John Virtue: New Ways to Think

Paul Moorhouse

Opening 4th April

It is the fate of some artists, having found their way, never to venture from the path they have chosen. Unable or unwilling to question the assumptions that have grown up around their working practice, instead they repeat themselves, and, in so doing, something dies. ‘Habit’, as Samuel Beckett wrote, ‘is a great deadener.’ John Virtue is a notable exception to that self-imposed predicament.

In 1978, he destroyed the work he had completed in the preceding seven years and, at the age of 31, started again. Returning to fundamentals, he purged himself of old habits involving brushes, canvas, paint and colour. In their place, he adopted charcoal and pencil – simple, direct means with which he made small drawings of his surroundings during daily walks that were later completed in ink. Eventually, these images led to an unbroken, numbered sequence of black and white landscape paintings. Always informed by drawing and his observations while walking, the paintings continued – as if unfolding like the pages of a diary – for over forty years. During that time, his recognition of the need for change nevertheless remained constant. Adapting to a succession of different places in which he has lived and worked, his art regularly – indeed restlessly – renewed itself. His search for new subjects and different approaches, when his work moved between figuration and abstraction, was pervasive. It would seem that for Virtue, change is a liberating force, and one that opens up unexpected directions. However, as the paintings he has completed in the last four years reveal, his greatest artistic convulsion to date took place during a time of unprecedented upheaval.

Following various locations in Lancashire, Devon, Exeter, London, Italy and Norfolk – places that are all associated with different, distinctive phases in Virtue’s work – in early 2020 he moved again. While renting a house in Much Hadham, a quiet Hertfordshire village, his original intention was to commute to Norfolk and continue working in the studio that he retained there. However, almost immediately this idea was thrown off course. The first coronavirus lockdown took effect in March, barely a month after his arrival. Unable to leave Much Hadham, he began instead to explore the locale. He found a landscape that contrasts markedly with Norfolk, where he had lived and worked for the preceding eleven years. His subject in that coastal situation had been the sea, its endless movement forming a backdrop for his walks, as well as a point of departure for the turbulent paintings that emerged later in his studio. Throughout Virtue’s work, the sense in which landscape forms an armature for the exploration of a deeper and more personal topography is ever-present. With its winding lanes and gentle undulating fields, Hertfordshire offered the prospect of a fresh start. For the next nine months, and while government restrictions on travel persisted, he concentrated on making drawings and painting small canvases at his rented home. However, he found working in that domestic setting inhibiting.

Any liberation that he was seeking only became possible a year after his relocation to Much Hadham. In January 2021, he bought a local house with an adjacent former school building. This now became his studio, and the freedom afforded by being able to work there was transformative. Large paintings that he had stored in Norfolk were brought to his new spacious workplace, and these were augmented by further canvases. In time, no fewer than eighty paintings – ranging from 9 x 9 inches to 120 x 120 inches – would be worked on in these surroundings.

From the outset, a new way of working unfolded, and its most conspicuous aspect was in some ways paradoxical. He was now able to move freely within the studio’s expansive interior, and this prompted him to work with the canvases flat on the floor, irrespective of their size. This development – and his ability to walk around each image and view it from four different positions – eliminated any consideration of the works having a top or bottom. At the same time, however, this enhanced freedom to circumnavigate each work coincided with a personal drawback. Long-standing mobility problems came to a head and meant that he was no longer able to walk in the landscape. This restricted him to the studio. In effect, the walks that for so many years had preceded his paintings now took place around the paintings themselves. In an entirely unexpected way, life and art had converged.

Being confined to the studio could have been disastrous. Instead, for the artist it appears to have generated an unforeseen freedom to work in new ways, and to see his paintings in a fresh light. Although unable to pursue his usual drawing expeditions, he had much closer proximity to his work place, and this generated different perspectives – almost as if the studio and its contents became the place for perambulation and his focus for exploration. It seems that, more than ever, the paintings became his private world. Conducted daily, he interacted with them in a changed way: without plan or premeditation, consulting his drawings randomly, constantly working and re-working images, putting works aside and then revisiting them. It was as if everything was in constant motion and flux. Whereas previously the outside world had been the changing arena to which he responded, now that vital role was replaced by paintings within which he moved, and with which he maintained a constant dialogue. The result is an extraordinary body of art that, to an unprecedented degree, is impressed with the unpredictable traces of a life being lived – in greater isolation, but with an unmistakeable intensity. Whether created within an expansive canvas or traversing a small image, each mark was a volatile intrusion within an ambiguous psycho-physical space.

This new-found freedom to make paintings that no longer had to resemble or signify, but instead could come into being without aim or intention, broke with his previous practice – and was clearly disorientating. ‘I had no idea what I was doing’, Virtue later recalled. Even the status of his work as art seemed in doubt. He added: ‘What I don’t want is to make paintings, but to try to find new ways to think.’ The impression is that of a traveller who, having cast aside his map, finds himself in an unfamiliar place without reference points. For an artist, abandoning a familiar lexicon of ideas can be terrifying. Instead, Virtue was exhilarated – as if released from a confinement of which he had been previously unaware. More than ever, the compulsion to carry on came to his aid, and each day he renewed his engagement with an activity whose rules and conventions no longer applied. As a result, he refigured the paintings on a daily basis, as if following a flow of thought.

In January 2023, two years after embarking on his quest, he then took a radical step into uncharted territory. By accident, he mixed the palette of black and white paints that he had been using for four decades, producing grey. Rather than being deterred by this mishap, however, he embraced it. The potential for acting in a completely new way now opened up before him, so much so that he now turned upon his work that he had produced in isolation – and recommenced the entire process.

During the next year, all eighty paintings from the last four years would be revisited, each being progressively transformed by the infusion of what is not simply a different tonal value – but, rather, an entirely new sensibility. As had been the case in 1978, old habits were again banished. Gone was the previous reliance on expressive brushwork and autographic mark-making in black and white: the canvases that emerged eliminate such categories and opposites. Encrusted and glistening, their surfaces comprise a complex matrix of marks in greys and black, but, bearing drips and splashes, they are evidently made without the intervention of brushes or any other form of touch. The paintings appear as fantastic machines – inhabited by an intangible and ethereal presence. As a result, Virtue’s recent work takes its place in a long career, and startles by its unfamiliarity.

What then is the nature of these strange new works, which even the artist declines to describe as paintings? The question may appear redundant when a state of not knowing seems to be their very essence. Indeed, throwing off considerations of self-conscious artistic ego, expression and ‘style’ – all of which are entrenched in the traditions of western art – has contributed to their making. Virtue has provided a clue. During the first three months spent in his new studio, he spent every evening looking at reproductions of calligraphic ink drawings by the great Zen master Sengai (1750-1837). Proceeding from the principles of Zen thought – rooted as it is in paradox – Sengai’s art followed no conventions. It embraced laws of its own, without being bound by laws. In his drawings, spontaneity and discipline go hand-in-hand, or, rather, become one; intuition illuminates intellect. This enlightened state – in which all opposites finally disappear – is the goal of Zen, and, in Sengai’s work, the artist is at one with his means, with thought and gesture elided.

Referring to his immersion in Sengai’s art, Virtue later recollected: ‘After 56 years I finally understood what I had been obsessed by since 1964 when I first encountered Japanese Zen calligraphy.’ As this suggests, he has always found Zen – and Sengai in particular – to be an inspiration and a guide, never more so than during an enforced period of isolation in unfamiliar surroundings. In his book on Sengai, the distinguished Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki quoted the words of Engo (Yuan -wu, 1063-1135), the celebrated Buddhist monk: ‘Be thoroughly free from all possible forms of limitation and definability, and then you will find yourself behaving like a sail boat that follows the wind blowing over the Lake.’ There could be no better summation of Virtue’s endeavour.