Different Strokes

WHAT if?” is the question that arises on viewing Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language, an exhibition of the artist’s prints and paintings at Henley’s Bohun Gallery. The works on display, which represent the trajectory of a career spanning 1930s-1980s, are hung chronologically, lending a curious sense of foresight to the spectator.

We see Trevelyan’s immersion in surrealism in the 1930s evolving into a more individual style in later decades. On regarding this abundantly varied yet cohesive body of work, we are compelled to reflect, aware of the many different routes which this artist might have taken, notwithstanding ‘events’.

Possessing no formal art training, it is no wonder that Trevelyan had a sponge-like capacity to absorb a range of influences and techniques. The most successful work in the exhibition from this early period is, for me, a collage, Landscape with Church and Telegraph Pole (1937).

At first it appears to us as a Paul Nash-esque village-scape, innocently composed. But there seems to be a mercurial instability to the image; the blue rooftop of a small building in the corner is oddly sky-like and seemingly cloudy, suddenly more like Magritte than Nash.

The choice of large-print newspaper on a cutting in the foreground again gives the picture a self-reflexive slant. The only collage work in the show, we wonder whether Trevelyan might fruitfully have pursued this line of inquiry in more depth, had it not been for the interruption of the war and a nervous breakdown.

In the early 1960s Trevelyan became ill with meningitis and it became almost impossible for him to paint in the aftermath, his son Philip Trevelyan explained to me.

He turned more and more to printmaking as a result but with a radically pared-down style, borne out of necessity but resulting in some of the artist’s best pieces.

Trevelyan’s work from this time is marked with bold, dark edges and geometric blocks of form. In Hippos (1966), an etching and aquatint, a huge, serene hippo head is blasted with a physical chunk of sun; the effect is that of stained glass.

Several other hippos loiter submerged in the background, their obstinate orange ears poking out of the water. Subversive animals appear in many of Trevelyan’s works; in Paddle Steamer (1986), a late painting in which there is an atmosphere of stark, natural light (achieved through using a white ground), a cat with petrifying yellow eyes dares us to meet its gaze.

Trevelyan’s best work is generally his prints rather than his paintings; perhaps this is because printmaking is an inherently constructive medium, worked out of layers.

Avenue of the Americas (1982) is a print concerning weighty traffic and skyscrapers; detail is reduced to a minimum, though Philip Trevelyan assured me that his father always accounted for ‘the right number of windows’.

And in Benares (1968), a print from the ‘India suite’, a drifting and almost abstract image is suddenly drawn into focus through the rendition of a bridge, with a real sense of its reconstructed status through representation.

If Trevelyan had not endured – indeed, survived – the war, or suffered from poor health, who knows what different direction his work might have taken? His best work emerged from these set-backs, and he does not seem to have been one for wallowing; rather unlike his recalcitrant hippos.

Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language is at Bohun Gallery in Reading Road, Henley, from April 23-June 1. The gallery is open Tuesdays to Saturdays 10am- pm.
Call 01491 576 228 or visit bohungallery.co.uk