The Symbolist art of Keith Winnett

Born in Coventry in 1931, Keith Winnett was educated at King Henry VIII School and studied painting at Coventry College of Art. On receiving his diploma he was immediately appointed to the staff of the college and thereafter had a long and distinguished teaching career, eventually becoming Principal Lecturer in charge of the Painting School at Lanchester Polytechnic. He retired in 1983 and since then has only exhibited once at the University of Warwick in 2007. Throughout that time he has produced an extraordinary, complex and dense body of work which has been gestating in some cases for nearly forty years. It is the product of a somewhat reclusive nature and few people have had the privilege of seeing his work. Most of it was produced in a studio, like an alchemist’s laboratory, in a partitioned area of his living room in his house in Allesley village near Coventry. It is a neat, modern house which ill prepares you for the cultural Aladdin’s cave you enter. Inside it is like the Soane Museum full of replicas from the British Museum, architectural models and exquisite artefacts from many cultures. The house is furnished with modern design classics and the walls in every room are lined from floor to ceiling with paintings, books, LPs, CDs and DVDs — all containing and revealing the best of the visual arts, literature, music, drama and philosophy.

It is this environment of high culture that provides the context for his painting and it came as no surprise in a recent interview to hear Keith passionately defending his belief in the western artistic canon — something that sets him at odds with the current climate of cultural relativism. His work is intensely informed by the canon and one of the joys of encountering this body of work is its evocation of so many artistic traditions and associations woven into a number of highly personal and deeply felt paintings. One sees the residue, both directly and indirectly, of so many artists. First and foremost there is Poussin who provides the compositional and conceptual framework for the content of much of this work. It is the Poussinesque setting that makes possible his intricate narratives, symbolism and mythology, prompted and nourished by works from the past. For example, a figure from Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ provides the model for a recurring bather motif in several works, as does Massacio’s Adam and Eve. Also from Italian art there is the more obvious reference to eighteenth-century Venetian painting in his extraordinary picture of Santa Maria della Salute.

Santa Maria della Salute

This picture, painted as a personal memento of numerous visits to Venice, provides one striking aspect of the architectural and topographical content of his work. Some paintings are purely topographical, while others feature topography in the background and details, evoking a more northern spirit of painting. The flavour may be Flemish or Dutch, but the locations are observed and experienced nearer home in Coventry, Allesley village, Hatton and villages in Oxfordshire. He admires the northern spirituality of Dirk Bouts, Memling, the Van Eycks and Rembrandt, and it is one of Rembrandt’s etchings that provides the triple-tree feature which occurs in a number of his landscapes. More recently the northern sensibility has been enriched by the appearance of Bosch-like grotesques crawling into the landscape, and creatures in the undergrowth, like the grasshopper and toad in

Foreshore		Detail (bottom left)

 

Foreshore, remind us of Richard Dadd (although they are inspired by the poetry of Tennyson and Marianne Moore). Despite the foreign undertones, Keith Winnett is very conscious of his Englishness and affirms the Romantic tradition in his work, acknowledging the influence of Milton, Blake, Palmer and Pre-Raphaelitism on his vision. He claims unequivocally to be a Romantic painter.

References from the visual arts abound, but more to the point is the sense of time, place and experience, as well as the numerous literary, poetic, philosophical and musical associations. Keith’s passion for literature and philosophy began with his reading of Dante and T.S. Elliot during years of convalescence from tuberculosis in a sanatorium at Hertford Hill near Warwick. 1950s sanatoriums were bleak institutions and his physical suffering was exacerbated by observing the decline and death of fellow patients. Something of this experience comes out in his images of emaciated figures and memories of Hertford Hill with its grim hospital building, canal, lock gates and distant views of St Mary’s church in Warwick. Another Victorian building that frequently appears is the house and school at Middle Barton in Oxfordshire where he recalls happier childhood memories of summers spent with his aunt who was the village headmistress. A keen

School House

Event Horizon

reader of Proust, Keith evokes Proustian childhood experiences of long summers, country walks, excursions to Oxford and the nurturing influence of the Ashmolean Museum. The nearby village of Great Tew also yields a persistent architectural image in his work in the form of a neo-classical tomb observed in the local churchyard. In similar elegiac and more angst-ridden moods are images inspired by the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Geoffrey Hill, and T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. These, combined with memories of war, the Coventry blitz, shattered buildings, bomb sites and a derelict 1914-18 ammunition dump, account for the imagery of concrete bunkers, no man’s land, distant watch towers, the gates of Auschwitz and touches of Turneresque sublime in the fiery skies and black suns. In a more serene mood, pleasanter memories of Venice are recaptured in pictures featuring a lagoon with a burning boat and distant views of Torcello.

Detail of Event Horizon

His confinement in the sanatorium may also have subconsciously prompted the series of drawings based on Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Perhaps more than the poetry itself, Keith identifies with Pound’s situation at the end of the war when he was caged in a US Disciplinary Training Centre in Pisa. Later, in order to save him from the death penalty, he was consigned to a mental asylum in Washington. Of all the other poets, it is William Blake who exercises the greatest influence on Keith’s work. It is Blake’s poetry and personal mythology, rather than his engraved work, which captures his imagination and provides clues to his imagery. Mostly the clues are oblique or cryptic, but sometimes these can be found chapter and verse in Blake, such as the child and old woman in the foreground of Foreshore based on the following verse in The Mental Traveller.

And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

Detail of Foreshore

Elsewhere Blake and other poets provide a more discursive role in the imaginative development of his work, and it is important to stress that despite the abundance of literary associations, Keith Winnett is emphatically not a literary artist. The creative process begins with the discipline of drawing which Keith describes as ‘a flexing of the muscles.’ It is out of the qualities of line, mark-making, texture and paint that ideas, feelings and images frequently evolve. It is this process that explains the genesis of the Ezra Pound drawings. His paintings are never willed or programmed systematically. He often begins with an indeterminate vision and the content and narrative emerges slowly and unconsciously through the drawing and painting process and the accumulation and free association of ideas and moods. Rather than poetry, his vision is often prompted by music. Mahler, like Blake, is a major source of inspiration and Keith strives on occasions to achieve in his paintings a visual parallel to Mahler’s wealth of musical imagery, mood, and poetic-philosophic intent.

It is the fourth movement of Mahler’s third symphony, with its haunting contralto solo expressing Nietzsche’s woeful verse from Also Sprach Zarthustra, which provides the mood and title for What Midnight Says. The central Adam-like figure in the picture symbolises Neitzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and around him a number of other mythologies, personal and referential, are imaginatively woven, including the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and references to Nietzsche’s idea of humanity as a stretched tightrope. The painting is melancholic, dark and pessimistic,

What Midnight Says		Dasein

unlike Mahler’s symphony which ends optimistacally and triumphantly with the notion that life can be transfigured through the love of God. Similar ideas are expressed in Dasein where an isolated figure embodies Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, whereby man as a temporal being is pitched into an existing world, like it not. In a less obvious way the meaning of life and the nature of being also provides some of the narrative for Chasing Silenus. This picture deals with the myth of Silenus who held the truth of the meaning of life and was forced to disclose his secret after being chased by Midas. Here Silenus and Midas exit stage right, providing the incidental detail you might encounter in a painting by Poussin.

Chasing Silenus		Detail (in woods on right)

The spirituality that Keith admires in northern painting permeates his landscapes with their watery enigmatic settings. The rivers, canals and locks — containing and releasing water into the estuary, sea and lagoon — are metaphors for the notion that a person’s life is like a river flowing towards the sea. It is not a passive view of life’s journey that is expressed in his work, but also its aspirations, anguish, leaps of faith and breaking of chains. Neitzsche’s themes of birth, regeneration, redemption, resurrection and mortality, are expressed in a number of works, and in many respects Keith revives something of the ‘cycle of life’ theme that obsessed much of nineteenth-century Symbolist painting (the resurrection theme first appeared in his Lazarus paintings of the late fifties). Here these ideas are symbolically manifest in the old woman and child from Blake’s poem in Foreshore, the persistant baptismal image encapsulated in the figure from Piero’s Baptism of Christ, and the drowning souls in the lagoon. Other religious, biblical and literary associations occur in the repetition of three wondering figures, like those on the road to Emmaus (also inspired by T.S. Eliot), and the eucharistic symbolism of the woman preparing food in Foreshore, which also draws inspiration from D.H. Lawrence’s poem The Ship of Death.

The purpose of the above notes is to provide an introduction to the symbolic, thematic and cultural content of Keith Winnett’s work. If the emphasis has been on this aspect, at the expense of its formal qualities, it is because the nature of the work demands it. It seemed essential to indicate the broader context of his ideas, but this should be regarded as only a starting point and by no means an explanation of the work. If these observations prompt the spectator to search for further hidden meanings, then one would be led on a fool’s errand and miss the point. The paintings are a complex compound of ideas and feelings unconsciously gathered and each painting poetically transcends the sum of its parts. The point is to imaginatively engage in the work and enjoy the enigma and free association of ideas. Also the spectator should marvel at one aspect of the work which has so far been ignored — the technical mastery, which unlike the cryptic nature of the symbolism, speaks loudly and clearly for itself. It is a body of work which acknowledges aspects of the western canon in a veiled manner, and to do this convincingly you have to be a complete master of your craft. These works are the product of a long, slow, intense painterly process built on superb draughtsmanship, and it is ultimately the breathtaking quality of the painting that commands our attention and admiration.