About my painting

With the exception of 'Sisters' and ofcourse 'Digital' I work on paper in acrylic, pastel and ink.

Sisters is industrial paint on linen.

Digital is on an iPad Pro using multipale apps.

Painting books

Guildhall Abstracted

Digital Review

Tirpitz and pTarmigan

Modernity

Linear C

Extracts from Guildhall Abstracted catalogue.
Forward by Grant Pooke, University of Kent

Terry Cripps (b.1951) was born in Tripoli and raised in Singapore, Kenya and St. Ives in Cambridgeshire. He studied at the Cambridge School of Art (1967-71), completing a Licentiate of the Society of Industrial Artists (LSIA). The curriculum introduced students to the requirements of commercial illustration principally in design, illustration and printmaking, but Terry was among the first of that cohort, supported by his then tutor, Geoff Newman, to study the techniques of photography i.

Following graduation, Terry worked for a number of advertising agencies, variously as a designer, art director and creative director both in London and the South West. He began to work as an illustrator and was represented by the Beint & Beint illustration agency. Among their clients who commissioned him were Wolff Olins, Condé Nast, Radio Times, Saatchi & Saatchi, Albert Mead Vickers and Vogue.

Extensive professional experience in commercial illustration also prompted the development of Terry’s paintings, examples of which are presently held in private collections in the United States, Germany and Japan, having been exhibited in both the UK and France. In 2006 he was shortlisted for the biennial John Moores Painting Prize. Re-locating back to London in 2014, the practicalities of a significantly smaller workspace imposed a new method of working. His previous paintings, like those of many abstract practitioners, were large and imposing. A smaller studio meant that creating on such a scale was no longer possible; the exploitation of digital methods in generating images has been a comparatively recent departure. The present exhibition shows this new way of working, with exhibited work typically 10” x 8” in size with the final compositions digitally printed onto aluminium.

Guildhall Abstracted: Responses and Inventions (August 2nd-30th), is an innovative and expansive exhibition. It mediates an artistic response to a personally selected series of paintings from the Guildhall Art Gallery’s permanent collection through apparently contingent pairings and association. But although referencing figurative paintings, some in the “Grand Manner” which span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Terry’s aesthetic looks resolutely forward to the twentieth century and associated avant-garde practice. His inclusion of colourful biomorphic forms and motifs recall the compositional devices employed by Joan Miró and André Masson – iconic Surrealist artists whose revelatory, automatic drawing techniques interrogated the ostensibly fixed vistas of the interwar years.

In similar fashion, Terry’s subtle use of line and form renders the fixed object dramatically fugitive and malleable within typically ambiguous and unfixed spatial settings. In an exhibition review of Miró’s practice penned for the weekly US magazine, The Nation, the modernist American art critic and staunch defender of abstraction, Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), fashioned an analogy to “Matisse’s cold hedonism and ruthless exclusion of everything but the concrete, immediate sensation” ii. Although executed using digital media, Terry’s aesthetic shares with both these painters a tangibly modernist, late romantic sensibility in which extraneous forms are pared down or removed through the refinement of abstraction.

The practice of other, more recent artists is also apparent in a range of compositions exhibited here. Terry’s lyrical approach to colour and elliptical re-versioning of titles recalls the playful sensibility of the late British painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017). Although there are differences around the deployment of particular colours, as Terry’s palette uses blues, very strong reds, although rarely greens and his abstraction, unlike that of Hodgkin, works to eliminate residually readable objects and subject matter. The other name suggested by Terry’s gestural use of line is that of Cy Twombly (1928-2011), an artist closely associated with American post-war abstraction. In Twombly’s aesthetic, the relationship between abstract form and the picture plane often remains fluid or unresolved. Terry’s compositions situate similar ambiguities in form and ground relationships, demanding close viewing attention to the specificity of the pictorial and spatial effects achieved.

Twombly’s work also marked a transition towards the more robustly conceptual practice of a younger generation which arguably informed the art school ethos experienced by Terry’s cohort in the late 1960s and early 1970s iii. Yet beyond these recognisable antecedents, Guildhall Abstracted demonstrates a more profound cultural truth: how the expressive use of medium can re-fashion the established, figurative genres of history painting, portraiture and landscape into vibrant, relational vistas in which, as the saying goes, futures remain open, contested and yet to be imagined.

 

Grant Pooke

School of Arts, University of Kent

 

July 2019

Notes

i Interview with Terry Cripps by the author, artist’s home and studio, South-West London, July 5th, 2019.

ii ‘Review on an Exhibition of Joan Miró’, by Clement Greenberg, The Nation, June 7th 1947, reproduced in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Arrogant Purpose 1945-1949, volume two, edited by John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1986, pp153-4.

iii Discussed at interview, July 5th 2019.