WEAVING LIGHT

Fred Sorrell: Long Tide, Parafin, London, 2020

At first the painting seems simple in construction – just four colours in a grid - but over time its effects are revealed to be complex and enduring and variable. Each time one contemplates it, it is a different painting. 

In the Long Tide series Fred Sorrell combines blue, mauve, pink and green in a grid structure on a white ground. Blue and mauve are paired in the vertical sections of the structure and green and pink in the horizontal. The pairings alternate in each successive section, and the coloured bars seem to pass both before and behind each other so that horizontal and vertical are, in effect, interwoven. This creates an oscillating and active visual field which is enlivened by the crossing points of the grid where all four colours are brought together, and where the eye cannot settle but instead moves restlessly as little visual flashes and flickers are produced. The title, Long Tide, leads me to think that perhaps Sorrell’s subject might be the view across an estuary or from a beach, where water is in constant movement, but his colours are unexpected. They don’t seem to correspond with nature. Yet in combination, and within Sorrell’s open grid, they produce a soft and gently rippling visual matrix. The experience of looking at Sorrell’s painting, in which these strange colours are in movement and seem to stain and merge and inhabit the white ground that surrounds them, and the optical flickers that are like dappled light, is perhaps akin to the experience of gazing out across a body of water.

Cezanne supposedly said, ‘When in doubt return to nature’. An older painter friend gave Fred Sorrell this advice too, telling him to limit himself to painting only his garden for a year. It was good advice and this focus helped Sorrell find his way out of an artistic impasse and allowed him to discover the real subject of his work; the complex and always-changing visual symphony that light creates in nature.

Cezanne also said, ‘Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.’ Sorrell’s paintings have their basis in the act of looking; a rigorous and extended study of the ever-shifting experience of light, colour and space in nature. However, Sorrell does not seek to describe this experience but rather to create a viewing experience that is suggestive, and which is analogous to the sensations experienced before nature. His abstract images are therefore not merely an objective record but also constitute an emotional response. They reflect the fluid dynamism of the act of looking.

However, while Fred Sorrell’s painting have their beginnings in nature, in his careful recording of visual experience, they are made in the studio. This is an important point. It is in the transition from observation to creation that a kind of visual alchemy is achieved. Something new is made.

When he speaks about the process of making his paintings Sorrell talks of accumulating  ‘information’, of making a ‘record’, and then of working with ‘structure’, ’weight and volume’ and ‘surface’ in a ‘methodical’ way. Nonetheless in the studio his notations, his records of colour and light, are transformed into something intuitive and magical; the objective becomes subjective. It is at this point, in his words, the paintings become ‘complex and elusive’. The wonder is how simple it appears.

December 2019