DERRICK GREAVES. CHROMA
‘I have to fight for the colour, it has to be right. My colour is very personal, I follow my instincts. But it is also very measured. I want clarity in all the parts of the painting. This is why you can count the colours. You can see three different yellows, two reds, a blue. The lines, the ground, each is countable, like in a Léger. But the final painting is a total feeling that comes from all these countables.’
Derrick Greaves, interview with Cathy Courtney, 1999
James Hyman Gallery is delighted to present the online exhibition, Derrick Greaves. Chroma. The exhibition coincides with his museum show, Derrick Greaves. Art Worlds, at the Graves Arts Gallery Sheffield (25 January – 21 May 2025)
Derrick Greaves. Chroma celebrates Greaves work as a colourist and presents works in which a heightened colour is central to their impact. As Greaves explained in an interview reflecting on the development of his work:
‘I saw that if I was to re-evaluate the chromatic structure, the tone, the line, so that all the elements could be democratic, then I had to put on the paint in the simplest, most direct way. I painted more flatly so that I could see what I was doing, so I could judge the relationship of an area of paint to a line next to it: to assess proportion and juxtapositions in a valued and measured way…. I realise there is an audience that likes the bravura, the attack, the spirit of the painter: from John Singer Sargeant to Vincent Van Gogh - they love the brushstroke. People feel after my fifties work, the brushstrokes are missing. I feel, however, that this showiness gets in the way. I don’t want traces of the hand or finicky touches. I don’t want to make a great show of me on the canvas. I’m the opposite of an expressionist painter trying to grab the spectator. I want to paint myself out of a picture so that the feeling of a painting is everything. I want people to bring themselves to the picture.’
Whilst in the work of artists such as Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Derek Jarman colour is associated with emotion, in the paintings of Derrick Greaves it works differently:
“Van Gogh’s work was about high chroma but also hysteria, and my own work was somewhat critical of that. The suffering that he went through was something that I didn’t share, that self-martyrdom. I’m more detached and intellectually removed than that. But I did a lot of drawings around that theme so it must have had a significance that was heavy enough for me to go on doing it. (Derrick Greaves, interview with James Hyman, 14 April 2006.)
Instead Greaves uses colour alongside line, in a way that often recalls the way that the lead calme holds the glass of a stained glass or the metal wires contain the enamel of a cloisonné. The results are bold, powerful, witty and exhilarating.
This is an online exhibition, please contact us to view works. All works are for sale and are offered subject to availability and price revision.
Sales enquiries:
Becky Martin
becky@jameshymangallery.com
James Hyman
james@jameshymangallery.com
07766331697
