- Artist
- Alan Johnston born 1945
- Medium
- Graphite on paper
- Dimensions
- Unconfirmed: 1838 × 338 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Barker-Mill Foundation 2015
- Reference
- T14294
Summary
This is one of three works in Tate’s collection from a series of twenty drawings known as the Oxford Series. Each named Untitled (Oxford Series) and dated 1978, the drawings were executed with a 5H or 6H pencil on narrow vertical scrolls of paper six feet tall, which were subsequently mounted on card and framed. Each of the drawings responds to this format with a simple vertical composition. In this work, what appears to be a thick vertical block is in fact divided down the middle by an undrawn area which protrudes at intervals into the blocks on either side. In another work (Tate T14293), a thick vertical block stands to the left of a thinner vertical block. A further work (Tate T14295) consists of a thin vertical block divided near the bottom and top by horizontal blocks of a similar thickness. All of the blocks are comprised of repetitive calligraphic marks made with hard pencil, which coalesce to form the image. The twenty drawings were shown together at Johnston’s first major solo exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1978 under the title From the Mountain to the Plain. They were accompanied by five further drawings of 1978 in a near-square format: Lode, Pent, A Broken Song, Sound of the Castle and Old Man (=). A sixth drawing, River Plain No. 3 1978 (Tate T14292), is related to these works but was not shown in the exhibition.
Drawing is at the core of Johnston’s practice. During the period in which he studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (between 1972 and 1973), he found that he was directing his work away from figuration and towards the sensibilities of the European landscape tradition, using hard pencil on paper or drawing directly on the wall in an abstract language of simple interlocking or related forms. These forms consist of subtle, rhythmic and repetitive webs of looping calligraphic pencil work that coalesce over time into singular forms. In 1978 the curator of the Oxford exhibition, Mark Francis, wrote that ‘the artist had a sense of himself in landscape, rather than an observer of it. Alan Johnston’s drawings are an attempt to express this feeling.’ (Francis in Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1978, p.5, emphases in the original.)
The density of the drawing in the related works of 1978 communicates the experience of an image accumulated over time into a concentrated understanding of a landscape. There is no overt communication of a landscape image but rather the feeling of a relationship to that landscape and of being in repose within it. This reflects a sense of the genius loci or ‘spirit of the place’, and alludes particularly to the landscapes of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) as well as to more recent ideas of the sublime as ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ (for instance in the work of the French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Francois Lyotard). In this respect the critic Owen Griffith has likened Johnston’s work to ‘secret tuning forks vibrating with hidden harmonies’ (Owen Griffith, ‘Alan Johnston’, Art Monthly, no.67, June 1983, p.12) and his work shares a broad affinity with the concerns of artists such as Richard Tuttle, a close friend of Johnston’s since 1977, and Agnes Martin.
Johnston’s forms in these related drawings are created on a human scale, suggesting a correspondence between the drawing and the viewer, whose experience of the works is defined by the space in which they are intended to be seen: measured architectural environments which frame the range of expressive densities within each drawing. The title of the exhibition at Oxford, From the Mountain to the Plain, has been elucidated by Griffith: ‘the title comes from [Giambattista] Vico’s image of a man on a mountain shouting down to those on the plain below. The plain is the social plain of human affairs. The mountain represents the aspirations of the artist and those around him … The work provides for the viewer the same challenge that the mountain provides for the artist.’ (Griffith in Fruitmarket Gallery and Pier Arts Centre 1987, pp.9–10.) In this series, however, that challenge is not represented directly in the image but discovered through a concentrated looking that draws the viewer into the experience of the work.
Further reading
Alan Johnston, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1978.
Alan Johnston, exhibition catalogue, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and Pier Arts Centre, Orkney 1987.
Alan Johnston, Drawing a Shadow: No Object, exhibition catalogue, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 2010.
Andrew Wilson
January 2015
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