Truth and illusion
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Words by Mercedes Smith
Exploring Michael Porter’s unique perspective on painting the landscape.
Michael Porter’s work centres on extraordinary interpretations of the natural world. I have heard him described as an Abstract artist by people who misinterpret the complexity of his work, but nothing could be further from the truth. “I would never call myself an Abstract painter,” Michael tells me when we meet at his quayside studio in the depths of a summer sea mist. “I am a painter who works from reality. I do not make photographic representations of a place, I make paintings that express that place, but I always begin with something specific from the landscape.”
Born in 1948 in the rugged and beautiful landscape of Derbyshire, Michael studied at Nottingham College of Art, Derby College of Art, and Chelsea School of Art in London. He became a Fellow of Gloucestershire College of Art in 1973 and has received awards including the National Gallery Artist-in-Residence Award, the London University Lorne Award and the RWA Odin Award, alongside an Honorary Doctorate from Derby University, and an Honorary Fellowship of University College Falmouth. Now aged 78, he is respected as a Master painter and has worked at his studio in the industrial heart of Newlyn for nearly thirty years.
I would describe his paintings as a balance of both truth and illusion, based on his extraordinary technical skill and his experimental approach to image making. The hyper-realist, seemingly three-dimensional parts of his work are mesmerizing, while different areas of the composition reach deep into otherworldly spaces. His acclaimed public show at The Newlyn Exchange in 2008, titled The Passage of Time, neatly captioned the sense that Michael’s paintings also express both the ‘now’ and the ‘always’ of nature, taking us from the immediacy of his observations to the timelessness of the natural world. Each artwork begins with the overlooked minutiae of the landscape, from a single pebble embedded in the ground, or a leaf drifting across a body of water, to a tangle of roots and branches. In his latest solo exhibition, Michael presents paintings inspired by his explorations of the Cornish coast and countryside, including large scale canvases and a series of smaller works.
Throughout his career, his engagement with the landscape has drawn only on locations that are familiar to him: Michael has made many collections that respond to woodland environments, particularly the forests of his native Derbyshire; these days he spends his time walking Cornwall’s moors and coast path, taking photographs and collecting natural objects as source material for his paintings. “I like the idea of taking something ordinary and showing people that if you look closely, there is beauty in it,” he says. “I know people don’t like the idea of beauty in art these days, but beauty can be found in different things and in many ways. Think of a Francis Bacon painting. It is raw and challenging work, but there is beauty in it.”
Seeing Michael’s work in the studio feels very different to viewing it in a gallery setting, where his deep palette and detailed imagery are contrasted by crisp white walls. Here, his paintings and photographs are more intimately set amongst the ephemera that inspires them – the strands of seaweed, stones and sea shells that have caught his eye. As we browse an endless array of objects and artworks, Michael talks to me about the things that influence him and fill his working day. He loves poetry, and quotes Modernist painter and poet Marsden Hartley, who wrote the verse ‘a shell sitting still’. “I love that phrase,” he tells me. “I use it a lot as a title in my work.”
Each day in the studio Michael paints and draws inspiration from the visual world, the written word, and his varied taste in music. “I was listening to Bruce Springsteen yesterday” he laughs, “but tomorrow it will be opera.” On the studio wall the phrase ‘the deepest sadness with the greatest optimism’ is written in charcoal: it defines his love for the work of English Contralto Kathleen Ferrier. “Do you know her music?” he asks me. “I find it so moving”. This daily engagement with painting, music and literature fulfils most people’s perception of the idyllic life of an artist. “I know I’m lucky,” says Michael, “my mother used to say I wasn’t born rich, I was born lucky, but I don’t like the idea of enjoyment in painting, because painting is work. A friend of mine is a writer, and when you read his books the words just flow – and that’s what you are supposed to see. What you don’t see is all the screwed-up bits of paper on the floor, and that’s exactly what creativity is like.”
Creativity, for Michael, begins with a single object, often placed on top of a flat canvas and painted directly from life. “I am always looking for the simplest way to interpret the thing I’m looking at,” he says, “a stone for example, that says something to me in the way the light shapes it. Sometimes I use photographs of stones: I will make prints in my darkroom and then paint onto those, so you don’t see the photo anymore, but you see through to it. There are layers and layers to all my work, because layering reflects the actuality of being in nature. When you walk through a landscape you see one thing beyond another thing, and another beyond that. That’s what my paintings are about.” Michael builds those layers using different materials and gives them real power, letting acrylic, watercolour and wet oil paint merge so they repel each other before finding their own balance. “The effects are accidental to an extent, but you get to know what’s going to happen” he says. “I’ve been experimenting with these techniques for a long time and getting it wrong again and again before I got it right.”
That unique pairing of precise figuration and free flowing materials means that a trompe l’oeil painting of a pebble, or an abandoned bird’s nest, might be set against complex marks that could be interpreted as woodland surfaces, or as abstracted renditions of those things. “But there is always something that draws me back to the figurative image I was painting,” says Michael.
That passion for draftsmanship is evident in both his huge paintings and his smaller works on paper. “I love painting fine detail, and I make lots of small paintings because I find it meditative. I can still get absorbed in making a large work of art, but on a smaller scale I can focus on the really tiny details.” Often, Michael takes three or four months to complete a single painting. “But I don’t care about time,” he says, “a painting takes as long as it takes. I am not trying to do something magnificent; I am doing something simple. I think of myself as an ordinary bloke who happens to paint. We all look at the world differently and have something to say about it. All I am trying to do is to share the things I think are interesting. The objects that I find in a place, that define a place, that’s what fascinates me - those things, together with my memory of a place gathered over many years. If I can communicate a little of that in my work, I call that success.”
See Michael Porter’s Solo Exhibition, Coast & Country, from 22nd August to 16th September at Whitewater Contemporary Gallery, The Parade, Polzeath, PL27 6SR and at wwcg.co.uk
