Talk:Samuel Palmer

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The Valley of Shadow and Light- Printmaking and Palmer. Veronica Aldous

When I visited the Palmer exhibition at the British Museum I was struck by the Utopianism of the artist's vision. A bomb scare caused by an abandoned rucksack in the main concourse meant that,I,with all the other visitors had to leave the exhibition post haste. The curious dichotomy between the lyrical evocation of serenity and godliness contrasted severely with the frightful reality of imminent danger in our capital city. I felt a chasm between one time and another. Then I remembered that Palmer’s work is about the piercing light of the divine illuminating  the darkness, an Arcadian  and nostalgic vision of a rural and godly life; he once said  "the past for poets, the present for pigs”! This vision is of a dark vale pierced by cosmic light. The astral and solar depictions represent a yearning for knowledge of the divine. There is no better medium for working darkness into light than printmaking, where strong tones give way to flashes of bright highlight and subtle imperceptible shifts in tonality may be acheived. Apart from Edward  Calvert and John Linnell, Palmer’s original influence was the radical visionary William  Blake. Blake may have cared little that his views were marginalised- for him the Truth was everything, his imagery and poetry functioning as a channel for the divine. The divine in Blake, is often depicted as light auras and discs- the empyrean fire of Milton, a theatrical world of tableaux and spectacle. For his acolyte, Palmer, there is none of the hectoring quality of Blake, but a subtle  pantheistic evocation of the English countryside, an idiosyncratic vision based on a sensitivity for light and darkness. For Palmer ‘his blacks’ - his special gummy or oily ink mixes- were everything. Those who are drawn to etching and wood engraving favour the graphic, the clear, and the linear. Palmer’s blacks in drawing and prints are rarely a simple black; they incorporate shades and hues dependent on the inks and additives, which he utilized. Like Blake, he experimented with media. Unlike the disastrous bitumenization and oleaginous splitting which dogs some of Blake’s work, Palmer’s oeuvre survive well, and his admixtures were less alchemical and more conventional. His printmaking techniques were highly developed and controlled and he was specific in his choice of papers and inks. Paper is always warm white, slightly toned, and mounts were chosen in support of the overall effect. Palmer became specific if not fiercely perfectionist about production techniques. The crepuscular effects, which gave the famous, and much reproduced “Oxford Series” drawings their woodcut like appearance may well have inspired Palmer to continue the exploration of tonality in his etchings. They show a clear influence of Durer, proving that Palmer, from an early stage was informed by the graphic qualities of printmaking. So, Palmer was an embryonic printmaker even from an early date. Several woodcuts are attributed to the Shoreham period including “Naked Woman with Attendants’. The crudity and lack of technique may be testimony to the difficulty of the wood engraving process. This is a hard technique to master, as lines are incised into a block of tough end-grained boxwood. In 1828 Welby Sherman produced a woodcut under Palmer’s direction, ‘ Harvest under a Crescent Moon’. This beautiful image is professionally produced and owes a debt to Blake’s series ‘Pastorals of Virgil’. The elongated  landscape form holds, a sharp new moon, a field of wheat and the harvesters who labour by night to gather the grain- a clear reference to fertility and the reward of innocent labour. The impression is dark and over the workers loom lumpen breast-like wooded hills- again one of Palmer’s favoured symbols. As Palmer developed his technique in etching rather than woodcut, there is little of the strange experimentation of Blake, but a traditionalist technical excellence, which allows the image to be paramount, not the texture. The smooth transition of tones was something Palmer sought, a different impetus to the linear illustrative quality of Blake and Calvert.

Palmer’s prints are all about the exposition of light, the effects of light, the light as the presence of the Divine. Palmer would utilize a vast amount of biting (acid immersions) on one plate, 13 or more are recorded. Images were slowly built up, as is common with the etching process, but with Palmer the delicacy of line and tone were controlled with extreme meticulousness. 15 states are recorded in some images, and Palmer laboured over some plates for 20 years. As a result, the works are not prolific, but excellent. Palmer called printmaking “the excitement of gambling, without its guilt and ruin.” This reveals the obsessive and absorbing quality to the process which all committed printmakers will recognize. Palmer probably learned the craft of etching from Charles West Cope- Palmer called him ‘ his master in etching’. “The Willow” 1892 is a resonant image of a small tree full of movement and sparkle as though the breeze is the very breath of God. Each leaf is rendered and given importance. There is none of the massy weight, which sometimes characterizes the tree forms in drawings. This is an image, which sparkles in a naturalistic way and has the influence of Constable’s lyricism and sense of weather. Here, though, there is a sense of immanence, a mystical yearning for the spirit of the tree as an arbiter of a higher realm. Light bounces from the leaves in highlights but there is a mechanical look to the sky shading with its intense and artificial looking ruled hatchings. Technically proficient, this print gained Palmer entry in 1850 to the all- male Etching Club of which Cope was a founding member. In a sense the nature of this club reinforced Palmer’s idealism, that desire for authenticity of vision which he had found in previous years with the Shoreham ‘ Ancients’ who huddled round Blake’s mentorship. In “ The Herdsman’s Cottage” of 1850, Palmer injects his particular view of light as a sunset breaks over the mansard roof of a barn, slanting down into a well-trod path, illuminating a figure and an ox. The man turns toward the light, as though to the very face of God. Trees shimmer and there is evidence of burnishing-out in the bright spots in the leaves. These prints seem to depict moments in a dark valley when at last the radiant sun or moon allow a glimpse of a non-secular higher realm. Suddenly, the path is clear, the way lit. The benison of light is a direct allusion to the raising of awareness through contemplation of the divine in the landscape. Palmer’s customary planetary motif of the crescent moon couched in its darker side reveal the psychological potency of the coupling of polarities. Sometimes a bright sun reveals radiant spokes piercing the surrounding darker tones. A carved moon hangs on the horizon of “ The Lonely Tower” (1879) as stars hover and circle the spectrally lit structure. The place is Leith Hill, Surrey where a tower marks the brow of a hill. Reality commingles with the infinite as a reposeful couple look from darkness to the vibrant horizon. The psychology is clear- contemplate the divine and be lit from within. In ‘The Bellman’ etching (1879), which was finally completed before Palmer’s death, lines from Il Penseroso are illustrated by a lone figure of the bellman walks a rural path walking toward the sinking sun. Kine rest beyond a low wall, their horns struck with brisk highlights. The scene is peaceful, tranquil; the sun has lost its violent solar flares of earlier imagery. Couched between a transition between two softly etched hills, its lambent disc is traversed by soft lines depicting cirrus. Throughout the print (which underwent thirteen states) flicks of white show the light reflecting from textures of barns, earth, and rooftops. The copper plate from which the print was pulled is a thing of beauty; it is furrowed by the engraver’s needle, etched and burnished to valleys, pits and crests. Palmer’s printmaking has less immediacy than his mystical paintings and drawings- they are more laborious and highly finished. Here are clear refinements of a particular vision; a remarkable taste for light on clouds, on trees, on animals and people; Starlight, moonlight, lamplight, sunlight –light as the essence of the divine, light that illuminates the dark valley.  (Veronica Aldous for Urthona Buddhism and the Arts Magazine 2006)