Garrick Palmer

Garrick Salisbury Palmer (born September 20, 1933) is an English painter, wood engraver, photographer and teacher. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (retired), the Society of Wood Engravers Associate of the Royal Engravers, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (retired), and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (retired). Born in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Palmer is the pre-eminent wood engraver of his time.Fact|date=November 2007 To look at a Palmer is to recognize instantly both the impulses that moved the artist and the unique way in which the he has captured the spirit of the subject.Fact|date=November 2007 His work is immediately recognizable for the sophisticated perspective of the composition and the vigour of its execution.Fact|date=November 2007 Largely contained between the boards of classic books reissued by the Imprint Society (Barre, Mass.) and the Folio Society (London), and on the walls of various public and private collections around the world including the Tate Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Mr. Palmer's highly idiosyncratic work has been widely exhibited and is much sought after by connoisseurs of the art.Fact|date=November 2007

Biography

The shy and reticent Mr. Palmer has always remained in the Portsmouth area, close to the downs and farm fields he so vividly depicts. From 1945 to 1949 he was educated at St. John's College, Southsea, followed by a National Diploma of Design in painting and engraving from the Portsmouth College of Art and Design. Studying postgraduate courses at the Royal Academy, London, between 1955 and 1959, his artistic gifts were soon recognized and he was awarded the David Murray Landscape Scholarships, (1955/56/57) the Leverhulme Scholarship (1957), the Royal Academy Gold Medal and the Edward Scott Travelling Scholarship (1958).

While still at the RA, Mr. Palmer began teaching part-time at Winchester School of Art, where he became a full-time tutor in 1962, and in 1966, the head of the Foundation Department, retiring in December 1986. He then devoted himself full-time to his art. Since the early 1980s he has had a second strong career as a photographer.

Personal life

While a student at art college Mr. Palmer met the young Ellis Leach-Moore, like him a native of Portsmouth. Her study encompassed jewellery making and silversmithing. They were married on July 11, 1959. Mrs. Palmer's distinct, unique conceptions, frequently using the bones of monkfish, reached their apogee in what she termed "brooch-sculptures"; in all their art are traces and echoes of one another's work. They had three daughters. In 1998, Ellis Palmer died of breast cancer.

Exhibitions - Paintings and Engravings

Mr. Palmer has showed work at the following exhibitions:
*RAA Summer Exhibition in 1956/57/58/60, followed by the
*Wildenstein Gallery, London, 1961;
*Piccadilly Gallery, 1961;
*Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, 1962 and 1967;
*Reading Art Gallery (engravings only), 1964;
*Ash Barn Gallery, Petersfield, 1965-66;
*Southampton University, 1969-1976(?);
*Atelier d'Art, Amsterdam, 1970;
*Retrospective, Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery, 1973;
*Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, 1975;
*"Five Artists", Southampton Art Gallery, 1975;
*Yew Tree Gallery, Derbyshire, 1977;
*Galerie Ismene, Pyrennees, France, 1978;
*"Xylon - International Triennial Exhibition of Wood Engravings", Fribourg, Switzerland, 1979;
*Portsmouth/Duisburg Exhibition, Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery, 1980;
*the "International Exhibition of Wood Engraving", Hereford Art Gallery, by invitation, 1984;
*"Engraving Then and Now", the retrospective 50th exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers, 1988;
*Southern Arts Exhibition of contemporary wood engraving, 1989;
*Artists Prints, Hill Court Gallery, Abergavenny, Wales, May 1994.

In February 1994, Mr. Palmer took part in a major examination of art created for Coleridge's Poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". "The Mariner Imagined, Coleridge's Poem and the Artist, 1831-1994", held at Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, London, which also featured works by David Scott, Joseph Noel Paton, Gustave Dore, Willy Pogany, David Jones, Duncan Grant, Mervyn Peake and Patrick Procktor. The following November his work was shown in an "Exhibition of Wood Engravings used as Book Illustrations", at Oxford University Club, Halifax House, Oxford. His next participation was in the "Society of Wood Engravers Touring Exhibition", April 1995 - January 1996; Garden Gallery, Pallant House, Chichester, West Sussex, an exhibition to mark the "forthcoming publication of LAND", by the Old Stile Press, Llandogo, Dec. 1995; the "LINE" Gallery, Linlithgow, Scotland, January 1996; and Twentieth Century Word Engineering, Exeter City Museums and Art Gallery, February 1997.

Commissions and Reviews

The strength and vigour of Mr. Palmer's work found particular expression in landscape and the sea. In 1967, the Folio Society awarded him his first commission, to illustrate "Three Stories" by Herman Melville, which included Mr. Palmer's first memorable full-page illustration to "Benito Cereno" of the head of Babo, the rebellious slave, on a pike in the market square. The Society commissioned him again in 1971 for "The Destruction of the Jews", by Josephus, and in 1974 for "Moby Dick", by Melville. Similarly the short-lived Imprint Society in Barre, Massachusetts, commissioned Mr. Palmer to illustrate H. M. Tomlinson's classic "The Sea and The Jungle" in 1971 and "Benito Cereno", by Melville, in 1972. The haunting image of the head of Babo on a pole returns, this time with significant differences that highlight Mr. Palmer's artistic development. The Old Stile Press, in Llandogo, succeeded in charming Mr. Palmer back to his boxwood blocks to illustrate "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", by Oscar Wilde, in 1994 (225 copies); in the same year he illustrated "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", by Coleridge. The blockbuster book "LAND", Old Stile Press, 1996 (240 copies), featured landscape wood engraving in Mr Palmer's "instantly recognizable style" [ [http://www.oldstilepress.com/Pagescreens/Palmer1.html Garrick Palmer ] ] and text by Eric Williams and soon sold out. Mr. Palmer also illustrated "Ship of Sounds", Gruffyground Press, 1981 (130 copies), a poem by John Fuller.

A New Career As Photographer

Mr. Palmer has always had a strong interest in photography, especially in black and white, which parallels his expressive wood engravings. Beginning in 1983, he has had numerous commissions and exhibitions: Exhibition of Orkney & Shetland, The Winchester Gallery, 1983; a grant from Southern Arts for a Portsmouth project, 1985; commission to produce photographs of sculptures in Hampshire for the newly-formed Hampshire Sculpture Trust, January 1987, followed by its opening exhibition in May 1987, followed by an exhibition of the prints at the Winchester Gallery in July 1987. In November 1987, the City of Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery held an exhibition of his photographs, entitled "Portsmouth, A Personal Reflection", which moved to the Havant Museum and Gallery in July 1988. October 1990 saw an "Exhibition of Architectural Photographs" at the Spitfield Gallery, London. Mr. Palmer participated in "A Southern Eye" - Six Photographers, at the Winchester Contemporary Art Gallery in September 1996. In April, 1997 he exhibited photographs of contemporary sculpture at the New Art Centre, Roche Court.

Hampshire County Council awarded Mr. Palmer a three-year grant in 1997 to photograph "Early Churches in Hampshire", a selection of photographs being shown at Winchester Cathedral in 1999. Other exhibitions include: photographs of historic churches and landscapes around the area of Butser were shown at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park Centre in August and September, 2001; "Photographs of Sculpture" at the Hampshire Sculpture Trust Gallery in Winchester, November-December 2002. "FOREST", an exhibition at the Winchester Gallery plus a Southern Arts Touring Exhibition 2002-2003; photographs at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park Centre in 2004. In February-March 2006, Mr. Palmer's show of church interiors, "Places of Worship", was held at Portsmouth Cathedral; in October-November 2006 "At Any Time" was shown at the Winchester Gallery.

In 2001 Mr. Palmer was commissioned to document the demolition of the site next to Pallant House and the building of the New Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, a project that occupied him until 2006. His most recent work has been to photograph works by the young New Zealand artist Makoure Scott for "Twenty-First Century Works", a limited edition publication, (Paul Holberton, 2006).

Discussion of Mr. Palmer's work

Like any true artist, Mr. Palmer possesses a style that is uniquely his own; indeed, the critic Hal Bishop, in his catalogue of the major exhibition "Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving", says "As an engraver Palmer seems to have started 'fully sprung'. . . . An early Palmer is recognisably by the same artist as the later work. There seems to have been no mediating stage."Bishop, Hal: "Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving, A Celebration . . .and A Dissenting Voice", page 80, catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and Hereford City Museum & Art Gallery, Hereford, 1997.] Mr. Palmer's works are always lyrical compositions seen usually through some dense and forbidding screen, which adds to their sense of mysterious anticipation. "The dense textures or all-over patterning . . . are in Palmer transmuted into an abstracted apprehension of the way things seem to him." His landscapes, usually "examined with both brilliance and virtuosity" [http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/palmer_garrick_landscape.htm] , seem always on the point of revealing some secret business that will break out of the hedgerow or the hay mow or the dense field of ripe corn; Mr. Bishop attributed this to Mr. Palmer's handling of light: "strong light which does not abstract and distort at the surface of material object it strikes, but is broken up into 'waves' which channel the eye across the picture plane." These are termed 'overcurrents' by Mr. Bishop, who has a rich vein to mine: Mr. Palmer has produced dozens of landscapes, whether wood engraved book illustrations and wall art, or the series of colour lithographs produced in the early 1970s for the Consolidated Fine Art Association and the Societe de Verification de la Nouvelle Gravure Internationale of New York and Paris, which were pulled by Curwen Prints in London. While colour does highlight Mr. Palmer's unique sensibilities, it is in wood engravings of the landscape that he reaches the pinnacle of his art. Where the majority English landscapes are content to show that "green and pleasant land", Mr. Palmer responds to the bones and sinews of the earth which he exposes as carefully as an anatomist.

Eleven of these mysterious landscapes, that act to excite 'the pricking of one's thumbs', were gathered into a book by Nicholas MacDowell of Old Stile Press, titled "LAND" and quickly sold out to Mr. Palmer's avid, albeit almost underground, following. Mr. MacDowell sensed that Mr. Palmer "endowed his landscapes with rich layers of story and hinted-at spiritual meaning" [ MacDowell, Nicholas, http://www.oldstilepress.com/Pagescreens/Land1.html] These views, Mr. Bishop says, "are all engravings of character, reflecting the emotions of the artist as much as the underlying nature of the landscape. . . . he shows the susurration of the trees, not of the leaves, and the wider movements of heat and light."

The leap from landscapes to the book illustrations, which presented a narrowing of the scope of his expression was, for Mr. Palmer, easy and graceful: "the beauty of the formal language Palmer invented for himself was that its economy of expression was infinitely adaptable to the breadth of human feelings. . . .In Captain Ahab Palmer has matched Melville in creation, portraying him with a self-haunting psychological depth, by literally getting under his skin, paring the block back to reveal the musculature and determination, and intuiting in the face that most abstract human construct will." [Bishop, Hal: "Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving, A Celebration . . .and A Dissenting Voice", page 81, catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and Hereford City Museum & Art Gallery, Hereford, 1997.] Mr Palmer's use of a 'screen' was again evident in "The Ancient Mariner" in which the tattered rigging serves to isolate and separate his figures.

It was not an accident that Mr. Palmer's commissions were largely for books about the sea; Mr. Palmer's deep understanding of the solitude implicit in the English countryside found its parallel in the wide sweeps of ocean; the mysterious presence in all his landscapes was recaptured in the forbidding figure of the whale. In discussing the many illustrators who have tackled Melville, "A Companion to Herman Melville " cites as notable "Garrick Palmer, whose cross-hatched wood engravings for Moby-Dick, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd reflect the treacherous bonds of society and fate." [Schultz, Elizabeth: "Creating Icons,Melville in Visual Media and Popular Culture" page 534, essay contained in"A Companion to Herman Melville" , Wyn Kelley, ed.: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, Wiley, 2006]

In 1969, in response to one of British Telecom's then-interminable seeming strikes, Mr. Palmer designed and cut "Broken Links", a wood engraving of the literal coming apart of the wires used by BT to carry its communications. The technically accomplished image may appear to be an abstraction but it is possible, still, to determine that it is a series of cables delaminating and uncoiling before the viewer. Exhibited at Xylon 8, the Triennial Exhibition of Wood Engraving at Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1979, this energetic work caused quite a stir, not least because wood engraving as an art was so enervated that at the 1969 SWE exhibition only 44 of 102 prints were actually wood engravings.

Never one to shy from challenge, Mr. Palmer began an even more ambitious project soon after Xylon 8. "Not only as a composition is it one of the boldest abstract engravings ever attempted, its monumental size (352 x 266mm) mocks most other engravings." Bishop, Hal: "Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving, A Celebration . . .and A Dissenting Voice", page 82, catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and Hereford City Museum & Art Gallery, Hereford, 1997.] Printed in 1985 by master printer Ian Mortimer in an edition of two, and exhibited at that year's SWE exhibition, the image is arresting, hypnotic. It appears that all hell has broken loose, with tubing and wiring lashing out in all directions, with overhead a strange sky whose very atoms appear to be roiling from the disturbance. "But such is the power in the conception and execution of the engraving, which does not conceal its self-confidence, that all the disparate elements are held in ordered balance." Few are the artists who could conceive such a composition; fewer still those who could actually cut the image. Like the landscapes, these abstract works "display the originality of a powerful and visionary artist" [MacDowell, Nicholas, [http://www.oldstilepress.com/Pagescreens/Land1.html] ] .

Some of Mr. Palmer's most recent work is contained in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", published by Old Stile in 1994, between wine-red silk moire boards and a matching slipcover, reprinted in 1998 by Trafalgar Publishing, London. The images evoked by the artist are some of the most haunting and tragic figures called into being, stripped of all their possessions, leaving only their hurt and downtrodden shells to look uncomprehending at the world beyond the bars. Here the screen becomes "a wonderfully evocative rhetorical device, becoming the iron bars, trapping the image in the block as if it were truly locked up, yet as designed it frees the form in space. It is as much a portrait of the author of "De Profundis" looking in as the prisoner looking out, the veil lifting for the eyes." [Bishop, Hal: "Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving, A Celebration . . .and A Dissenting Voice", page 80, catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and Hereford City Museum & Art Gallery, Hereford, 1997]

References