Stark, dark and stormy
Robert Creighton’s landscapes reduce nature to its simplest form
From Hamilton’s Macassa Bay to Scotland, and “from relatively recently to a lifetime ago,” Robert Creighton’s landscapes range widely in place and time.
His newest landscapes and a few interiors are on show in A Sense of Place, a stunning exhibition at Gallery on the Bay. All are works on paper, most of them prints.
Creighton, 68, has been creating and exhibiting for more than 40 years. A graduate of McMaster University and the prestigious Edinburgh College of Art, he has tackled images of humans and animals.
He’s made a name for himself as a printmaker who excels in a variety of techniques. For most of the prints in this exhibition, he works in intaglio; that is, he incises his image as lines into the surface of a metal plate. The inked image is then transferred onto thin paper fused to a heavier sheet. This technique is called chine collé.
At times moody and stormy, Creighton’s landscapes carefully balance the representation of a particular place with an almost stark arrangement of line and form.
In “Winter Macassa Bay 2,” for instance, clusters of tiny lines, long and short, suggest grasses without crossing over completely into representation.
“All the pieces are from drawings that were made in situ, with a dose of reflective impression involved,” Creighton tells me. “Any landscape piece I have ever undertaken is filtered through my immediate impression, or feeling, for the location.”
In “The Beverly,” the view is wonderfully stark and simplified.
“I encountered that particular scene on an early morning when everything was defined by a flat light seeming to create a mirror of sky, water and time,” he explains.
A thin horizontal divides the composition almost in half. The top consists of a narrow and bumpy strip of land, home to the thinnest of bare trees, against a shimmery, metallic-looking sky. The lower layer gives us the reflection.
The lines of the trees are complemented by the lines of the paper.
“Storm at Ferryland,” a lithograph, offers more detail. Creighton contains his scene in a circular tondo format. Once again, he divides the view almost in half. But unlike the mirror imagery of the land in “The Beverly,” this division accentuates the differences between the top and bottom layers, drawing attention to the fluid cloud shapes in the sky and the driftwood at the bottom.
“On one of our visits to Newfoundland, I was working at the Saint Michael’s Workshop in St. John’s and I’d gone down the coast to Ferryland, when a brief but intense rain storm came through. Other than being totally drenched, I had found an odd piece of driftwood on the shore.”
Creighton says he then went back to Saint Michael’s and made the lithograph “within the hour.”
“Fortress 3” places us in the foreground of an ambiguous arched interior. The absence of human figures takes away our sense of scale, increasing our unease.
Creighton calls this an homage to Giovanni Piranesi, an 18th-century Italian artist well known for his views of fantastical and foreboding interiors. Creighton’s interiors are based, however, on Fort Knox, a 19th-century coastal fortification in Maine.
“I came across this site with my family many years ago,” he says. “I returned to it for years, intrigued by the light and the monumental architecture of the place.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com