Dennis Creffield
Painter and art teacher who toured England in a camper van drawing cathedrals in charcoal
DENNIS CREFFIELD, the artist, who has died aged 87, was best known for his dramatic and expressive series of charcoal drawings of the medieval English cathedrals, commissioned in 1987 by the Arts Council; shown in 1988 at a magnificent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and subsequently on tour, they were works which, in the words of one reviewer, challenged his reputation as “one of England’s closely guarded secrets”.
The phrase was that of RB Kitaj, one of many fellow artists who admired Creffield’s work, even when he was little-known to the wider public. In 2005, however, a retrospective of his work held at Flowers East gallery in Shoreditch revealed an artist of catholic interests and gifts.
As well as architectural drawings (which included not only cathedrals but castles, great houses, London buildings), he depicted people – from murkily erotic paintings of figures coupling, to raw charcoal drawings of black-eyed, feral babies, and theatrical portraits of the living as well as the dead (Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Mozart, Nijinsky as Petrushka). He also created visionary works, including a series in response to William Blake’s poem Jerusalem and improvisations on Shakespeare’s and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – to say nothing of biblical scenes, landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes.
Creffield had studied under the English expressionist David Bomberg, becoming inspired by his mentor’s belief that art should aim for an intense engagement with its subject – what Bomberg called “the search for the spirit in the mass”. “For me,” Creffield told The Sunday Telegraph’s arts correspondent Martin Gayford in 1993, “a drawing has to have the stink, the savour, the touch, the feel of the thing itself. It’s got to be alive. This is what I got from working with Bomberg.”
This belief was never more effectively realised than in his exuberant but closely studied drawings of English cathedrals – buildings which Creffield, a convert to Roman Catholicism, regarded not as picturesque remnants of an irrelevant past, but as “audacious and living lessons” designed for a “meaningful purpose”. He was not, he admitted, interested in ruins; when he was, somewhat reluctantly, persuaded by the National Trust to draw Fountains Abbey, the result emphasised the sturdy survival of the abbey, rather than its romantic decay.
Gayford noted that, far from being soothingly nostalgic, Creffield’s cathedrals were “as unsentimentally tough as spacerockets, all sinewy vaulting and rock faces of masonry”, and the project, which Creffield described as a “pilgrimage of love”, executed over a year while the artist was living in a camper van and moving from one place of worship to another, was hailed by Peter Fuller as “one of the most significant achievements of English draughtsmanship, indeed of English art, since the war”.
Dennis Creffield was born in south London on January 1 1931. His father was a mechanic, his mother a servant. He attended Colfe’s School before following the advice of his friend Cliff Holden and joining Bomberg’s class at the Borough Polytechnic, aged 16. He became a member of the Borough Group, who promoted Bomberg’s work and principles.
From 1957 to 1961 Creffield studied at the Slade, where he won the Tonks Prize for Life Drawing and the Steer Medal for Landscape Painting. In 1961 he was featured in an Arts Council national touring show, Six Young Painters.
Though he was adept in oils, Creffield became best known for his drawings in charcoal. “When you draw,” he explained, “you slow down – your body catches up with you – and a physical communion begins. It’s as different in kind from ordinary seeing as a wave is from an embrace.”
In 1964, on the recommendation of the art critic Herbert Read, he became the Gregory Fellow in Art at the University of Leeds, and in his two years there he began teaching, both at the university and at Leeds College of Art. From there he moved to Brighton to teach at the Polytechnic, taking up residence in a third-floor flat overlooking the sea.
“Enraptured by the light and movement” after the “inland airlessness” of London and Leeds, Creffield found a new guiding spirit in JMW Turner. Like Turner, Creffield painted Brighton Pier, and he executed a series of paintings and drawings of Petworth – a response to the house, the landscape and to Turner’s vision. Turner, too, had depicted some, though not all, of the English cathedrals.
Other commissions followed, including French cathedrals; and for the National Trust he painted the “atomic pagodas” of Suffolk at Orford Ness. Creffield’s first marriage, to Diane “Dilly” Clutterbuck, with whom he had seven children, broke down. He had five more children by other women. But for the last 20 years he found happiness with Teresa Roche, whom he married last year. She survives him as do four sons and seven daughters. Another daughter predeceased him.
Dennis Creffield, born January 1 1931, died June 26 2018