If you step through the doors of Long & Ryle, that charming gallery round the corner from the Tate Britain in Pimlico, be prepared for something of a surprise. It seems, at first glance, to have got bigger.
They haven’t had the builders in, though; Long & Ryle are currently showing the latest exhibition of the painter John Monks, a modern master of perspective. Nearly filling the far wall is a huge oil painting – featuring the interior of the dining room of a grand mansion, dominated by a chandelier – which leads the eye to a backlit open doorway on the far side.
Unlike the neat gallery, the imaginary room is in a mess: more a case of derelict than faded grandeur, as if Miss Havisham had just nipped out to make a cup of tea. The painting draws you towards it: you feel like you could walk into it, then walk through it, treading ever so carefully. What lies beyond that mesmerising doorway?
This is the seventh exhibition the gallery has held of John Monks’ work, over a twenty-two-year period. While I’m there, the 70-year-old artist is on hand to discuss the ideas and techniques behind his latest collection, having driven me to Pimlico after a chat and a cup of coffee in his remarkable studio in Clapham Old Town.
Monks’ interiors and landscapes need to be seen in the flesh to appreciate the extent of their dark beauty. The interplay of tones and colours emanating from his wild, impasto brushstrokes; the complementary contrast of rough and smooth, dark and light; the crafty use of glazes to create that space-defying depth of field.
The paintings are unpeopled, which adds to their mystery: a grey building seen through a hollow of trees; a grand piano angrily strewn with a clutter of music scores; a four-poster bed shy of its mattress. There are paintings within the paintings, landscapes within the interiors. Move real close, and you realise each piece could be cut into sections, jumbled up, and presented as a series of abstract-impressionist works.
John’s home and studio is a secret world accessed through a tiny doorway within a black metal gate, in a former coach house that later saw life as a metalworkers’ workshop. I spend an hour there before my visit to Long & Ryle, meeting his wife Sue, and his elegant Saluki-Lurcher crossbreed, Corot, before being led up a rickety flight of wooden stairs into his studio. This space, naturally lit through a wall of windowpanes, but inky dark in the corners, is cluttered with the paraphernalia of his trade: scattered paint tubes, rusting tools, a huge, wooden stretcher filling much of the floor, awaiting its canvas. There are ghosts in the walls: I wouldn’t like to be locked in there overnight.
John tells me about his childhood in Canada, then Blackpool; his foundation year in his seaside hometown’s art school; his BA at Liverpool School of Art in the 70s, and his four years at the Royal College of Art, where he produced mainly abstract work, much influenced by the gritty Catalan abstractionist Antoni Tapies. He’s been living in his Clapham hidey-hole for forty years; for the last fifteen he and Sue have divided their time between London and a second home – and studio – in Picardy, France.
We’re sitting in the room, then, where John had his eureka moment, some time in the late seventies. One afternoon, weary of abstraction, he decided to portray a more accurate representation of a real object. He points to an old-fashioned, four-bladed metal fan on a shelf on a table behind me, his first subject, depicted many times. Other previously unloved items became the subjects of his focus, notably an old suitcase which he discovered in the street, still locked but its contents pilfered through a ripped hole in its side. He was given an exhibition in the newly opened Paton Gallery in still-shabby Covent Garden. The legendary curator at the New York Met, Bill Lieberman, paid a visit to the gallery and bought the painting of the suitcase for the museum’s collection.
On such strokes of fortune careers are made, and John Monks has been making a living from his art ever since, evolving and honing what has become a signature style, led by where the paint takes him rather than the shifting winds of fashion. He works out of his head, painting scenes from his memory, and his imagination. ‘I like to let the energy and the spirit in the materials have a say in things’, he says, citing Francis Bacon as a big influence, as well as the French Masters, and American experimentalists such as Robert Ryman and Cy Twombly. ‘I usually have a starting point, but I never know where I’m going to end up… when the paint starts to take over, you know you’re onto something… you need to create a puzzle before you solve it.’
His work is in major collections such as the Yale Centre for British Art, the CAS, the Arts Council of Great Britain, The V&A, Manchester City Art Galleries and Santa Barbara Museum, California, and in 2013 he was given a solo exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. You feel the gallery he is most fond of, though, is Long & Ryle, whose praises he sings to the skies, aware that such a long-term relationship is something to be cherished. This latest exhibition, entitled Palette, runs until January 10th. I’ll certainly be back before it ends.
