Garrick Palmer - Discussion of Palmer's Work

Discussion of Palmer's Work

Like any true artist, 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." 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", 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; Bishop attributed this to 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 Bishop, who has a rich vein to mine: 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 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", Palmer responds to the bones and sinews of the earth which he exposes as carefully as an anatomist.

Eleven of these 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 Palmer's avid, albeit almost underground, following. MacDowell sensed that Palmer "endowed his landscapes with rich layers of story and hinted-at spiritual meaning" These views, 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 Palmer, easy and graceful: Bishop claims that "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." 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 Palmer's commissions were largely for books about the sea; 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."

In 1969, in response to one of British Telecom's strikes, 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, 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." 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 are claimed to "display the originality of a powerful and visionary artist".

Some of 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. Bishop claims 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."