sicche, nessun linguaggio e a priori moderno o obsoleto, ma cio che decide e l'uso che ogni singolo artista e capace di farne. E questo uso, segnato e inflesso dai significati che l'artista initerroga mentre li cerca, introduce, nell'intimo della cultura formale che l'artista predilige e che egli convoca entro la propria opera, quella che si chiama normalmente l'originalita, o la qualita - insomma, la singolarita del suo apporto.
Tindle e, fra gli artisti attivi oggi in Europa, uno di coloro che piu esplicitamente convocano nella propria ricerca un linguaggio storico, ossia un linguaggio che, almeno in parte, sembrerebbe anteriore alla grande e gloriosa esperienza delle avanguardie artistiche internazionali della primissima fase di questo secolo: e che non lo e poiche e anch'esso problematico, critico, e corrosivo delle certezza creditate, perche e inquieto e inquietante. E allo stesso modo che I piu talentosi e originali fra gli artisti che usano e reinventano linguaggi detti di avanguardia devono esserre ben distinti dalla folla numerosissima degli accademici del modernismo, cosi Tindle e alcuni altri con liu devono essere tenuti ben distinti dalle crescenti truppe della post-anti-modernita.'
Antonio del Guercio
Alcuni erotismi possibile
Catalogue introduction to: Eros in Albion - Sei Pittori Inglesi
Casa di Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Arezzo
7 october - 7 november 1989
David Tindle uses the most painstaking of techniques: egg tempera on canvas or board. This gloriously ancient method, slow, precise, delicate, full of nuance and subtlety, is at the service of the most modern and magical mystery. Seemingly a realist, Tindle's realism is firmly located in the immediacy of his own surroundings, irradiated by personal emotion. Still-life, interiors and landscapes are his subjects: portraits when they do appear, are dazzlingly immediate and full of feeling.
The sense of immediacy, of the moment, emerges paradoxically from this most difficult of techniques. Tempera as a material insists on measured, exacting methods - one cannot be slapdash. In Tindle's paintings this is so precisely employed in the most elusive and poetic manner dealing with the most ordinary of subjects, that which surrounds us in everyday life.
Tindle is no strict purist: gouache, watercolour and acrylic are also materials in his armoury. He paints his garden, his house, his studio. He paints a box of apples, the view from the window, empty chairs expectant in a room, a coat on the back of a chair. He paintings fruitfulness and decay. Dandelions in a glass on a ledge are drooping airy dandelions clocks, at the end of the cycle. But these paintings are far more than mementoes and memories of ordinary things. These simple artifacts and recurring themes recall something of the spirit, if not the appearance of Morandi: a deck-chair has as much presence, even more, as a monument, just as Morandi gave to simple jars and jugs extended breathing space, a sense of grandeur. Chardin, too, comes to eye and mind.
Tindle of course has put it best himself: 'The images I paint are of things that I know or can remember best. I try to place them in an order that expresses the feelings I have about them. It is not a question of painting them as realistically as I can, but to get the right tonality, so that memory and presence are very close.'
The subjects are both monumental and enduring, fleeting and spontaneous. Nowhere is this apparent contradiction more visible than in Nightwalk, both still-life and action painting. A man - we deduce from hand and clothing, as we can only see the upper part of his body, the legs cut off by a table, the head invisible beyond the painting - is reaching towards his hat, which rests on the table top. Or, perhaps, he has just put his hat down. The coat is flung on a chair - just hurled down, or about to be retrieved? Restlessness or serenity, insomnia or the pause before sleep. Is this an embarkation on night walk or night thoughts, or a return?
Even in full summer, in the garden, in hazy sunlight, there is a hint of the autumnal, of the gentleness of reflection, of indeed harvest. Dandelions too, with its flurry of dying flowers, of drooping stalks and stems, places this extravagance of mortality next to the plumpest of small apples. A boy on a ladder, an apple picking ladder, in the garden, watches his blue balloon in the sky - has it just been flown or is it returning? The sky is so spacious, the balloon is a small punctuation in its vast, overreaching arch.
Tindle's gardens are always contained, outdoor rooms, nature tamed and not a wilderness, the gardens cultivated. Just as the view from his studio at home is of roofs and walls before we see the field beyond, a table may be set in the garden with tablecloth, with jugs and glasses in formal marching army, a Morandi landscape, a note as formal as the garden walls, again a containment.
Old trees, apple trees, often recur, as magical and real for Tindle as for that mystical, magical realist, Samuel Palmer. Apple trees when old look old, small and bowed over by the burden of years of the weight of their fruit, domestic yet wild, the nurturing tree, the tree of Temptation.
Tindle delights in every detail - at times each blade of grass is distinct. This commitment however is always subservient to the picture as a whole - areas of blur and brushstrokes are interwoven and intertwined so that the final image is attuned to a reflection of the human vision, in and out of focus.
Tindle's objects are tenderly painted and minutely observed, whether set in fields of grass or juxtaposed against marvellous muted tones of colour in walls and floors. The light which bathes his pictures is wonderfully evoked and becomes light observed from windows, light falling into rooms, a light varied by unseen cloudscapes and by shadows which play across the garden.
Most recently, Tindle has become even more finely tuned in achieving the crucial balance between that which is atmospheric, suggestive, lyrical, poetic and yet strikingly tangible. It is work which is rich in emotions which are often obliquely suggested: the euphoria of a summer day, the sheer exhilaration in looking at a garden, the satisfying comfort of one's own room. The outside world is filtered through Tindle's intense observation recollected in troubled, arduous work and tranquillity too. The resulting images are ever more refined, ever more powerful, and indeed, ever more beautiful.'
Marina Vaizey
Catalogue introduction to: David Tindle - Recent Work
October 24 - November 22, 1985
Fischer Fine Art Limited, London |