Motifs and ideas in the work of Basil Beattie

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Alexander Adams reports from a London show by a fine British artist

The James Hyman Gallery in London is presenting a selection of work by one of Britain’s most accomplished painters, Basil Beattie. ‘Basil Beattie: Onward and Upward’(until 21 January), includes a selection of paintings from 1986 to 2011. Beattie often deals with single motifs (ziggurats, tunnels, ladders) and ideas (stacking and compartmentalizing) in particular periods and this display includes examples of many different subjects. This exhibition coincides with the publication of the bookBasil Beattie: Taking Steps. Large Works 1986–2009, which surveys Beattie’s work since a decisive change in his style.

Born in 1935, Beattie studied at the Royal Academy Schools 1957–9 at a point when painterly abstraction seemed more progressive than the aridity of the pre-war Euston Road School, post-war Neo-Romanticism or the realism of the Kitchen Sink School. Beattie has admitted to being greatly influenced by the Tate’s 1959 exhibition of Abstract Expressionists, which largely introduced Pollock, Still, Newman and Kline to British artists. Initially, Beattie’s work was an extension of the branch of Abstract Expressionism known as Color Field painting, where he stained the canvas, applying colour without using brushes. Then in his ‘Circus’ series definite forms started interacting.

It wasn’t until 1986, when Beattie reintroduced recognizable pictorial devices into his pictures, that he achieved the style for which he is best known and which will be his most lasting contribution to painting. In large canvases he painted ladders, tunnels, steps, towers, room corners and railway lines (along with more elementary designs such as squares, spirals and so forth). All this was painted in sombre earth colours and reds along with black and white, cleansing his paintings of the primary and secondary colours he used before. The profusion of signs acts like a diary of moral self-discovery, the emptying of a cupboard of dreams and the jottings of a man under psychological analysis. The business of ‘performing art’ for an audience seemed banished as Beattie began to examine the building blocks of his own character and the potential of painting as metaphorical language.

What was new about Beattie’s painting post-1985 was the placing of interrogation and doubt at the centre of his art. How real are the forms he described? Are viewers supposed to take these ziggurats as descriptions of some forms that exist outside the paintings (in the artist’s imagination or in another of his paintings or even in reality) or simply the way the painted structure resolved itself on the day of painting? How real are these forms to the painter? Viewers have to address themselves: how real is this form to me? How important is it for me to understand the story or situation Beattie describes? How closely does this metaphor describe something in my own life or my general outlook?

In this phase of Beattie’s art, legibility of sign and form is matched by a new legibility of construction. Whereas the stained canvases were alchemical – more events than manmade forms – the later work is easily comprehensible. There are relatively few stages in the construction of each painting and each is readable. If one had the inclination, then an ordinary viewer could decipher the order in which every element – even each brush mark – was applied.

Beattie never covers his tracks or uses painterly subterfuge to conceal how his paintings came into being. Changes in Beattie’s works are where he has changed his mind or modified one element in the light of a subsequent stage of painting – it is never to hide a mistake or indiscretion. For example, whenever Beattie paints a design in a dark paint then works over it in a lighter paint he allows the first layer to show as a dark fringe. There is plenty of doubt, consideration and revision but no shame, embarrassment or denial.

Thoughts About Legend (1986) is like sketchbook pages pinned to a studio wall, thoughts, contradictions and diversions about simple forms subject to gravity. The browns and beiges are leavened by small slashes of blue and orange and the grid structure is unified by a sketchy diagram drawn over the centre of the canvas, making a picture of pictures. Five Steps to Nowhere (2003) has thick steps balanced precariously and seen in profile. The fact that the uppermost is hanging in air unattached to anything (not even the edge of the canvas) gives the painting a feeling of irresolution and instability.

Many of the paintings seem to deal with states of emotional tension and anxiety that convey themselves to viewers very directly. Three medium and large-size paintings come from the ‘Janus’ series (begun in 2007), in which three (or rarely four) stacked arched segments show rudimentary landscapes, horizons and distant chimneys. Diminishing railway lines and roads offer to move viewers to the limits of these flat terrains without promising any definite destination. Beattie has spoken of these as ways of looking back on the past the way one looks into a car’s rear-view mirror.

Small works in mixed media on paper provide a foil to the enveloping large canvases. They stay close in the proportion of marks to surface area of the canvases. The less successful ones are invariably those that introduce strong colours, which tend to distract. Beattie’s best graphics are his monochrome drawings in charcoal, graphite or ink wash and his colour screenprints, none of which are on show here. Three small canvases in the office area of the gallery bring Beattie’s ideas down to domestic scale. The large size of paintings is part of the excitement of the viewing experience (something Beattie learnt from Abstract Expressionism). Unlike many large paintings, Beattie’s paintings never intimidate, never approach bombastic blustering and are always richly human in emotional pitch and lush in physicality. They are like dry-stone walls: textured, hardy, provisional and never monolithic. The roughly hewn forms seem to be both only roughly what the painter’s intends and exactly what he intends.

This exhibition and the new book are excellent introductions to one of Britain’s most exciting painters.