People in the Landscape: the Paintings of Anthony Eyton
There are several great perks or benefits to being a documentary filmmaker. One is the way in which, for a short time, you get a privileged glimpse, behind the scenes, into a particular way of life; and following on from that – the varied and interesting characters that you’re fortunate enough to get to meet.
Until recently of all the people that I’ve met the most inspiring by far was the Godfather of the folk movement, Pete Seeger. To me, he seemed a extraordinarily wise and kind and principled man. But running him pretty close is the subject of my recent film, the Royal Academician and Royal Watercolour Society artist, Anthony Eyton. I liked him immediately – and oddly enough I discovered that everybody he came across felt the same.
For the purposes of our programme we were inspired to take Anthony back to the Eden Project where he was artist in residence during the construction of the iconic Rain forest and Mediterranean Biomes. Our idea was to take Anthony back to Eden but in the company of his fellow artists, Fay Ballard, Julie Held and Neil Pittaway, and to record them all as they attempted to create paintings of the Project.
Tim Smit, the founder of Eden, explained how he persuaded Anthony to get involved. “I’ve known Anthony’s work since I was eighteen because my father in law, Christopher Pinsent, was a very close personal friend of his. I bumped into Anthony and heard that he was actually doing some work at the Bankside and I thought ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an artist in residence down here’.
As Anthony explains, however, it took a while before he decided to take on the project. “Tim took me around the pit when it was just a clay pit – lovely pinks and roses and lovely colours. My one regret is that I didn’t paint it there and then but I sort of shilly shallied.” But eventually Anthony agreed to start work, and never looked back.
Tim Smit has remained a huge fan, not only of the work, but also of Tony himself. “You’ve got to imagine this place with huge divots with water in and mud, and these big trucks going everywhere and Anthony set up next to a portacabin where they did the bacon butties and tea in the morning. Every morning the guys that were building were coming up to stand around Tony and it went from ‘here’s a poncey artist – what the hell are these guys at Eden doing?’ – to seeing him as their champion – telling their story”
Anthony memories of that time are equally fond. “Behind me was the canteen so every man who worked there had to pass by and they’d say ‘have you got me in yet?’ and I was wearing an apron like a butcher and they’d say ‘have you got the sausages ready?’ There was a lot of camaraderie between the work force and I related to them, and of course I tried to put them in the pictures.”
And despite the conditions (what Anthony described as ‘like the Creation. I don’t know which day of creation it was – when everything was void and clay and chaos…’) despite this the work has stood the test of time. According to Tim the paintings are ‘…so full of life that with each succeeding year the work gets better and better because the memory – the actual living through it – you forget the excitement , the movement, the sheer bravura of what was going on – but his paintings capture that perfectly.”
Despite these accolades, and despite his solid reputation in the Art world, Anthony confessed to a certain amount of trepidation when invited to revisit Eden. “I was a bag of nerves!’ he admitted. “I haven’t got the answers in my painting – I’m searching all the time. It’s not a repetitious thing. It’s always an adventure, a new thing.”
it is certainly this freshness of approach that gives Anthony’s work it’s energy and vigour. It is easy to use words like ‘impressionistic’ and ‘gestural’ and tempting as ever to look for influences and antecedents, but Anthony himself finds it equally hard to pin down. “Influences?” he says. “It’s the whole world really, from Rembrandt to Giotto to Picasso.” Perhaps fellow artist Fay Ballard, who has known Anthony and his work for many years, summed it up as well as anyone. “He is, I think, one of the great artists living today in Britain. His eye is extraordinary. He has this wonderful ability to create space in all his paintings, however loose they might seem. They have a spacial sense that takes you deep into the vanishing point at the back of his work, and I think that’s a real skill. His work is always so fresh. I never know what I am going to get when I look at an Anthony Eyton painting.”
Anthony studied at the Camberwell School of Art, and he subsequently taught there, and at the Royal Academy Schools. One of his many commissions includes recording the transformation of what was the Bankside Power Station into what is now the Tate Modern art gallery. He is equally at home in the mediums of oil, pastels and watercolour and although he is just as well known for portraits and still life studies his favourite subject is ‘the relation of people to the landscape.”
“It is an adventure. To get words, or thoughts, into paint. As I’ve been a painter since I was sixteen I’m pretty used to wanting to explain myself in paint – and watercolour is I think the most difficult medium of all because you have to commit yourself, you have to keep it fluid, you have to keep a sense of the paper – the whiteness of the paper.’
It was Fay Ballard and Julie Held’s friendship with Anthony, as well as their personal skill and renown as artists in their own rite, that saw them travel down to Eden to work with Anthony. They were both pretty protective of their friend and mentor and, rightly, worried that he didn’t overdo it during the film shoot. But, as Fay admits, Anthony ‘…looks so frail in many ways but actually he’s a wonderfully strong tiger. He seems to know everyone and everyone adores him. He doesn’t miss a trick. He’s always got his sketchbook in his hand. He lives for his art in the nicest possible way.”
Anthony admitted that actually he had always wanted to have a go at the subject of the painting he took on during our filming. Typically, he was determined to work in the Tropical Biome despite a temperature and humidity that demands that Eden has exits throughout the Biome in case anyone finds it too much. Anthony did admit that it was ‘terribly hot and that did have an effect.” Whatever that effect was he still managed to work in the Biome for something like six hours – a marathon effort that had the film crew wilting and sending out for copious liquid and refreshment.
The resultant painting, a study of two hot air balloons used for trimming the inaccessible tops of the plant life, has all of Anthony’s characteristic energy and brio. And, despite the trauma of having a film crew at his shoulder, Anthony seemed to enjoy the experience. “To be watched during the whole process – one’s ups and downs – one’s shouts of joy if there were any – that’s an unusual thing I think. Having an audience brings out an energy and also a certain urgency to one’s painting. One really had to get on with it – no fussing about – and the ensuing excitement was very good really.”
Certainly both his work and his personality have ensured that Anthony has left an enduring legacy. And, as Tim Smit reiterates, Eden “…has been very proud to work with Tony. He’s got such a pirate grin. Great kindness, great talent, and a joie de vivre which is just mischievous and wicked.”
But it works both ways. For an artist it is often an unexpected joy to work in the public arena rather than the confines of the studio. Being an artist, as Tony admits “….is a solitary occupation. As an artist you never get applause – you work in isolation – and you’re always pleasantly surprised when somebody says ‘oh I saw your picture and liked it.’ Here I had an active audience to cheer me on a bit and that helped my psychology. I think I like to be liked and recognised. To feel I’m doing some good in the world by bringing my appreciation of nature into being. What more could I want really?”
Further reading: