Leslie Marr
Chuggaton Devon, 1965
Oil on canvas
25.5 x 30 cm
10 1/8 x 11 3/4 in
10 1/8 x 11 3/4 in
The eventful year of 1963 included Marr relocating to a small cottage at Higher
Chuggaton, near Barnstaple, in North Devon. It was a joint decision with Lynn; both of
them had been living in London for some time and needed change. The fresh landscape
proved fruitful for Marr, who set about recording his responses to the stark, sweeping
views from the cottage over the Devon countryside, beginning a period during which
some of his best mature work was produced.
Sitting at the heart of this period, Chuggaton, Devon (1965) takes a view from the cottage
at sunset, the distant horizon line marked out by the day’s last burnished bronze light
glowing through layers of cloud. Thick, fluid impasto carries motion across the canvas,
flowing between Marr’s perception of natural phenomena. ‘Landscape to me is a
living thing,’ he later declared, ‘full of mysterious energies’. The unsettling convulsive
quality of this diminutive but potently energetic work associates it with Soutine’s early
landscapes at Céret, which Marr had seen at the Tate Gallery two years previously. The introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue, written by David Sylvester with
whom Marr was familiar, aided his thinking around landscape and his shared project with
Soutine. Sylvester quoted lines from D.H. Lawrence’s description of a Cézanne scene: ‘It
has its own weird anima… it changes like a living animal under our gaze’.56 According to
Marr, Lawrence’s statement ‘provides a clue to what Bomberg actually meant by spirit in
the mass’ and yet Marr’s subjective interpretation and assimilation of these influences is
unique.
In his essay, Sylvester wrote of how ‘the animation, and this alone,
is enough to generate the metaphors, the allusions, the ambiguities
of reference, in this, or any, Soutine. Forms with metamorphic
implications are the stock-in-trade of modern art.’ This sense of
metamorphosis, landscape shifting or flowers fighting back against our
sight, is what is most remarkable and original in Marr’s work after his
exposure to Soutine. Under his gaze, nature’s animating energies are
released. The spirit he discovers becomes a metamorphic multiplicity,
demanding we repeatedly question the assumptions with which we
approach the work and the sources and influences that shape it. Thus,
Marr’s subject becomes autonomous, liberated from the analytic
authority Bomberg used to control his motif. Wild, Dionysian, abandon
is characteristic to both artists, but the centrifugal energy released
in Marr’s landscapes and still lifes of the mid-sixties demands a more
expansive frame of reference than that of Bomberg and the Borough
philosophy, or of Soutine only.
Exhibitions
2006, London, Piano Nobile, Leslie Marr: Into the 21st Century2007, Newcastle, Northumbria University Gallery, Leslie Marr Retrospective, November-December