Garrick Palmer
Encyclopedia
Garrick Salisbury Palmer (born September 20, 1933) is an English
painter
, wood engraver, photographer and teacher
. He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
(retired), the Society of Wood Engravers
Associate
of the Royal Engravers, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (retired), and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
(retired).
Born in Portsmouth
, England
, Mr. Palmer is the pre-eminent wood engraver of his time. To look at a Palmer is to recognize instantly both the impulses that moved the artist and the unique way in which the he has captured the spirit of the subject. His work is immediately recognizable for the sophisticated perspective of the composition and the vigour of its execution. Largely contained between the boards of classic books reissued by the Imprint Society (Barre, Mass.) and the Folio Society
(London
), and on the walls of various public and private collections around the world including the Tate Gallery
and the Fitzwilliam Museum
, Mr. Palmer's highly idiosyncratic work has been widely exhibited and is much sought after by connoisseurs of the art.
, followed by a National Diploma of Design in painting and engraving from the Portsmouth College of Art and Design. Studying postgraduate courses at the Royal Academy
, London, between 1955 and 1959, his artistic gifts were soon recognized and he was awarded the David Murray Landscape Scholarship
s, (1955/56/57) the Leverhulme Scholarship (1957), the Royal Academy Gold Medal and the Edward Scott Travelling Scholarship (1958).
While still at the RA, Mr. Palmer began teaching part-time at Winchester School of Art
, where he became a full-time tutor in 1962, and in 1966, the head of the Foundation Department, retiring in December 1986. He then devoted himself full-time to his art. Since the early 1980s he has had a second strong career as a photographer.
, reached their apogee in what she termed "brooch-sculptures"; in all their art are traces and echoes of one another's work. They had three daughters. In 1998, Ellis Palmer died of breast cancer
.
In February 1994, Mr. Palmer took part in a major examination of art created for Coleridge
's Poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. "The Mariner Imagined, Coleridge's Poem and the Artist, 1831-1994", held at Lauderdale House
, Highgate Hill, London, which also featured works by David Scott
, Joseph Noel Paton
, Gustave Dore
, Willy Pogany
, David Jones
, Duncan Grant
, Mervyn Peake
and Patrick Procktor
. The following November his work was shown in an "Exhibition of Wood Engravings used as Book Illustrations", at Oxford University Club, Halifax House, Oxford
. His next participation was in the "Society of Wood Engravers Touring Exhibition", April 1995 - January 1996; Garden Gallery, Pallant House, Chichester
, West Sussex
, an exhibition to mark the "forthcoming publication of LAND", by the Old Stile Press, Llandogo
, Dec. 1995; the "LINE" Gallery, Linlithgow
, Scotland
, January 1996; and Twentieth Century Word Engineering, Exeter City Museums and Art Gallery, February 1997.
, which included Mr. Palmer's first memorable full-page illustration to Benito Cereno
of the head of Babo, the rebellious slave, on a pike in the market square. The Society commissioned him again in 1971 for The Destruction of the Jews, by Josephus
, and in 1974 for Moby Dick, by Melville. Similarly the short-lived Imprint Society in Barre, Massachusetts
, commissioned Mr. Palmer to illustrate H. M. Tomlinson
's classic The Sea and The Jungle in 1971 and Benito Cereno, by Melville, in 1972. The haunting image of the head of Babo on a pole returns, this time with significant differences that highlight Mr. Palmer's artistic development. The Old Stile Press, in Llandogo, succeeded in charming Mr. Palmer back to his boxwood
blocks to illustrate The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, by Oscar Wilde
, in 1994 (225 copies); in the same year he illustrated The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge. The blockbuster book LAND, Old Stile Press, 1996 (240 copies), featured landscape wood engraving in Mr Palmer's "instantly recognizable style" and text by Eric Williams
and soon sold out. Mr. Palmer also illustrated Ship of Sounds, Gruffyground Press, 1981 (130 copies), a poem by John Fuller
.
Museum and Gallery in July 1988. October 1990 saw an "Exhibition of Architectural Photographs" at the Spitfield Gallery, London. Mr. Palmer participated in "A Southern Eye" - Six Photographers, at the Winchester Contemporary Art Gallery in September 1996. In April, 1997 he exhibited photographs of contemporary sculpture at the New Art Centre, Roche Court.
Hampshire County Council
awarded Mr. Palmer a three-year grant in 1997 to photograph "Early Churches in Hampshire", a selection of photographs being shown at Winchester Cathedral
in 1999. Other exhibitions include: photographs of historic churches and landscapes around the area of Butser were shown at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park
Centre in August and September, 2001; "Photographs of Sculpture" at the Hampshire Sculpture Trust Gallery in Winchester, November–December 2002. "FOREST", an exhibition at the Winchester Gallery plus a Southern Arts Touring Exhibition 2002-2003; photographs at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park Centre in 2004. In February–March 2006, Mr. Palmer's show of church interiors, "Places of Worship", was held at Portsmouth Cathedral
; in October–November 2006 "At Any Time" was shown at the Winchester Gallery.
In 2001 Mr. Palmer was commissioned to document the demolition of the site next to Pallant House and the building of the New Pallant House Gallery in Chichester
, a project that occupied him until 2006. His most recent work has been to photograph works by the young New Zealand
artist Makoure Scott for Twenty-First Century Works, a limited edition publication, (Paul Holberton, 2006).
and Paris
, which were pulled by Curwen Prints in London. While colour does highlight Mr. 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", Mr. Palmer responds to the bones and sinews of the earth which he exposes as carefully as an anatomist.
Eleven of these mysterious 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 Mr. Palmer's avid, albeit almost underground, following. Mr. MacDowell sensed that Mr. Palmer "endowed his landscapes with rich layers of story and hinted-at spiritual meaning" These views, Mr. 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 Mr. Palmer, easy and graceful: "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." Mr 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 Mr. Palmer's commissions were largely for books about the sea; Mr. 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 then-interminable seeming strikes
, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 "display the originality of a powerful and visionary artist".
Some of Mr. 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. 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."
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, wood engraver, photographer and teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
. He is a Fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...
of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, until 1991 the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers is an art institution based in London, England. The Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers was a society of etchers established in London in 1880 and given a Royal Charter in 1888...
(retired), the Society of Wood Engravers
Society of Wood Engravers
The Society of Wood Engravers was co-founded in 1920 by British wood engraving artist Gwendoline Raverat, wife of French painter Jacques Raverat.The Society was revived in 1984 by Hilary Paynter. It publishes a bulletin called Multiples....
Associate
Associate
Associate may refer to:* A business valuation concept.* A title used by some companies instead of employee.* A title used to signify an independent person working as if directly employed by the company of which they are an associate...
of the Royal Engravers, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (retired), and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, until 1991 the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers is an art institution based in London, England. The Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers was a society of etchers established in London in 1880 and given a Royal Charter in 1888...
(retired).
Born in Portsmouth
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, Mr. Palmer is the pre-eminent wood engraver of his time. To look at a Palmer is to recognize instantly both the impulses that moved the artist and the unique way in which the he has captured the spirit of the subject. His work is immediately recognizable for the sophisticated perspective of the composition and the vigour of its execution. Largely contained between the boards of classic books reissued by the Imprint Society (Barre, Mass.) and the Folio Society
Folio Society
The Folio Society is a book club based in London that produces new editions of classic books. Their books are notable for their high quality bindings and original illustrations...
(London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
), and on the walls of various public and private collections around the world including the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
and the Fitzwilliam Museum
Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge, located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge, England. It receives around 300,000 visitors annually. Admission is free....
, Mr. Palmer's highly idiosyncratic work has been widely exhibited and is much sought after by connoisseurs of the art.
Biography
The shy and reticent Mr. Palmer has always remained in the Portsmouth area, close to the downs and farm fields he so vividly depicts. From 1945 to 1949 he was educated at St. John's College, SouthseaSouthsea
Southsea is a seaside resort located in Portsmouth at the southern end of Portsea Island in the county of Hampshire in England. Southsea is within a mile of Portsmouth's city centre....
, followed by a National Diploma of Design in painting and engraving from the Portsmouth College of Art and Design. Studying postgraduate courses at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
, London, between 1955 and 1959, his artistic gifts were soon recognized and he was awarded the David Murray Landscape Scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
s, (1955/56/57) the Leverhulme Scholarship (1957), the Royal Academy Gold Medal and the Edward Scott Travelling Scholarship (1958).
While still at the RA, Mr. Palmer began teaching part-time at Winchester School of Art
Winchester School of Art
Winchester School of Art is the art school of the University of Southampton, situated 10 miles north of Southampton in the city of Winchester near the south coast of England.- Overview :...
, where he became a full-time tutor in 1962, and in 1966, the head of the Foundation Department, retiring in December 1986. He then devoted himself full-time to his art. Since the early 1980s he has had a second strong career as a photographer.
Personal life
While a student at art college Mr. Palmer met the young Ellis Leach-Moore, like him a native of Portsmouth. Her study encompassed jewellery making and silversmithing. They were married on July 11, 1959. Mrs. Palmer's distinct, unique conceptions, frequently using the bones of monkfishMonkfish
Monkfish is the English name of a number of types of fish in the northwest Atlantic, most notably the species of the anglerfish genus Lophius and the angelshark genus Squatina...
, reached their apogee in what she termed "brooch-sculptures"; in all their art are traces and echoes of one another's work. They had three daughters. In 1998, Ellis Palmer died of breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
.
Exhibitions - Paintings and Engravings
Mr. Palmer has showed work at the following exhibitions:- RAA Summer Exhibition in 1956/57/58/60, followed by the
- Wildenstein Gallery, London, 1961;
- Piccadilly Gallery, 1961;
- Ashgate Gallery, FarnhamFarnhamFarnham is a town in Surrey, England, within the Borough of Waverley. The town is situated some 42 miles southwest of London in the extreme west of Surrey, adjacent to the border with Hampshire...
, 1962 and 1967; - Reading Art Gallery (engravings only), 1964;
- Ash Barn Gallery, PetersfieldPetersfield, HampshirePetersfield is a market town and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. It is north of Portsmouth, on the A3 road. The town has its own railway station on the Portsmouth Direct Line, the mainline rail link connecting Portsmouth and London. The town is situated on the...
, 1965–66; - Southampton University, 1969-1976(?);
- Atelier d'Art, AmsterdamAmsterdamAmsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, 1970; - RetrospectiveRetrospectiveRetrospective generally means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. For example, the term is used in medicine, describing a look back at a patient's medical history or lifestyle.-Music:...
, Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery, 1973; - Swansea UniversitySwansea UniversitySwansea University is a university located in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom. Swansea University was chartered as University College of Swansea in 1920, as the fourth college of the University of Wales. In 1996, it changed its name to the University of Wales Swansea following structural changes...
, SwanseaSwanseaSwansea is a coastal city and county in Wales. Swansea is in the historic county boundaries of Glamorgan. Situated on the sandy South West Wales coast, the county area includes the Gower Peninsula and the Lliw uplands...
, WalesWalesWales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, 1975; - "Five Artists", Southampton Art Gallery, 1975;
- Yew Tree Gallery, DerbyshireDerbyshireDerbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. A substantial portion of the Peak District National Park lies within Derbyshire. The northern part of Derbyshire overlaps with the Pennines, a famous chain of hills and mountains. The county contains within its boundary of approx...
, 1977; - Galerie Ismene, PyreneesPyreneesThe Pyrenees is a range of mountains in southwest Europe that forms a natural border between France and Spain...
, FranceFranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, 1978; - "Xylon - International Triennial Exhibition of Wood Engravings", FribourgFribourgFribourg is the capital of the Swiss canton of Fribourg and the district of Sarine. It is located on both sides of the river Saane/Sarine, on the Swiss plateau, and is an important economic, administrative and educational center on the cultural border between German and French Switzerland...
, SwitzerlandSwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, 1979; - Portsmouth/Duisburg Exhibition, Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery, 1980;
- the "International Exhibition of Wood Engraving", Hereford Art Gallery, by invitation, 1984;
- "Engraving Then and Now", the retrospectiveRetrospectiveRetrospective generally means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. For example, the term is used in medicine, describing a look back at a patient's medical history or lifestyle.-Music:...
50th exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers, 1988; - Southern Arts Exhibition of contemporary wood engraving, 1989;
- Artists Prints, Hill Court Gallery, AbergavennyAbergavennyAbergavenny , meaning Mouth of the River Gavenny, is a market town in Monmouthshire, Wales. It is located 15 miles west of Monmouth on the A40 and A465 roads, 6 miles from the English border. Originally the site of a Roman fort, Gobannium, it became a medieval walled town within the Welsh Marches...
, WalesWalesWales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, May 1994.
In February 1994, Mr. Palmer took part in a major examination of art created for Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
's Poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and was published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss...
. "The Mariner Imagined, Coleridge's Poem and the Artist, 1831-1994", held at Lauderdale House
Lauderdale House
Lauderdale House is an arts and education centre based in Waterlow Park, Highgate in north London, England. As an arts centre, it runs an extensive programme of performances, workshops, outreach projects and exhibitions....
, Highgate Hill, London, which also featured works by David Scott
David Scott
David Randolph Scott is an American engineer, test pilot, retired U.S. Air Force officer, and former NASA astronaut and engineer, who was one of the third group of astronauts selected by NASA in October 1963...
, Joseph Noel Paton
Joseph Noel Paton
Sir Joseph Noel Paton FRSA, LL. D. was a Scottish artist, born in Wooer's Alley, Dunfermline, Fife.Born to a family of weavers who worked with damask, Joseph continued the family trade for a short time...
, Gustave Dore
Gustave Doré
Paul Gustave Doré was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving and steel engraving.-Biography:...
, Willy Pogany
Willy Pogany
William Andrew Pogany was a prolific Hungarian illustrator of children's and other books.-Biography:...
, David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...
, Duncan Grant
Duncan Grant
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...
, Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R...
and Patrick Procktor
Patrick Procktor
Patrick Procktor RA was a prominent English artist of the late 20th century.-Early life:Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin, the younger son of an oil company accountant, but moved to London when his father died in 1940...
. The following November his work was shown in an "Exhibition of Wood Engravings used as Book Illustrations", at Oxford University Club, Halifax House, Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
. His next participation was in the "Society of Wood Engravers Touring Exhibition", April 1995 - January 1996; Garden Gallery, Pallant House, Chichester
Chichester
Chichester is a cathedral city in West Sussex, within the historic County of Sussex, South-East England. It has a long history as a settlement; its Roman past and its subsequent importance in Anglo-Saxon times are only its beginnings...
, West Sussex
West Sussex
West Sussex is a county in the south of England, bordering onto East Sussex , Hampshire and Surrey. The county of Sussex has been divided into East and West since the 12th century, and obtained separate county councils in 1888, but it remained a single ceremonial county until 1974 and the coming...
, an exhibition to mark the "forthcoming publication of LAND", by the Old Stile Press, Llandogo
Llandogo
Llandogo is a small village in Monmouthshire, south Wales, located between Monmouth and Chepstow in the lower reaches of the Wye Valley AONB, two miles north of Tintern. It is set on a steep hillside overlooking the River Wye and across into the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England.- History...
, Dec. 1995; the "LINE" Gallery, Linlithgow
Linlithgow
Linlithgow is a Royal Burgh in West Lothian, Scotland. An ancient town, it lies south of its two most prominent landmarks: Linlithgow Palace and Linlithgow Loch, and north of the Union Canal....
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, January 1996; and Twentieth Century Word Engineering, Exeter City Museums and Art Gallery, February 1997.
Commissions and Reviews
The strength and vigour of Mr. Palmer's work found particular expression in landscape and the sea. In 1967, the Folio Society awarded him his first commission, to illustrate Three Stories by Herman MelvilleHerman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
, which included Mr. Palmer's first memorable full-page illustration to Benito Cereno
Benito Cereno
Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville. It was first serialized in Putnam's Monthly in 1855 and later included in slightly revised version in his collection The Piazza Tales .-Plot summary:...
of the head of Babo, the rebellious slave, on a pike in the market square. The Society commissioned him again in 1971 for The Destruction of the Jews, by Josephus
Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
, and in 1974 for Moby Dick, by Melville. Similarly the short-lived Imprint Society in Barre, Massachusetts
Barre, Massachusetts
Barre is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 5,398 at the 2010 census.-History:Originally called the Northwest District of Rutland, it was first settled in 1720. The town was incorporated on June 17, 1774, as Hutchinson after Thomas Hutchinson, colonial...
, commissioned Mr. Palmer to illustrate H. M. Tomlinson
H. M. Tomlinson
Henry Major Tomlinson was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea.He was brought up in Poplar, London...
's classic The Sea and The Jungle in 1971 and Benito Cereno, by Melville, in 1972. The haunting image of the head of Babo on a pole returns, this time with significant differences that highlight Mr. Palmer's artistic development. The Old Stile Press, in Llandogo, succeeded in charming Mr. Palmer back to his boxwood
Buxus
Buxus is a genus of about 70 species in the family Buxaceae. Common names include box or boxwood ....
blocks to illustrate The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile either in Berneval or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol on or about 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading, after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard...
, by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, in 1994 (225 copies); in the same year he illustrated The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge. The blockbuster book LAND, Old Stile Press, 1996 (240 copies), featured landscape wood engraving in Mr Palmer's "instantly recognizable style" and text by Eric Williams
Eric Williams
Eric Eustace Williams served as the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He served from 1956 until his death in 1981. He was also a noted Caribbean historian, and is widely regarded as "The Father of The Nation."...
and soon sold out. Mr. Palmer also illustrated Ship of Sounds, Gruffyground Press, 1981 (130 copies), a poem by John Fuller
John Fuller (poet)
John Fuller is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.Fuller was born in Ashford, Kent, England, the son of poet and Oxford Professor Roy Fuller, and educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford. He began teaching in 1962 at the State University of New...
.
A New Career As Photographer
Mr. Palmer has always had a strong interest in photography, especially in black and white, which parallels his expressive wood engravings. Beginning in 1983, he has had numerous commissions and exhibitions: Exhibition of Orkney & Shetland, The Winchester Gallery, 1983; a grant from Southern Arts for a Portsmouth project, 1985; commission to produce photographs of sculptures in Hampshire for the newly-formed Hampshire Sculpture Trust, January 1987, followed by its opening exhibition in May 1987, followed by an exhibition of the prints at the Winchester Gallery in July 1987. In November 1987, the City of Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery held an exhibition of his photographs, entitled "Portsmouth, A Personal Reflection", which moved to the HavantHavant
Havant is a town in south east Hampshire on the South coast of England, between Portsmouth and Chichester. It gives its name to the borough comprising the town and the surrounding area. The town has rapidly grown since the end of the Second World War.It has good railway connections to London,...
Museum and Gallery in July 1988. October 1990 saw an "Exhibition of Architectural Photographs" at the Spitfield Gallery, London. Mr. Palmer participated in "A Southern Eye" - Six Photographers, at the Winchester Contemporary Art Gallery in September 1996. In April, 1997 he exhibited photographs of contemporary sculpture at the New Art Centre, Roche Court.
Hampshire County Council
Hampshire County Council
Hampshire County Council is the county council that governs the majority of the county of Hampshire in England. It provides the upper tier of local government, below which are district councils, and town and parish councils...
awarded Mr. Palmer a three-year grant in 1997 to photograph "Early Churches in Hampshire", a selection of photographs being shown at Winchester Cathedral
Winchester Cathedral
Winchester Cathedral at Winchester in Hampshire is one of the largest cathedrals in England, with the longest nave and overall length of any Gothic cathedral in Europe...
in 1999. Other exhibitions include: photographs of historic churches and landscapes around the area of Butser were shown at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park
Queen Elizabeth Country Park
Queen Elizabeth Country Park is a large country park situated on the South Downs in southern England. It is located on the A3 road three miles south of Petersfield, Hampshire....
Centre in August and September, 2001; "Photographs of Sculpture" at the Hampshire Sculpture Trust Gallery in Winchester, November–December 2002. "FOREST", an exhibition at the Winchester Gallery plus a Southern Arts Touring Exhibition 2002-2003; photographs at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park Centre in 2004. In February–March 2006, Mr. Palmer's show of church interiors, "Places of Worship", was held at Portsmouth Cathedral
Portsmouth Cathedral
The Cathedral Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Portsmouth, commonly known as Portsmouth Cathedral, is the Church of England cathedral of the City of Portsmouth, England and is located in the heart of Old Portsmouth...
; in October–November 2006 "At Any Time" was shown at the Winchester Gallery.
In 2001 Mr. Palmer was commissioned to document the demolition of the site next to Pallant House and the building of the New Pallant House Gallery in Chichester
Chichester
Chichester is a cathedral city in West Sussex, within the historic County of Sussex, South-East England. It has a long history as a settlement; its Roman past and its subsequent importance in Anglo-Saxon times are only its beginnings...
, a project that occupied him until 2006. His most recent work has been to photograph works by the young New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
artist Makoure Scott for Twenty-First Century Works, a limited edition publication, (Paul Holberton, 2006).
Discussion of Mr. Palmer's work
Like any true artist, Mr. 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." Mr. 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; Mr. Bishop attributed this to Mr. 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 Mr. Bishop, who has a rich vein to mine: Mr. 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 YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, which were pulled by Curwen Prints in London. While colour does highlight Mr. 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", Mr. Palmer responds to the bones and sinews of the earth which he exposes as carefully as an anatomist.
Eleven of these mysterious 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 Mr. Palmer's avid, albeit almost underground, following. Mr. MacDowell sensed that Mr. Palmer "endowed his landscapes with rich layers of story and hinted-at spiritual meaning" These views, Mr. 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 Mr. Palmer, easy and graceful: "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
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab may refer to:* Ahab , the captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick* Captain Ahab , a Los Angeles based pop/electronic band...
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." Mr 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 Mr. Palmer's commissions were largely for books about the sea; Mr. 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
Billy Budd
Billy Budd is a short novel by Herman Melville.Billy Budd can also refer to:*Billy Budd , a 1962 film produced, directed, and co-written by Peter Ustinov, based on Melville's novel...
reflect the treacherous bonds of society and fate."
In 1969, in response to one of British Telecom's then-interminable seeming strikes
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
, Mr. 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
Fribourg
Fribourg is the capital of the Swiss canton of Fribourg and the district of Sarine. It is located on both sides of the river Saane/Sarine, on the Swiss plateau, and is an important economic, administrative and educational center on the cultural border between German and French Switzerland...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, 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, Mr. 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
Ian Mortimer
Ian Mortimer is a Canadian sprint canoer who has competed in the World Canoe Championships and trains with the sprint canoe national team of Canada...
in an edition
Edition
In printmaking, an edition is a number of prints struck from one plate, usually at the same time. This is the meaning covered by this article...
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 "display the originality of a powerful and visionary artist".
Some of Mr. Palmer's most recent work is contained in The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile either in Berneval or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol on or about 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading, after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard...
, published by Old Stile in 1994, between wine-red silk moire boards and a matching slipcover
Slipcover
A slipcover is a fitted protective cover that may be slipped off and on a piece of upholstered furniture. Slipcovers are usually made of cloth...
, 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. It is as much a portrait of the author of De Profundis
De Profundis (letter)
De Profundis is an epistle written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas. During its first half Wilde recounts their previous relationship and extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to Wilde's conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency...
looking in as the prisoner looking out, the veil lifting for the eyes."
External links
- http://www.garrickpalmer.co.uk