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There is something immediately recognisable about a painting by John Lessore. Even more than the precisely articulated composition or the restrained palette, it is the quality of light: a discreet but intense gleam that permeates his pictures' characteristically sombre tones, like a sun shining darkly through a tapestry. The source of the light remains enigmatic. In interiors like the “Sunday” series, it can turn a refrigerator into a gleaming rectangle of ice, while the flesh tones of the female figures busying themselves around the lunch table communicate a soft, innerly absorbed radiance. Outside, the light becomes more clearly still the real subject of Lessore's painting. Like the verb in a sentence, it creates the action, taking the eye from a lawn's acid brightness through a mass of near-black foliage to the sullen reflections of a day dying on a wall. Essentially the light confers mysteriousness on what would otherwise be the most unremarkable and everyday scenes: a family gathers, the artist studies his model, a woman writes a letter. But the pictures are filled with a range of observations and emotions - some of them barely conscious, others tirelessly sketched out and mulled over for days in the studio - which the artist has caught in a single image. So the one instant is freighted with the memories of hundreds of others, giving the particular the density to survive. And the figures in these scenes (they are almost always peopled) radiate a quattrocento-like self-consciousness, as if they knew their actions and surroundings had a deeper meaning and that they themselves had been spun out of a welter of memory and desire. Nothing could appear more unassuming than this low-key recording of the artist's daily round. Yet, to begin with, it spans three quite separate worlds. There is Lessore's London, where he was born and brought up, and whose melancholy beauty he has long recorded. Then there is Lessore's France, the country of his forefathers, an altogether brighter and more sensuous place, where the pleasures of life are publicly shared and celebrated. Then, somewhere between, there is Lessore's Norfolk, where he has long owned a cottage to which he retreats regularly to work at different periods throughout the year. Norfolk has proved essential to Lessore's range as a painter, as this exhibition amply bears out, primarily because of its unusual qualities of light, which Lessore sees as spilling in unchecked from the sea, flooding both landscape and interior. The sense of light bouncing off water is almost tangible in a painting like “The Life Room, Norwich School of Art”, where Lessore taught for a considerable period of his career: the light from the river below the School glitters on ceiling and walls, then weaves itself around the figures, giving their strivings amid plaster casts and models, studies and skeletons, an almost heroic significance. No less dramatic, in its consistently understated way, is the diary he has kept of memorable events at his cottage retreat: the hurricane, the fallen willow and the roof rethatched. In a different region, in another light, Lessore is always in pursuit of the same thing: the magic in the ordinary, the memorable in the everyday. It is all around us, all the time, but it takes the artist's eye to find it and to give it a durable existence. © Michael Peppiatt |