David Spooner at C.S.A.

Press, 22 September 1983, Page 12

David Spooner at C.S.A.

Paintings and drawings by David Spooner, at the Canterbury Society of Arts, until September 25. Reviewed by John Hurrell. Four oil paintings and 12 chalk and charcoal drawings are presented in the C.S.A. by an Englishman, David Spooner, who is teaching for a year at the School of Fine Arts, Ham.

Technically competent but unexciting, these works are based on landscape elements used in a form of English expressionism derived from the late 19505, and a style which is often associated with the Canterbury Art School. In spite of the present interest in “neo-impression-ism” overseas, it is hard for expressionism these days to avoid looking hackneyed and unimaginative. Of the four paintings presented in this exhibition, two appear sweet-toothed and seductively pretty, and two appear to be incongruously rawer in their colour

handling, with an earthier and tougher sense of tonal contrast. This indecisiveness is continued by the colours looking even more arbitrary when the paintings are compared with the black and white working drawings. Although many of the drawings, like the paintings, present rather predictable compositions of waterfalls and harbour scenes, some are redeemed by their vigorous and successful integration of chalk and charcoal to energise the paper’s surface. The agitated marks work particularly well in the mountain and peninsula drawings, and are an interesting contrast to some of the paintings, where the paint surface has not been worked in enough. Some drawings based on waterfalls suffer from the inert centrability of their composition, and despite their use of black, white and grey, could almost be based on tourist postcards. This somewhat dull exhibition appears to perpetrate

a form of orthodoxity in the Canterbury Art School context. The use of landscape forms as a starting off point for subjective interpretation, the romance of the gestural application of oil paint, and the lack of enterprise in paint handling and in manipulation of style, as a conceptual as well as a manual activity, illustrate well the urgency of problems of how to keep painting a meaningful practice in its current historical context, be it local, national or international.

The obvious ability displayed by this artist in the best of his drawings shows he would have been better to wait until the end of the year, for the chance of a more consolidated exhibition, and one with something fresh and definite to say.