When
British painter David Shutt came to Greece in 2001 he was looking
for a quality of light and a context for philosophical ideas which
have their origins here, in the hope of making a unified image which
celebrated both. It turned out that his stay, a five and a half
month sabbatical from teaching at Canterbury's Christ Church University
College, was one of the artist's most prolific periods. The paintings
he made were shown in the artist's first one man show in Greece
at the Jill Yakas Gallery in April 2002.
Shutt
is a dedicated landscape painter, having spent twenty years painting
the mountainous region of Snowdonia in North Wales. His 'Greek paintings'
have grown out of the same interest, but are distinct in terms of
light. They also speak of an artist who influenced by the country's
ancient past, searches for his own personal Arcadia in the surrounding
nature. Distantly evocative of the work of 19th-century travelling
painters, Shutt's paintings have a romantic and most appealing feel
to them.
The
two artists who have influenced David Shutt most in a direct way,
are the English painters Patrick Symons and Euan Uglow. They made
Shutt aware, amongst other things, of the work of Jay Hambidge who
published two books in the early 20th century: 'The Greek Vase'
and 'The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry'. He had been a keeper of
the substantial collection of Greek ceramics in Boston Museum and
had recognized the superior beauty and harmony of the pieces in
the collection of the classical period of the age of Pericles, over
the less integrated works which preceded and followed them. He started
measuring them and discovered those works to possess very particular
qualities of proportion which are mathematically associated with
Pythagorean ideas, which have come down to us in Plato's 'Timaeus'.
They are especially present in the 'divine' platonic solid, the
dodecahedron, as opposed to those associated with the four elements
and Plato's atomic theory: the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron
and the icosahedron. The dodecahedron possesses the ratio of the
golden section since it is composed of pentagonal facets whose chords
intersect each other in that ratio and this is the basis of the
cosmos, to be found throughout nature in philotaxis (the organizing
principal of plants), animal growth and musical structure, in the
Pythagorean world view. It is a very appealing poetic and pantheistic
idea.
For many years Shutt has been interested in ideas of figure composition
and pastoral landscape which also have their origins here in Greece.
The idea of the self-confident, self aware and integrated nude has
its origins in Greek sculpture and the most appealing context for
the nude is Arcadia, celebrated in the paintings of Titian, Claude,
Poussin, Cezanne and Matisse. For twenty years Shutt has painted
the upland region of Snowdonia, a sheep rearing landscape of North
Wales, and having developed a deep devotion to a particular locality
since childhood, had come to think of it as a personal arcadia,
which has many shared characteristics in common with the geographic
Arcadia in Greece. Because many of Cezanne's figure compositions
are based on the story of Diana (Artemis) and Callisto as told by
Ovid in his 'Metamorphosis' Shutt started painting a number of compositions
loosely based on those events. To research the quality of light
appropriate to the story, set in Arcadia,he has been painting in
a number of Mediterranean locations in France (near Cezanne's Mte.
S. Victoire for example), Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, and now
more substantially, in Greece.
Shutt
spent the Spring and Summer of 2001 painting the marvelous landscape
around the archaeological site of Troezen, associated with Orestes,
Theseus, Hippolytus and Phaedra. The changing cycle of the seasons
and the way the vegetation, environment and light changed, became
the subjects of his studies, ultimately to inform the most recent
'Artemis and Callisto' composition (still in progress).
So
this may explain why 'Sea, Olive, Moon' is composed in a pentagon,
'Looking Up and Down the Gorge' is in a golden section and 'The
Painter's First Shed' is in the square root of a golden section,
and 'Phaedra' is in three squares. The internal dynamics of these
shapes have given their coherence to the subjects. From the subject,
in each case, the shape of the canvas becomes the outward manifestation
of the space it occupies and the glow of colour and light which
infuse this marvelous place.
David
Shutt, born in Cheshire, England, graduated with a B.A. First Class
Hons in Fine Art from Leeds University, and a Higher Diploma in
Painting (Postgraduate ) from the Slade School in London.
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