To many of us, especially in the UK, Timothy Spall needs no introduction. He is an actor well-known and famous enough to be a household name. His thorough preparation for his award-winning role as Mr Turner in the eponymous film, laid the groundwork for this foray into painting. This experience provided the spark and confidence to set himself a rigorous and public challenge. Mounting such an exhibition is not done lightly. The teenage Spall had to choose between “art, acting or army”. Here we see an unexpected chance to revisit a missed opportunity.
Timothy Spall is an autodidact. He is a man who is constantly enquiring into, and schooling himself in, the ‘serious diversions’ of life. One such pursuit is painting. He creates images of brooding land and seascapes that are episodic documents of the painter’s close attention to the world around him. His is a world of elemental churning, punctuated by moments of calm observation.
Spall’s technique is hard-won. He applies himself in a painstaking and disciplined way. By dealing with the veracity of things and the technical problem of representation, he achieves an authentic sense of a real and immanent presence. His use of colour is subtle. Skies are tinted with lemon yellows and tangerine oranges, which glow against blue-grey tonalities. He demonstrates a preference for dramatic silhouette graphically picked out in inky-blacks and carbonised blues. Architectural form and detail is finely-drawn. Trees are an intricate network of interwoven tendrils. A more gestural handling of the brush is used to describe sea and sky. Complex layering and vigorous scumbling builds an impression of atmospheric weather effects.
Timothy Spall expresses an animating and sublime life-force, which imbues his subjects with symbolic power and poetic imagination. The paintings convey a sense of reaching out to that which is slipping past. Spall makes landfall, grasps the significant and anoints it in paint.
