Simon Callery - Painter's Forum 10.10.23

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Simon is not a figurative artist. Although he started as a sculptor and became a painter, his current practice is cross-disciplinary, melding archaeology with painting, but working with natural pigments, washed canvases and other cloths. It is not therefore easy to see the reference contexts for my own work.

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But Simon showed us some of his earlier pictures and I made quick sketches of those (See opposite).The two which struck me, repeated here, consisted of faint oil pastel lines on a lead white ground. The paintings had a calm earthiness about them. 

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The first painting consisted of horizontal lines, the second of vertical lines. The paintings were otherwise similar in colour, texture and feel. But the difference between the two, caused exclusively by the shift in line from horizontal to vertical, was striking.

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The "horizontal" picture carried with it a clear sense of perspective, of landscape and (perhaps not surprisingly, given the linear direction) of a horizon. The "vertical' picture carried no such sense and my scribbled note says that the "vertical lines removed the impression of depth." 

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As an artist focused on recognisable images I find that interesting. Is it simply that our eye is much more attuned to horizontal lines - flat surfaces with horizontal edges receding to a horizontal horizon, and that multiple vertical lines are much less evident in our environment, and therefore carry much less referential significance for us?

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I am reminded strongly of Bridget Riley's op art vertical line series. I don't recall many, if any, horizontal line images produced by her and I wonder, after Simon's talk, whether that was a deliberate part of her determination to escape from any hint of the figurative in her work. 

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Perhaps therefore the context, for me, lies simply in the significance of, and the impact made on me by, the horizontal work and its juxtaposition with a work (the vertical) which is more alien to my practice.