Art Letters

Letter: Marco di Manchester? Marco di Merseyside more like!

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Dear Sir,

As someone who has spent three decades preserving, cataloguing, and,when necessary,defending the ecclesiastical art of Northern England, I read Dr. Livia Helmstrom’s recent monograph on Marco di Manchester (Marco di Manchester: A Northern Light) with both admiration and incredulity. Admirable for its zeal, to be sure, but more so for the sheer elasticity of its claims. Allow me, as both a veteran of aerial reconnaissance and an unrepentant Mancunian realist, to offer a modest corrective.

Marco,if indeed that was his name,was not a mystic mediator between North and South, nor some cloaked prophet of painterly hush. He was, I’m afraid, a fairly competent parish artisan from the periphery. Whether he hailed from Manchester proper or (more plausibly, in my view) from the outer reaches of what is now Merseyside, his training was provincial, his reach limited, and his imagination unmistakably derivative. I have stood before his so-called St. Cuthbert Among the Sparrows many times,more than Helmstrom, I’d wager,and it remains a work of modest charm but no real invention. The sparrows look like etchings copied from a French bestiary. The folds of the robe, so rhapsodized by Helmstrom, are clearly lifted from a Flemish woodcut, likely seen in a borrowed Book of Hours or, as one suspects, at the Carmelite priory in Preston.

As for The Wilmslow Annunciation, it bears all the hallmarks of someone who went on a brief holiday to Florence, got a bit overawed at all the art and returned north with a sketchbook full of borrowed tricks. The halos are flat. The perspective timid. The expressions are not “proto-modern” but simply unsure. In aviation terms, Marco was not inventing new flight paths,he was merely circling around other people’s airfields.

I do not deny that he had some talent. But talent is not the same as vision. We do ourselves and our history a disservice when we repackage every regional craftsman as a lost genius. Marco was a backwater painter,perhaps the finest from his specific backwater,but a backwater painter all the same.

Let us celebrate our local histories without gilding them. The North is rich enough without needing to invent Northern geniuses. There are several of those already; for real Northern Masters, look to Leonardo da Liverpool, Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea or even Giles Monet.

Yours sincerely,

Commander Walton P. Grimsby, OBE

Curator, North-West and Wales Ecclesiastical Arts Trust

Interview with Hackson Jollock: Lines, Fury, and the Endless Loop of #64

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Hackson Jollock is one of Britain’s most ferociously original visual artists,if not always the most serene. His canvases are an explosion of line and motion, electric with frustration, precision, and improvisation. His latest work, titled simply #64, is a tangle of looping, frenetic lines in indigo, copper, and blood red. It’s been hailed as both a “nervous system laid bare” and “a topographical map of thought.” But one thing is certain: whatever you do, don’t mention Jackson Pollock around him.

Interviewer: Hackson, thank you for joining us. Let’s begin with the elephant in the room,your name and the inevitable comparison to a certain American painter.

Hackson Jollock:

Look, I didn’t choose to be born with a name that sounds like a pun. That’s my parents’ fault, not mine. But I’ll say it once and for all: I am not mimicking Jackson Pollock. I do not drip. I slash. I etch. I rage. Pollock was obsessed with surrendering to the unconscious. I’m busy interrogating it. If you want to talk about influence, let’s talk about Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, or the London Tube map. But enough about Pollock. Let him rest.

Interviewer: Understood. Let’s talk about your latest piece, #64. It’s a field of restless lines,some looping, some slicing,and signed in bright red in the corner. What’s going on here?

Jollock:

It’s a language, or the breakdown of one. I think of my work as a kind of graphic stammer. Every line is a stutter, a contradiction, a backtrack. #64 is part of an ongoing series exploring failure,failure of communication, failure of memory, failure of form. I wanted to see what happens when you just keep drawing until the meaning collapses.

Interviewer: There’s an almost musical quality to the piece, like jazz improvisation. Is that deliberate?

Jollock:

Absolutely. I sometimes listen to free jazz when I work. Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, early Soft Machine. I’m not painting to the music,I’m painting inside it. The lines are phrasing. They’re riffs. Sometimes I leave spaces like rests in a measure. #64 is noisy, but there’s rhythm in the chaos. That’s where the tension lives.

Interviewer: You’ve said before that you don’t “plan” your works. But surely a piece like this has structure?

Jollock:

There’s structure in the aftermath. When I begin, I don’t have an image in mind,I have energy. Anger, mostly with this one. I start with a single color and move as fast as I can. Then another color. Then another. I don’t stand back until it’s nearly over. Only then do I see the shape of what I’ve made. It’s like fighting your way through fog and realizing you’ve built a cathedral out of your footsteps.

Interviewer: Many of your paintings feature the number titles,#37, #48, and now #64. Is that a rejection of narrative?

Jollock:

Yes. And no. The numbers are part of the narrative. They’re coordinates in my brain’s geography. I don’t want to tell you what to see. I want you to look and feel. If I called it “Tension Between Lovers in a Mid-Sized Town”, you’d bring your own tired baggage. #64 could be anything. It could be you.

Interviewer: Do you ever think your work is hard for people to access?

Jollock:

Good. I don’t want to be accessible. I want to be intrusive. Art should interrupt your day, not decorate your flat. If someone looks at #64 and feels overwhelmed, irritated, confused,that’s a success. That means I’ve reached them before they’ve reached for an explanation.

Interviewer: Finally, what’s next for Hackson Jollock?

Jollock:

I’m building a machine that draws without stopping. A mechanical extension of my process. It will never sleep. It might draw forever, or it might jam up in five minutes and implode. I think that’s perfect.

#64 is currently on view at the Pimlico Wilde Gallery, London. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own interpretations.

To the Directors of Pimlico Wilde regarding Your plans for a gallery on the Moon

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Dear Sirs and Madams,

I write to you with no small measure of incredulity upon reading of your latest initiative to open a contemporary art gallery on the Moon. While I have long admired Pimlico Wilde’s commitment to bold cultural gestures, this latest scheme, ambitious though it may be,strikes me as emblematic of a certain strain of metropolitan absurdism that confuses spectacle for substance.

The idea of establishing Lunarscape One on the rim of Shackleton Crater is, I grant, impressive in its logistical daring. However, one must ask: for whom is this gallery intended? Beyond a clutch of astronauts and a passing robot or two, your projected footfall seems destined to be, shall we say, light. A cultural institution without an audience is not a temple of the arts,it is a mausoleum of misdirected intent.

There is something depressingly symptomatic in the notion that art must now escape Earth itself to be considered avant-garde. Must the act of cultural significance really involve shipping modular domes into the vacuum of space? The Moon is silent, lifeless, airless. Many places on earth, Torquay, for example, are very much alive.

Might I propose a more grounded alternative? Torquay, on the south coast of Devon, offers much of what the Moon cannot: a temperate climate, excellent rail links, a thriving community of artists and retirees, and a magnificent seafront promenade that would not look out of place in a Paul Nash watercolour. The town is sorely under-served by high culture, and a gallery of Pimlico Wilde’s stature would be a revelation. One can imagine a thoughtful programme of exhibitions,environmental art, interwar surrealism, generative light work,resonating not in the void of space but in the minds of the living.

More pertinently, a gallery in Torquay would be visited, loved, and discussed. It would bring artists into conversation with a real, human audience,people who can wander in on a rainy Tuesday, unburdened by space suits or live-streaming apparatus. The Moon offers only isolation; Torquay offers dialogue.

I entreat you to reconsider the direction of your cultural trajectory. The stars may beckon, but there is honour,and perhaps greater value,in illuminating the overlooked corners of our own world first.

With all due respect,

George Fenwick

Torquay, Devon

Letters to the gallery- Thanks!

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From the desk of Spencer Spence

The Turret,
London SW1

Dear Phillip,

First and foremost: thank you. Or rather,thank you, with one hand clasped to my heart and the other dramatically outstretched toward the magnificence that now adorns the west wall of my study (replacing the less impressive oil portrait of my cousin Rupert, whose gaze always followed one with the air of a man judging your wine choice).

Your extraordinary gift,the painting titled Three Badgers Rehearsing Macbeth ,has utterly transformed the room. Not just in terms of visual splendour, but spiritually. Emotionally. Possibly also acoustically, as I’m sure I now hear faint Scottish murmurs whenever I open a window.

I must commend the Pimlico Wilde Gallery for their uncanny ability to spot a masterpiece. This is no mere painting. It is a fever dream in fur. The detail! The menace in the badger on stage left, whose paw hovers just above the cauldron (which, I note with admiration, is bubbling with what appears to be mulligatawny soup). The drama! The tension! The fact that one of the badgers is clearly wearing a tiny ruff and what I believe to be Crocs.

Please extend my admiration to the artist, whose name I understand is Gloria Van Drench. Her work speaks volumes,mainly in hexameter,and has already been the centrepiece of three dinners, a heated argument about whether badgers are allowed in Equity, and one deeply unsettling coffee break with the Bishop.

Phillip, your generosity is only matched by your eye for the sublime. I am deeply grateful, and only mildly concerned that the painting may, in fact, be sentient. (Last night the eyes glowed faintly during a thunderstorm, but that could also have been the gin.)

Please consider yourself invited for cocktails any Thursday hence, to witness the painting in its full twilight glory. Bring Pimlico’s finest, and possibly a qualified zoologist.

Yours, awestruck and great full galleries as marvellous as Pimlico Wilde exist,

Spencer Spence

Writer, collector, and second cousin of someone who once met Hockney in a lift