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Victor Willing (1928-1988)
Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd
2 November 2000 — 13 January 2001
Victor Willing
Edited by Fiona Bradley
with contributions from Lynne Cooke, John McEwan, John Mills, Paula
Rego and Nicholas Serota
August Media Ltd, London, 2000.
The exhibition of Victor Willing’s paintings
at Marlborough Fine Art supports the publication of the book, VICTOR
WILLING by August, which sets out to, "re-present Victor Willing
to a new generation of artists and viewers, to document his work
and explore it in the light of what is happening now.
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| Cythere, 1982, oil on canvas, 250 x 400 cm |
His enigmatic large-scale paintings set the scene
for narratives already played out or still to come: they remain
relevant to the work of contemporary artists who explore fractured
narratives in both painting and photography, often through objects
fraught with complex suggestion, like those found in Willing’s
work". (1) I count myself as one of that new generation of
artists for whom seeing the vast, confident, fresh canvases at Marlborough
this month was an enlightening and inspiring experience.
The book is a necessary source for anybody who falls
under the spell of these paintings but who knows little of Willing
or his interesting but tragically short career. With curators, critics
and commentators — including Paula Rego, his widow and his
own writings, for Willing was an articulate commentator on art and
on his own work, the book fills a gap in the literature on Willing
and on the period: John McEwan’s essay is particularly fine;
he was a close friend of the artist and conducted many interviews
and conversations with him.
A year after graduating from the Slade School of Art
in 1954, Willing’s talent and potential were recognised when
he exhibited at the Hanover Gallery. Nicholas Serota (in 1986) described
him as the brightest of a bright generation, "a fiery comet
which would eventually guide us all". (2) However, Willing
married Paula Rego and moved to Portugal where he worked in her
father’s business. His career as a painter was effectively
postponed, yet when he returned to London and to painting in 1974
he did so with a maturity and confidence which his 1978 exhibition
at Moira Kelly’s AIR gallery displayed. A retrospective at
the Whitechapel in 1986 confirmed his reputation yet his death in
1988 from multiple sclerosis cut short his important career.
Of all the paintings in the Marlborough show , Cythere
- painted in 1982 when Willing was confined to a wheelchair and
during the year of his artistic residency at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge — reveals the skill and vision of a brilliant mind
and a passionate and courageous individual facing his own mortality.
The clarity and strength in visual terms allude to the cruelty of
chance, the blackness of death portrayed in terms of the unknown
in psychological terms, and the flourishing organic forms that signify
life and the personal battle against terminal illness.
In his essay Images of the Self, he quotes
from on of Willing’s favorite books, Friederich Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy, given to Willing by Francis Bacon:
"With sublime gestures he reveals to us how the whole world
of torment is necessary so that the individual can create the redeeming
vision, and then, immersed in contemplation of it, sit peacefully
in his tossing boat amid the waves". (3) As McEwan observes
the quote from Nietzsche "is uncannily apposite to his own
experience…….The necessary ‘torment’ created,
for him and many others, what was indeed a ‘redeeming vision’.
Thus, to an extraordinary degree he fulfilled what seems like his
destiny". (4)
Willing and Rego, like many of their generation were
interested in Surrealism and the role of the subconscious in art.
Both underwent Jungian analysis:
"For Jung, dreams suggested a striving towards individuation.
According to his analytical psychology, man is always seeking
creative development, wholeness and completion. It was only when
Willing hit rock bottom and started painting as a form of renewal
in London in the 1970s, that he expressed as art what he had sensed
in Portugal, and found his own form of fulfilment.
As he explained: ‘All my life I’ve tried to recapture
the intense pleasure in painting and drawing I had as a child,
when I did battles with people going -Aaaaaarrgh!" (5)
There is a candour and a clarity inherent in the works on show
in the Marlborough exhibition that one associates with the contentment
of infancy, but the works do not stop there. The series Heads,
(1986) was Willing’s last, indeed he painted them from his
bed. As Paula Rego recalls, "Imagine doing that when you
are incapacitated. Such assurance, and a humour that was devastating".
(6)
Willing’s struggle to paint again after virtually twenty years
and his struggle to come to terms with his illness and inevitable
premature death, provide an insight into the creative process. His
illness made him restless, at times hyperactive. His dreams informed
his art greatly.
"I’m not painting pictures to assert my position in
the world or in response to thinking what I’m doing as a
career. I don’t paint pictures to improve the world. I don’t
do it out of a didactic or pedagogic spirit at all. `I’m
really painting very much for myself, to discover myself in a
way. You see, the world around you looks at you and thinks of
you as a person who has certain occupations and achievements.
And so this is the person you present to the world. And you work
on that person. To some extent you think as yourself as that person
and you’d like to be better at it. You’d like to present
an image of yourself to the world that might be more distinguished
or more glamorous; but this leaves untouched the person only you
know…….Now I think my painting is almost exclusively
to do with that self which is normally neglected. It’s very
difficult to know how to go about painting that." (7)
John McEwan’s excellent essay in Victor draws on the
interviews and conversations with him over many years.
"There could not be a more precise description of the genesis
and effect of Willing’s late paintings than Bachelard’s
description from the chapter ‘Reveries towards Childhood’:
Between the light melancholy from which all reverie is born and
the distant melancholy of a child who has dreamed a lot, there
is a profound harmony".
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| "Aha, so there you are", 1980, oil
on canvas. 200 x 200 cm |
This fusion of past and present, of dream and daylight, found hallucinatory
reality as Willing sat in his Stepney studio. Just as reverie hovers
between waking and dreaming, so his pictures exist in a state of
many — layered consciousness: between mass and void, inside
and out, wall and sky, floor and sand, Egypt and Portugal, past
and present. Place, marks this meeting of experience and
desire, its title ambiguous and yet assertive, even proud: ‘This
is it", it seems to say, ‘this is where I make my stand.
The past ends, the future starts, here’.(8)
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Fiona Bradley, "Introduction", Victor Willing,
August, London, 2000, p.10.
(2) Ibid, p.10.
(3) John McEwan, "Images of the Self", ibid, p.23.
(4) Ibid, p.23.
(5) Ibid, p.23.
(6) Paula Rego interviewed by Valerie Grove.
(7) Victor willing quoted by McEwan, op.cit., p.32
(8) J. McEwan, ibid, pp. 38-39
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