David Gommon (Paperback)

Born into a working-class family in London’s Battersea, David Gommon (1913–1987) started studying art at local colleges when he was 16. By the age of 19, he had been taken up by Lucy Wertheim (1883–1971) – the pioneering London-based gallerist. Renowned for adventurously showing work by artists such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and Frances Hodgkins, she gave Gommon his first solo exhibition in 1934.

In his late teens, Gommon’s art was transformed by the ‘vivid sight’ of Chesil Beach in Dorset: he was ‘overwhelmed by the revelation of beach, the sea, the sky! It was biblical in its splendour.’ Moved by such moments, throughout the 1930s Gommon became a painter of enigmatic, phantasmagoric images, often rooted in the landscape, that hover on the verge of surrealism.

Aided by the artist’s own evocative writings, Philip Vann’s text examines the development of this visionary landscape art – embedded latterly in the paradisical surroundings of the Northamptonshire village of Hardingstone, where Gommon and his wife Jean lived for several decades. He looks, too, at how Gommon’s art – notable for its subtle but audacious colourism – is enriched by his love and appreciation of poetry (including works by John Clare, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot) and friendship with figures such as the poet–artist David Jones.

The book also explores other aspects of Gommon’s work. These include the excoriatingly satirical expressionistic artwork, The Book of the Dead, made during the Second World War, and his discerning portraits of creative people he knew and admired, such as the great Modernist poet Basil Bunting.