THOMAS LUMLEY Evidence That Something Happened STUDIES FROM WOOD

About

THOMAS LUMLEY

Evidence That Something Happened

STUDIES FROM WOOD

22.11 - 08.12.2018 

Private View 22nd November 2018, 6.30-9.00pm

Ash is fundamental. It is the ultimate rendering of anything, the sublimate of all things. Ashes blew in the wind after the sacking of Rome; the library of Alexandra was reduced to a grey powder. We burn joyfully in the wind; a handful of carbon is all that will remain of most of us in the long run. 

The poetry of ash is unignorable. Burned wood is smeared on the faces of the Saddhus in the feast of Kumbh Mela; it mixes with the Chrism on the eponymous Wednesday marking the start of Lent; They are cast on the water in the Hebrew Red Heifer; they are the embers glowing in the hearth at dawn. The carbon which copied the imprint of ancient animals in the fossil record.

A single piece of charcoal is created by burning willow twigs in airless conditions. And so there is something gently poetic in the rendering of a tree in charcoal. It has the quality of a rite. The tree which gave it’s skeleton to this endeavour is not reconstituted but becomes the medium. It is simultaneously simple and profound, the kind of clear act which reflects an enigma. 

Lumley’s drawings are studies in the truest sense of the word. They are an investigation and survey of the topography of a miniature world. As surfaces they are simultaneously delicate and muscular. But there is another aspect to this exercise. They are also a meditation; a spiritual investigation of the geist of the tree, created by observing one and using the cremated remains of another. This is not an intellectual exercise. It is instinctive. The abstract and the actual are united by the work of the human hand.

Charcoal is a humble material. It has none of the grand historic associations of oil paint or bronze; it is void of the modernist cachet of acrylic or aluminium; but every great rendering in history was almost certainly born out of its controlled disintegration. Fundamentally it’s also an ancient material. The oldest discovered charcoal cave drawings, created from the stumps of burned firewood, date back almost four hundred centuries. Across this ocean of time discussing the oeuvre of artists from our epoch seems almost superfluous. But as Lumley reaches to the paper and makes his unique contribution to this continuum these moments are and continue to be. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Thomas Lumley is known for his portraiture and figurative art. Following from his previous exhibition ‘Between the Essence and the Descent’ Lumley departs from interiors and landscapes and moves to phantasmagoric charcoal abstractions inspired by wood. 

Ten years ago in Rasa, Ticino, a mountain-top town in Switzerland, Lumley’s attention was drawn to the wooden beams as he lay in bed looking at the ceiling. Some years later in Richmond Park, the patterns in the ancient oaks caught his eye. 

Through his skilled works in charcoal, Lumley opens the doors to these organic cathedrals, drawing out the mysteries so that we may see, with our own eyes, what he and the tree have seen.

Born in Yorkshire and now living and working in London, artist Thomas Lumley is winner of the Prince of Wales Drawing School Prize at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2006.