Alex
Pemberton is a painter who relishes the appearance of things, the outdoors look
of landscape painted on the spot, not reassembled like a jigsaw back in the
studio. He derives the authority of his work from painting in front of the subject
on Thames-side footpaths and other vantage points, and from struggling to turn
paint into prospect while having the constant challenge of the actual view in
front of him. Like a philosopher, he is seeking after truth, and unsparing in
his scrutiny. A central problem facing a realist painter who chooses the river
for subject is articulating and making sense of a large plane of water.
Pemberton manages to convey to the viewer a sense of travelling across it: not
just in terms of looking, but in imagining the passage of a boat over it, so
well does he make the scene real and vivid.
If
his ostensible aim is the pursuit of objectivity, his actual achievement is
thankfully greater than this: warmer and altogether more human and emotionally
rewarding. He is immensely self-critical, but his high standards pay off in the
absence of rhetoric in his work, the refreshing lack of easy flourishes. He
habitually paints a stretch of the river around North Woolwich, and over the
years has registered many changes in the skyline as developers move in on
deserted industrial sites. The Boat Club has moved, silos have gone, housing
proliferates.
Anthony
Eyton has called Pemberton’s paintings ‘deliberate and distilled’. Certainly,
Pemberton has looked long and hard at his own work, and in thinking about ways
and means, has returned to such great masters of the past as Corot. A long-term
influence has been Nicolas de Stael, feeding a fascination for the materiality
of paint surface. Morandi has been an inspiration for painting in series, and
for formalizing a subject in close tones. (Compare, for instance, Pemberton’s
series of paintings of dockside cranes, which look almost like studies in blue,
so close-toned is the colour; yet the impact is effectively sculptural.)
These
paintings balance intriguingly between the panoramic and the intently focused.
In the background rises Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs. The river, seeking
its own truths, flows on.
From catalogue essay for 'The River ' Exhibition , River & Rowing Museum, Henley
Andrew
Lambirth
September 2009
