A random connection with an object which evokes or illustrates an idea and the
appearance of the object is changed to produce a meaning that the original does not
literally denote.
Signage occurs in a chance encounter with an object that carries a message informing the finder
of his own desire. The found-object is a sign of that desire. Breton illustrates this with a slipper-
spoon that he found on a junk stall, and which he recognised as a fulfilment of the wish spoken by
the automatic phrase that had begun running through his mind some months before- the
alliterative phrase ‘cendrier Cendrillon’, in English ‘Cinderella ashtray’. The spoon and handle of
the object was seen as the front and last of a shoe of which a little carved slipper was the heel.
Then that slipper was imagined as having for its heel another slipper, and so on to infinity. Breton
read this sign as signifying his own desire for love. It became the sign that begins the quest
within his book L’Amour fou.
Man Ray 1937 ‘ Spoon with a slipper handle’: Illustration for Andre Breton, L’Amour fou
In everything he produced as artist/designer Graham Sutherland was trying to communicate the
deeper meanings he discovered in natural forms. To enter this highly personal world of rocks,
wildlife, and people, we have to discard any notions derived from popular images of beauty. We
need to accept that works of art depicting nature need not look 'natural' in a photographic sense.
Indeed, to Sutherland this conventional interpretation makes it impossible to create our own visual
vocabulary, either as artists or viewers, and get to the spiritual heart of places and objects. To
fully understand his Coventry tapestry, viewers need to appreciate his stylistic 'alphabet', and the
visual codes he invented to transfigure natural forms so that he could unlock their doors to original
ideas. An awareness of these symbolic keys enables us to trace his pictorial elements back to
their origins as real objects out of doors, which for some reason arrested his attention.
Sutherland was situated historically in the mainstream of European art, which by his time had
discarded photographic realism. When trying to recreate landscapes of symbols, Sutherland was
in the realm of world- class symbolic artists such as Gauguin, although his major influences came
from a pair of more obscure English artists, William Blake and Samuel Palmer, who worked
between the 18th and 19th centuries. Even further back in time, painting in symbols had been the
self-imposed task of medieval artists of the fourteenth century. Sutherland's sympathy with the
symbolism of Blake, who saw 'a world in a grain of sand', and Palmer, who discovered Paradise
in an obscure Kentish valley, was really to revive and reinterpret many long-standing spiritual
notions about nature.
According to Sutherland, trees are like people in a landscape that can be moved around by an
artist to introduce drama:
"Trees have extraordinarily beautifully varied and rich shapes which detach them from
their proper connotation as trees; one doesn't think of them as trees really; rather as
figures & dots ready to lead a separate identity"
Reference to Sutherland's work reveals the curved orbits of animal skulls and water-worn chalk.
Connections through thorniness may be made with windswept gorse and blackthorn, the only
plants able to survive the salty storm winds sweeping in off the Celtic Sea. They dominate his
early landscapes of tunnel-like lanes and windswept coastal rock-strewn slopes of
Pembrokeshire. Sutherland had made a whole series of thorn paintings, and while on a walk in
Pembrokeshire during the 1940s he reflected on the great implications of the Crucifixion:
"My mind became pre-occupied with the idea of thorns and of wounds made by thorns-
on going into the country I began to notice thorn bushes and the structure of thorns, as
they pierced the air in all directions, their points establishing limits of aerial space. I made
some drawings and as I did so a curious change took place. While still retaining their own
pricking space encompassing life, the thorns re-arranged themselves and became
something else- a kind of paraphrase of the Crucifixion and the crucified head- the
essential cruelty."
Thorns are also horns. Horns become giant claws. Claws become cruel beaks. Blackened,
twisted branches of burnt gorse lying on a path, become serpents- and so it goes on. The
structure and evolution of the natural forms was a vital aspect of Sutherland's art. His flights of
fantasy in paraphrasing nature were only checked by his desire to market his canvases to a public
that, on the whole, could not join him at the frontiers of his mind.
Sutherland's mission was to discover a way of making quite ordinary natural forms, which we
see, but do not look at, available as extended ideas in paintings.
" If one duty of painting is to explain the essence of things and emotions, may not it also
be a duty, sometimes, not to explain- but to accept? Do we need an explanation of the
flight of a bird, or a flash of lightning? Do we need to be told why a rose is shaped thus?
Coleridge said that poetry gives most pleasure when generally and not perfectly
understood. These lines of Blake are possibly obscure:
My spectre round me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way:
My emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.
but it may be argued that their mysterious music is actually enhanced by that obscurity.
So in painting it might be argued that its very obscurity preserves a magical and
mysterious purpose. It could be said, on the other hand, that much contemporary work,
which is thought to be obscure, may be merely suffering the time-lag in appreciation
which has so often operated against painters in their lifetime."
