Christopher Bramham

Christopher Bramham

Christopher Bramham

new work

jonathan clark fine art18 park walk SW10 0AQ

london + 44 (0) 20 7351 3555

info@jcfa.co.uk www.jcfa.co.uk

Chris Bramham by Lucian Freud 1989

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The gravelly, green, wood- and stone-loving works of Christopher Bramham do

not, on the face of it, share much with the light touch and creamy ambience of

Henri Matisse’s Nice-period paintings. But Chris Bramham loves Matisse, and in

particular Matisse’s early Nice period. Register this – begin to sense why – and you

have a beautiful key into his work.

In an important sense, of course, Bramham’s painting needs no key. It is beautiful,

urgent, intimate work, and it convinces instantly, without the need for critical

intercession. You feel in front of his art both the nervous excitability and the spiritual

relief that always arise from unaffected truth-telling.

But besides being direct and plain-spoken, Bramham’s work is also, at odd times,

anxiously alert, even a little sly. (It is art, after all.) So it is both a pleasure and a

secret doorway to deeper connections when you notice the open book, facing

away, on the chair in Bramham’s marvellous Still Life with Books (pages 27-29). The

book that is open on top of the pile is the catalogue for ‘Henri Matisse: The Early

Years in Nice 1916-1930’, a late 1980s show organized by the National Gallery of

Art in Washington D.C. “Oh, I adore it beyond belief,” Bramham told me, laughing,

but quite serious, over the phone. “It’s a sort of bible to me. He helps me so much!”

Leafing through my own cherished copy, I glean that Bramham’s, in the painting,

is open to pages 130-131. The spread holds two plates, paintings from around

1919 that present classic Matissean motifs (windows, curtains, shutters, flowers,

an oval mirror, a distant palm) in familiar Nice-period harmonies (creamy yellows,

blues, mauves, and pinks, with eloquent little punches of black). In 1919, it’s worth

pointing out, all this must still have felt fresh and full of potential to Matisse. Two

years earlier, just shy of 50, the native northerner with the serious spectacles and

the permanent furrow bisecting his brow had moved south to a series of hotel

rooms in Nice.

Introduction

opposite

Detail of Still Life with Books 2014-15 (page 29)

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What did the move mean to him?

A great gulping intake of air. A new project. A spiritual unclenching.

And so it may have been for Chris Bramham, after his 1999 move, with his wife

Ruth and their children, to a big old house in north-east Cornwall, near the border

with Devon. The house, built in the 1870s, was unlikely. It reminded Bramham of a

vicarage. Slate floors, servant bells, big bay windows. Outside, and visible through

those windows, a big Scots pine.

Was all this relaxing, uplifting, intoxicating? Possibly not. Bramham succumbed, he

told me, to a kind of panic after his family moved in. You would never guess it by

looking at the paintings. But then, you would never guess that Matisse succumbed

in Nice to the same nosebleeds, insomnia, panic attacks, and relentless anxiety as

he had in Paris. Great painting is always jumping over unseen hurdles. It is always

unlikely.

A card Bramham received in the post eventually calmed his nerves. It showed

Constable’s elm – or actually, the etching made from it by Bramham’s old friend

– a huge influence on his life and work – Lucian Freud. “You’re not loving it,” he

immediately realized, in relation to his own work. “You’ve got to love it!”

So love it. But what do you paint at such times? Confronting this same basic

question, Matisse in palmy Nice and Bramham in marshy Cornwall alighted on more

or less the same answer. Both chose to paint what was arrayed before them –

arrayed both by chance (This is where I happen to be) and by design (where I happen

to be is my studio). They painted things in the world that were the world, in all its

separateness and quiddity (furniture, rocks, lemons, a melon) but which could also

be enlisted, without fuss, as materials for painting. Things close at hand.

For Bramham, as for Matisse, some of those things were further away: views

through windows, trees, the nearby landscape. Some were delimited by interior

walls: tables, chairs, paintings in progress. Others were more proximate still, at

Bramham’s feet or under his nose: paint tins, pot plants, brushes, a plate of eggs,

floorboards, a ceramic bowl, a favourite round table (that last quietly evoking the

table Matisse painted several times in 1916).

Bramham’s bowl – bone-white, dirty, delicately ribbed on the outside – is a fixture in

many of his best works. His wife Ruth used to make bread in it. Before that, it was

part of an old Victorian washstand. Eventually, it migrated to the studio. “Everything

ends up in my studio,” Bramham told me, “Ruth knows it.”

“Everything” includes mussel and oyster shells, which Bramham often uses to mix

paint. Also: lemons, jugs, green apples, peaches, a pear, knuckles of garlic, duck eggs, a

lilac branch, a sleeping dog, and, in one marvellously assured pastel, Ruth herself (p. 56).

All these things, once enlisted, must endure. Unlike the light, aerated surfaces of

Matisse, Bramham’s paint is thick, resinous, sensuously clotted. His heavily worked,

semi-sculptural, but always taut and subtle surfaces capture the tactility of things,

embodying them anew, demanding of them – and their creator – a second life.

Some are vegetable; they sprout over time, like the red onions that sit on a saucer

beside five lemons and a couple of sea shells (see p. 24). (Matisse painted his own

sprouting red onions in 1906). Others are wood; others still stone. All endure

Bramham’s painterly amplifications in their own way, just as they have endured

the various earlier phases of their existence. The husks of a handful of hazelnuts

languished so long under the painter’s patient gaze that they ended up shrivelled.

What Bramham learned from Freud, he told me, was that “nothing is so insignificant

that you can’t trouble over it.” The two artists were especially close in the 1980s

and ’90s. Freud painted first Bramham (frontispiece), and then two of his children,

Polly and Barney. A year ago, Bramham showed me a brief letter Freud sent him, an

invitation to tea. Unexpectedly, it quoted Nietzsche: “If there is to be art, if there

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is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one must first have enhanced the exitability

[sic] of the whole machine.” Excited himself, Freud signed off: “Put that in your pipe

and smoke it.”

Bramham is still, you feel, pensively puffing away. His work is rich in feeling, direct,

tender to the touch, and yes, excited. The recent paintings, many produced during

a long and arduous convalescence, are especially so. Small, hard-won, and intensely

heartfelt, they have the same quality of unaffected, open-eyed sincerity you see in

those early 19th century plein-air paintings by deracinated northerners assembled

in Rome. Never intended for show, these present randomly cropped rooftops,

mundane views, gardens, and old stones which may or may not be ancient ruins.

Perhaps because they are so personal, they also feel remarkably modern.

Wet, verdant, and unapologetically English, Bramham’s outdoor pictures also recall

Constable, and, in certain cases, the quality of faithful scrutiny you find in the more

naturalistic works of Albrecht Dürer – not least the Great Piece of Turf (a favourite

of Bramham’s from youth). Sometimes, subject matter and painterly idiom reinforce

one another in surprising ways, lending the resulting image a satisfying philosophical

cohesion. Old Cooker (p. 16), for instance, shows the stove the Bramhams saved up

for to buy and which they consequently loved for many years. Bramham shows it

standing discarded at the centre of a pile of rubble and refuse outside. The painting

is so humble it could be refuse itself. But it sings. Small celandines, red campions,

and oxeyes chime in with unexpected descants in paintings nearby (see pp. 18, 34

and 46). They recall the wildness, the freshness in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring’,

“when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.”

The pine tree, meanwhile, towers over all (see pp. 17, 31, 35, 52 and 53), its

pink-tinged crusty bark and sun-struck branches holding the warmth of the sun,

and brushing (Hopkins again) “the descending blue”. The white stones (see pp.

13-15), cordoned off by a chestnut fence erected by Bramham (it reminded him of

the rustic fence in Dürer’s engraving, The Virgin Mary Crowned by Two Angels) were

painted during dark days after a diagnosis of lymphoma, followed, months later, by a

debilitating bone marrow transplant. It’s really an astonishing painting – charged with

a quality of objectivity that almost intimidates. The big charcoal (p. 11) and small

painted study (p. 19) of the same subject are no less engaging.

Indeed, Bramham’s drawings and his pastels are as substantial and assured as the

oils. In the drawings, modelling, texture, shine, and opacity are all achieved through

varieties of hatching and withholding that are never formulaic. The nuances of

colour introduced in the pastels – the coloured light, for instance, reflecting off the

wooden table onto the white bowl’s exterior in Melon and White Stones (p. 10) –

attest to an artist better than adept in this medium.

Bramham’s ambition, however, is tested most fully by the medium of paint. It is in

oils that you feel him wrestling with the sensuous substance of things – spongy and

yielding or hard and resistant, bright or dun. Unlike Freud, a connoisseur of flesh

tones and floorboards who was otherwise not much interested in colour, Bramham

is an instinctive colourist.

His feeling for bright bursts of local colour aligns him more with Manet than with the

sweaty corporeal realism of Courbet or Freud. He delights in the saturated yellows

of lemons, the gamut of greens that streak across the surface of a watermelon,

and in the varieties of red, orange and yellow that make up the skin of two slightly

stunted-looking peaches. He attends to shiny highlights and stark shadows alike. He

is not interested in prettifying anything. If he sees it, he puts it in, bright and clarion

or abject and dull. He wants to deny nothing.

Sebastian Smee

Boston, January 2016

10 11

above

Melon & White Stones 2014pastel on paper 13¾ × 10½ in / 35 × 27 cm

opposite

White Stones 2012charcoal on paper 40 × 28 in / 101.5 × 71 cm

12

above

Landscape with Rubble 2014-15charcoal & chalk on paper 32 × 22½ in / 81 × 57 cm

opposite & foldout

White Stones 2010-14oil on canvas 78 × 48 in / 198 × 122 cm

14

Detail

16 17

above

Old Cooker 2014oil on canvas 6 × 8½ in / 15 × 21.5 cm

left

Small Garden II 2013oil on canvas 8 × 6¼ in / 20.5 × 16 cm

right

Pine Tree III 2008oil on canvas 21¾ × 16 in / 55 × 40.5 cm

18 19

Small Celandines 2007-12oil on canvas 5½ × 6½ in / 14 × 16.5 cm

Small White Stone 2013oil on canvas 6½ × 7 in / 16.5 × 18 cm

20 21

Landscape with Rubble 2014-15charcoal & chalk on paper 26 × 20 in / 66 × 51 cm

Rubble 2015-16pastel on paper 23½ × 18½ in / 59.5 × 47 cm

22 23

Interior with Melon 2013oil on canvas 20 × 17½ in / 51 × 44.5 cm

24 25

above

Five Lemons 2015oil on canvas 12 × 14 in / 30.5 × 35.5 cm

opposite

Red Onions 2015-16oil on canvas 24 × 18 in / 61 × 46 cm

26

above

Still Life Drawing 2014charcoal on paper 23 × 17½ in / 58.5 × 44.5 cm

opposite & foldout

Still Life with Books 2014-15oil on canvas 60 × 39 in / 152.5 × 99 cm

28

Detail

30 31

above

Trees 2015charcoal on paper 14½ × 24½ in / 37 × 62 cm

opposite

Pine Tree II 2008oil on canvas 21¾ × 16 in / 55 × 40.5 cm

32 33

Painting Stuff 2014-16oil on canvas 33 × 25 in / 84 × 63.5 cm

34 35

above

Red Campions 2007-12oil on canvas 11½ × 9 in / 29 × 23 cm

opposite

Pine by a Garden – Summer Evening 2013-14oil on canvas 38½ × 28 in / 98 × 71 cm

36 37

above

Garlic 2011pastel on paper 8½ × 12¾ in / 21.5 × 32.5 cm

left

Duck Eggs 2014pastel on paper 14 ½×10 in / 37 × 25.5 cm

right

Studio with Red Chair 2013oil on canvas 10 × 8½ in / 25.5 × 21.5 cm

38

above

Study of Tree (Landscape with Open Gate) 2011-12charcoal & chalk on paper 26½ × 23 in / 67 × 58.5 cm

opposite & foldout

Landscape with Open Gate 2006-12oil on canvas 32 × 42 in / 81 × 106.5 cm

41

40

Detail

42 43

above

Small Studio (Bar Stool) 2013-14oil on canvas 8 × 12 in / 20.5 × 30.5 cm

opposite

Small Studio with Lemons 2013oil on canvas 14 × 15½ in / 35.5 × 39.5 cm

44 45

Studio with Melon 2013oil on canvas 12 × 10 in / 30.5 × 25.5 cm

Small Interior with Lilac Branch & Sleeping Dog 2014oil on canvas 9½ × 6 in / 24 × 15 cm

46 47

above

Oxeyes 2005oil on canvas 8 × 6 in / 20.5 × 15 cm

opposite

Small Farm, Elder Tree 2014oil on canvas 18 × 11 in / 45.5 × 28 cm

48

above

Two Lemons 2013-14oil on canvas 10 × 12½ in / 25.5 × 32 cm

opposite & foldout

Lemons I 2012oil on canvas 20 × 18¼ in / 51 × 46.5 cm

51

50

Detail

52 53

Pine Tree IV 2008oil on canvas 23 × 16 in / 58.5 × 40.5 cm

Pine Tree I 2008oil on canvas 22 × 16 in / 56 × 40.5 cm

54 55

above

Small Apples 2013oil on canvas 5¾ × 7¼ in / 14.5 × 18.5 cm

left

Green Apples 2013oil on canvas 10×8 in / 25.5× 20.5 cm

right

Small Interior with Coatstand 2011-12oil on canvas 18 × 20 in / 46 × 51 cm

56 57

above

Ruth 2013pastel on paper 9½ × 11¼ in / 24 × 28.5 cm

opposite

Still Life (Melon & Apples) 2013oil on canvas 16 × 12¼ in / 40.5 × 31 cm

58 59

Two Peaches 2012oil on canvas 6 × 10 in / 15 × 25.5 cm

Yellow Pear 2014 -15oil on canvas 6 × 8½ in / 15 × 22 cm

jonathan clark fine art18 park walk SW10 0AQ

london + 44 (0) 20 7351 3555

info@jcfa.co.uk www.jcfa.co.uk

Christopher Bramham 1952 Born in Bradford, Yorkshire1970 Bradford Art College1971–73 Kingston-upon-Thames Art School1975–86 Part-time teaching at art schools in London1988 First exhibition in London at The Fine Art Society1992–02 Five solo exhibitions at Marlborough Fine Art, London2001 Exhibited in The School of London and their Friends, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut2004 Solo exhibition at Browse & Darby, London2006 Exhibited in Drawing Inspiration: Contemporary British Drawing, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria2010 Paintings, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London2012 New Works, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London

Photography by David Edmonds, Douglas Atfield, & Justin Piperger

Frontispiece: Lucian Freud (1922-2011) Chris Bramham, 1989, oil on canvas

Private Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

Facing Introduction: Christopher Bramham, Still Life with Books, 2014-15

(detail), oil on canvas, 60 × 39 in / 152.5 × 99 cm (p. 27)

Designed by Graham Rees

Printed by Deckers Snoeck

Text © Sebastian Smee

Catalogue © Jonathan Clark Fine Art

Framing by Stewart Heslop

Published by Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London 2016

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Jonathan Clark Fine Art