The Dartmouth Five

The Dartmouth Five - An extract from ‘Dartmouth, An Enchanted Place’ by Joslin Fiennes

Twenty-five odd years after the Dartmouth Five came here, Dartmouth has many artists. But in

the early 1980s, when John Gillo, then Andras Kaldor, Simon Drew, John Donaldson and Paul Riley first arrived, there were very few. Dartmouth was different then – very quiet, they say. Kaldor remembers Foss Street, where Drew found a place to live and work, as a back alley. On the South Embankment there was a coal merchant and a petrol station with a great crane supporting the fuel pipe. But it always had a solid group of people involved with sailing and/or the navy, and had supported a good bookshop for some thirty years. Bruce and Nicolette Coward, who owned the Harbour Bookshop from 1981, remember hosting the first Gillo-Kaldor exhibition after Andras had come in to chat carrying a big pot of paint. When he dropped it, the lid came off, and the floor was covered in paint. He was so mortified that he returned with a bottle of wine, and the friendship began.

This exhibition, says Gillo, sowed the seeds for the group. They promoted their art through joint publicity and exhibitions. Stunts were never far behind. During an exhibition at the Lymington Gallery in Hampshire, celebrated in a restaurant afterwards, Donaldson played a piano suspended from the ceiling – hoisted up on the chair. They painted a mural at Café Alf Resco’s on Lower Street. It’s partially hidden by an extension, but you can still see it from the other side of the street. They exhibited jointly in Henley, Newmarket, Cowes, and the Country Living Fair in Islington. They did Christmas shows for their children – synchronised swimming behind a blue cloth, wearing bathing hats, trunks and clothes pegs on their noses, and a nativity in which Kaldor, the Virgin Mary, had to carry Riley (the smallest) as Jesus to a manger under the supervision of Drew as the Archangel – but Riley was still dropped into it. At the dress rehearsal for the swimming, Donaldson remembers that they were standing on a dais in the exhibition room, mostly in underpants with noseclips, practising receiving their gold medals, when in walked a family to look at the paintings. They froze. Very slowly, the family went from painting to painting, until they came to the unmoving tableau, considered it, and moved on. They had created their first piece of installation art, a true Gilbert and George.

Wives were always an integral part of it, critics of the art, managers of the business, organizers and morale boosters. They remember lots of dinners, particularly at Sally’s Bistro at the Kaldors’ place and regular eating at the Gillos’, Drews’ and Rileys’. They went on holidays together, to the vineyards of Bordeaux (this spawned an art exhibition in the restaurants of Dartmouth with a food-and-wine theme), and elsewhere in the south of France.

What held them together? They all say Dartmouth, they all say friendship and they all say food. Was it the art? Gillo says ‘the group meant a huge amount to me for both inspiration and support. They have all been true friends over the last thirty years or so. It has been great to watch our work develop with shared inspiration and ideas. We all work in our own way, but we all pursue visual goals that are ultimately philosophical.’ Drew points out that because art is fairly solitary, being with like-minded artists was tremendously encouraging, and that combined exhibitions attracted attention and helped sales. But for him and the others, the company and having a good time were equally important. As Riley says ‘There was great camaraderie and mutual respect. We had a good time and we supported each other’.

John Gillo

The first to arrive of the five, John Gillo set up a gallery in Dartmouth in 1976. He had studied

at Brighton School of Art, and in the early days taught art, first in Falmouth School of Art and then Churston Grammar School. ‘During the winter of 1976’, he says, ‘I realised that the idea of teaching art for the next thirty-plus years was totally abhorrent and one particularly boozy evening with a friend...we decided to go out and set up a gallery.’

At first, Gillo’s work was about abstract ideas to do with colour interaction, often on a large scale. Since this did not work commercially, he turned to traditional watercolours, mostly of Dartmouth and the surrounding villages. Within that discipline he found himself still trying to develop complex patterns and structures. ‘Some of the work I now shudder to think of’ he says. But some he still likes. Now, he has gone back to acrylic and more abstraction. Still within what he calls a ‘landscape format’, it is an exploration of distortion.

River Mouth (used as the book’s cover illustration) nudges the architectural chaos perched on Dartmouth’s hills to make a subtle vortex of houses tipping off their foundations with the same shifting landscape appearing through the colours of the water while the clouds above scud off to the far right. The buildings, water and clouds become a maelstrom, with the painter and viewer inside; his painting Two Ferries moves with the same dynamic.

Mackerel uses complementary colours to create a sense of constant movement caught by shifting light from above and below. He says ‘Fish lend themselves to this composition, highly directional, they flash through the water reflecting light and colour.’

Andras Kaldor

Andras Kaldor is a man of contradictions. He is an architect who is a painter. His passion is the

belle époque of European baroque, or, failing that, of grand historic city houses and terraces, and he lives in a small town that has only one – the Naval College.He paints buildings but never uses a ruler.  He is Hungarian and has exhibited and worked in, among other places, New York, Washington, Berlin, Budapest and Paris, but always comes back to Dartmouth.

Kaldor thinks of terraces like musical scores, moving through repeated but not identical architectural motifs, harmony but punctuated with contrasts to give it a dynamic. But then he thinks one can get too esoteric about art and should just enjoy it.

Compare The Budapest Opera House with what he calls ‘the stark concrete years of the sixties and seventies’ and you can see why Kaldor gave up architecture – although he stuck at it for twenty years. The tough early times of full-time painting ended when Prince Charles called the proposed extension to the National Gallery ‘a carbuncle’, and Kaldor mounted ‘Carbuncles or Masterpieces?’ in a London gallery on historic London buildings and terraces. (He denies England has much proper baroque, but he found a bit.) Commissions followed for more paintings of buildings in London and Washington, and then came European railways and opera houses, combining his love of the music of the grand opera and the architecture of opera houses.

Turning to art was one of the dodgy times in Kaldor’s life. But the dodgiest, he says, was when he left Hungary at seventeen as Russian tanks were rolling in on the revolution of 1956. Once safely in Vienna he organised travel to England, and found a place at Edinburgh University to study architecture. His architectural career in London and Yorkshire brought him to Plymouth and sailing the coast to Dartmouth.

Paul Riley

Paul Riley has always been a painter. Both his parents were artists and he studied at the

Kingston School of Art, first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1960 aged fifteen. He came to Dittisham by chance twenty years later while working as an architect. His studio and art school at Coombe Farm outside Dittisham have been his centre of operations ever since. Many exhibitions and one-man shows followed in England, Scandinavia, continental Europe, the US and Australia.

After art school Riley’s palette was dark, and his inspiration, influenced by the early painting of van Gogh, was drawn from working communities, particularly mining villages in south Wales. Palette, medium and focus changed with travels to the Mediterranean. Once in Devon, Riley returned to watercolours, using a free-style brushwork as far removed from architectural drawing as possible. He met Kaldor, Drew and Gillo when he was keen to get to full-time painting again.

Riley’s dictum now is restraint, the painting of suggestion. With watercolour it requires above all looking, then patience, skill and a deep knowledge of tools and techniques, and how they interact. The changing waters of the Dart around Dittisham retain a fascination for Riley, who was brought up on the Thames.

When the mists come, they can wriggle up the river, leaving patches of landscape clear, blurring others, hiding joints between water and tree, tree and its reflection. In one painting, which is quite small, he uses an oriental-style brush with goat and wolf hair, and plays with wetting the paper, patch by patch, to capture the moving air, reflection and depth.

During the snow of 2011 he went out to find the frost had sharpened the light, clarifying the colours, so that every slope, tree and curve of the river was outlined. Riley uses different brushes here, and a range of masking techniques to get the precision and clarity he wants.

In Early Morning the light is bouncing off the water around the jetty, hardly penetrating enough to create reflections. Shapes are sharp and black or shrouded, tones are hinted at. The structure is minimal, but the place could be nowhere else.

John Donaldson

John Donaldson can’t recall a time when he didn’t paint; one of his earliest memories is

watching his grandfather paint watercolours. By thirteen, he had discovered oil; he liked its tangibility, the way he could push it around. Now, he does watercolours too. He grew up with music in the same way. In his late teens, he studied composition and classical organ before switching to modern jazz and electronic music. Donaldson came to Dartmouth in 1975 and met the other four of the Dartmouth Five some ten years later. Here, he paints, plays the organ in local churches and does local gigs. He still composes and records music. In painting he tries to catch ‘a place where something has just happened, some shadow has passed, a moving cloud has changed a look.’ He wants to be honest about the unusual and beautiful and the effects of light. He thinks ‘impressionist’ describes his work best, in that it has no hidden narrative, but attempts to interpret a visual moment.

Donaldson is inspired by the Dartmouth area, the south of France and Italy, as much by the countryside as by intimate scenes of historic houses on the river or cobblestone embankments in the sun, by the energy of bars and cafés, or the peace of sunlit steps rising against the corner of a vine-clad house. He can spend days searching for everyday views that crystallise a transitory but modest moment.

Paint and music are synergistic in his work, although he finds the connections between colour, texture and sound less conscious with time. ‘In the simplest terms’, he says, ‘I hear sounds when I paint and see colour when I make music’. In the early 1970s, he painted mostly large abstracts as he listened to music – he remembers Bartok, the  Modern Jazz Quartet, Jimi Hendrix and Olivier Messiaen – and actively interpreted what he heard and felt in colour and form. Trying to paint watery pictures more recently to Chopin’s Études and Barcarolles really failed; the process was too literal. Mood is paramount for John in music and he may listen to the more frenetic passages of Verdi’s Requiem or The Prodigy to help reach the ‘speed’ he needs to start painting, but then paints in silence, hearing the music in his head.

Painting is more of a physical challenge than music. He has to be really fit to paint; why, he’s not sure. But he can compose, record or ‘construct’ music in almost any state, despite even hangovers or head colds. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s because he’s not a greatly gifted musician technically, so the need to concentrate can dispel aches and pains and negative feelings. Painting draws more on a subconscious that can’t be forced. The subject has to be allowed to fill and occupy the mind.

Simon Drew

Simon Drew, half wit and half artist as he describes himself, came to Dartmouth in 1981. He

studied zoology (his drawings of animals and birds are basically accurate), and after six years training as and being a teacher, he retired, supported by his wife Caroline, to make something of himself.

Once here, he galloped off in all directions. He writes prose and poetry and draws to go with it. His work is exhibited in art galleries in Britain, the US and Australia. It appears in books, and on mugs, tee-shirts and postcards. He has designed for Friends of the Earth, the Millennium Dome and the eternally running BBC programme The Archers. He has far flung admirers. Alberto Grimaldi, producer of the iconic Marlon Brando film Last Tango in Paris bought the original of his drawing Last Mango. Couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier bought 100 of his cards showing a goat with E and A on its side. Gunter Grass called to order some books – was it the author of The Tin Drum? Local postmen know him; a letter from Hong Kong to ‘Simon Drew, Y-front, Dartmouth’, arrived.

Verbal and visual puns get Drew going. But they have to work together. With Dali Havidson the caption doesn’t do it, the image of the motor bike with the melting wheels doesn’t do it, but the combination does. A very visual pun is Camp David, Michelangelo’s David holding a handbag – the head of security at Camp David apparently has it hanging in his office. Ideas can come spontaneously. For Dali Havidson he was sitting under a palm tree in Mauritius thinking about a book on art. They can arise from mishearing, mole for moules, or from misspeaking, like the old lady who said her grandson was a drum maisonette. Wherever he is, Drew is always listening, scribbling ideas in his little book.

But puns aside, Drew’s work above all displays his pure enjoyment in doing the art. Carnival has no other point. Dali Havidson, The Animals Came in Four-by-Four and Mole Marinière do have another point, but the drawings could stand alone. Some enjoy Drew’s wit, some his imagination, some his art, and some just like him. His appeal is broad enough to have made him a celebrity.

‘Dartmouth:  An Enchanted Place’ is published by the Antique Collectors Club in association with Richard Webb and costs £35.

It is available for sale from the Dartmouth Community Bookshop (01803 839571) and White Sails Gallery (01803 832272)•

First published October 2013 By The Dart

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