No comfort in peaceful views
Robert Perry has devoted so much time to recording sites associated with the two world wars that it is difficult not to see his new paintings of North Wales at the RBSA Gallery as images of conflict.
Certainly, when he gets in close to focus on a near-abstract composition of churned ground, it’s easy to imagine that we’re back on the Somme and some drawings of an ancient copper mine on the Great Orme recall his underground drawings of ruined forts at Verdun.
But if these Welsh landscapes are technically at peace, that’s certainly not to say they are in any way comfortable. “Painted under umbrella,” Perry notes on one gouache study of rain clouds gathering above an austere peak.
His willingness to suffer for his art, in winter as well as summer, is conspicuous everywhere. Although the exhibition is called In the Footsteps of David Cox and is designed to complement the major Cox exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, it’s really the spirit of John Constable which seems to haunt this impressively substantial body of work, which was carried out in a little over the last year.
The large oil paintings, all executed on the spot, reflect Perry’s expertise in blending a range of techniques to capture the essence of what is in front of him. Actually, one of my favourites was a relatively small painting of Harlech Castle which achieves the remarkable illusion of having been painted in an instant, so consistent is its’ surface.
But it’s the many gouache studies that seem to be the heart of the project, each pinning down a meteorological moment specified in a handwritten caption, of which “3.40pm: 23 April 2008 Diffwys and Craig Aderyn after wind from seaward cleared the heavy mist” is typical.
* In the Footsteps of David Cox: Robert Perry in North Wales is at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, St Paul’s Square, until Saturday (Mon-Fri 10.30am- 5.30pm, Sat 10.30am-5pm; admission free).
