Thomas Puttfarken
James Dodds
has changed course a few times during his professional career. Having
trained as a shipwright from the age of fifteen, he enrolled at art school,
first at Colchester, then Chelsea, as a student of painting. Having made
the transition, probably not an easy one, from building boats to painting
pictures, he worked his way into largescale abstract compositions. In
1981 he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art and changed
from abstraction to figuration. If we believe his own account, this was
because he thought figurative painting was what was expected at the Royal
College. This may well have been so, yet his subsequent development suggests
that it is a less than satisfactory explanation. We can only speculate
on a fuller one. A salient feature seems to be that when James changes
course, he does not simply give up one position and move on to a new one.
He carries essential and vital aspects of the earlier over into the new
position. Changing course does not deny an underlying sense of continuity
and identity. James' earlier experience as a shipwright, of boats, of
the sea, of maritime tales and tall stories, of the wide world as seen
from Maldon, had not been abandoned and forgotten when he became an artist.
It continued to occupy a major place in his imagination. And its richness
of imagery, of myth and magic, of associations with poetry and history,
its inherent symbolic and metaphoric power, was probably simply too much
and too strong to be confined within the alluring yet ultimately vague
expressiveness of abstract art.
An exhibition of Max Beckmann's triptychs at the Whitechapel Gallery seems
to have acted as a catalyst, and the influence of Beckmann is openly acknowledged
in many of James' works of the '80s. It was not only the format of the
triptych itself with its potential for narrative and compositional complexity
that attracted the young artist, but also Beckmann's combination of the
mythical with the subconscious, the faraway with the contemporary, and,
perhaps above all, the powerful expressiveness with which the German painter
forced his grand, multilayered and often brutal phantasies into a tripartite
framework reminiscent of medieaval altarpieces, made by craftsmen rather
than by refined aesthetes. An art which, for the older painter, was the
culmination of a life which had seen devastating service as a paramedic
in the Great War, the debaucheries of Berlin during the Weimar Republic,
and prosecution and exile under the Nazis, now provided a mould for James'
own youthful 'Sturm und Drang', his protracted and stormy transformation
from a swearing shipwright, a sweating carpenter, to the inspired and
visionary painter that he is today.
That was an entirely legitimate and appropriate use of an earlier art.
That is what older masters are there for: to help younger ones to give
shape and form to their inner turmoil and to open ways forward to articulate
their own concerns. When James, a little later, gave visual expression
to the battle within himself, in his picture of a "Carpenter Wrestling
with an Angel", he again employed the art of the distant and not
so distant past. The motif is from Delacroix' or Rembrandt's version of
an Old Testament subject, of "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel",
a parable of the difficulties of human faith. If this was anything to
go by, we would know the outcome: after a long struggle, lasting all night,
the angel wins. In the case of James' picture, I am not so sure. The carpenter
is a cubist figure, made from solidly carved, planed and fitted surfaces.
The angel consists of curves sweeping down from above in elegant lines
as if designed by Giotto or Fra Angelico. Perhaps one should not wish
for a winner to emerge; the shipwright's desire to make and to fit together
hard objects must be accommodated with the evasive yet persistent musings
and inspirations from above. That is what art is made of.
As James'
views of his own art became clearer, the influence of Beckmann gave way
to that of others. The densely filled compositions with multilayered symbols,
metaphors, allegories etc., perhaps indicative of a youthful 'horror vacui',
gave way to a monumental vision which accommodated both the 'making' of
a figure, an object, a picture, and the forces of inspiration, phantasy
and wit. Again, earlier artists offered a hand in this, the 'classical'
Picasso of the twenties and thirties, or Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist.
The result are beautiful images of rounded, swelling forms, monumental
in the way in which they dominate over the flat surface and the limited
boundary of the picture. they fill the frame with little if any background,
and whether they are boats, sailors or voluptuous females reclining on
a beach, their protruding and receding outlines, like Hogarth's line of
beauty, engage our view in a "wanton chase" around their large,
attractive bodies.
These bodies often are still not all they seem to be; their titles refer
to other layers of meaning, ironic, sardonic or just witty: "A Foolish
Boatman", carrying the vessel that should carry him, is obviously
autobiographical; "Three Men and a New Boat" may seem to celebrate
the shipwright's trade in beautifully simple and monumental forms, yet
as the title implies, it also hints at adventures to come and, maybe,
another book to be written.
In all these pictures the sea is never far away, a lifelong friend, danger
and temptation. Sailors are Odysseus or an Old Mariner "surprised"
by a Sirenlike Greek Goddess. Or they are young men on safe ground contemplating
maps of the end of the world in "Journeys Never Made". Whether
they are telling tall stories or dreaming of travels beyond their reach,
we do not know. James invents narratives as he composes his pictures.
It concentrates his mind and gives a very personal coherence to his thoughts.
Yet that does not mean that in looking at his pictures we have to guess
what the artist's private thoughts might have been. For him a painting
may have been a way of working out a personal problem, conscious or not.
For us there is, in the first instance, enough pure visual delight in
the pictures to enjoy, and as we do so we may find that our own mind begins
to construct its own narratives, sometimes around basic and familiar human
activities, like a mother breastfeeding her child, or a gardener planting
or protecting young seedlings. Such scenes of caring are depicted in the
simplest possible forms, with grand sweeping lines both defining the figures
and protecting, at their centre, the small and vulnerable creatures. At
other times the stories are more violent, of men fighting; or bizarre,
of a detective pursued by his own raincoats. Here, memories of comicstrips
or films come to the fore, both dark and ironic. And then, again, there
may be literary associations, of poems and adages, of fairytales and local
stories of wild men.
The visual strength of James' pictures is sufficient to allow us to pursue
such narratives without becoming anecdotal. His style of drawing and painting
is generous, guided by a clear perception of an object's or figure's overall
shape and form, to which details have to yield or become subservient.
It is a style naturally suited to largescale imagery, even to monumental
wallpainting, and is the more remarkable as we consider that the other
branch of imagery in which James has established himself with equal authority
is that of smallscale and highly detailed printmaking. This does not mean
that he does not vary his style of painting for specific purposes. The
struggle between carpenter and angel is also one between different styles
of depicton, and the sirenlike Goddess is positively precious in her seductive
allure. James' latest works are relatively small pictures of simple, individual
objects, taken out of their — invariably — maritime context
and presented enlarged, as monumental objects in front of a plain ground.
Deprived of their familiar environment and their normal service function,
they open themselves up to new interpretations, perhaps not sufficiently
sharp and precise to be called symbolic or allegorical, but certainly
suggestive and associative. A heartshaped shackle in monumental isolation
remains, in the first instance, just that, and as such it is beautifully
and lovingly depicted. Yet its still recognizeable function of somehow
holding things together, of keeping them tight, acquires a more specific
association by the fact that its distinctive shape is no longer seen as
being determined by its practical function. Looking like a heart is now
its new pictoral function, and the small and useful object, familiar to
sailors, becomes — through enlargement and isolation — a general
visual metaphor of human love and trust. It may take a shipwright to understand
fully the functional purpose of these objects and to depict them accurately
and quite realistically, but it requires the eye and the mind of the artist
to detect, and to make apparent in the depiction, shapes that evoke associations
and feelings of a general human concern.
Thomas Puttfarken 1999
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
