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Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present James Mortimer’s (b. 1989, Swindon, UK) artwork spotlight, highlighting his compelling new work, Cliff Man.
British artist James Mortimer’s painting Cliff Man is a work that arrive from several places at once. Here, in a wan, flattened landscape stands a ruddy faced man, puffy-eyed, staring at us blankly. He is centred, in front of a coastline lined with vaguely Mediterranean buildings, distant rolling hills, oversized tropical plants, and gambolling figures, far off in the psychological distance. To the foreground, bottom right, a goat is under bloody attack, from what looks like a bloodthirsty dog. It all coalesces into a dreamlike scene, combining naïve precision with surreal disjunction. You’re captured and detained by the bristling tension flickering between meticulous detail and an odd, disquieting atmosphere.
Strange, unfathomable stories have long underpinned Mortimer’s practice. He creates panoramic visions from the wellsprings of his subconscious, nourished assiduously from quotidian life; the people he glimpses out and about, arcane bits of pop culture, art history, his friends and neighbours.
Percolating deep into the Mortimer cortex, these observations begin to emerge in his studio, when the artist dips into his subconscious and develops whatever surfaces. The right-handed Mortimer finds sketching with his left-hand - automatic drawing - is a fruitful means of loosening control at the outset and allowing an unmediated, unrationalised flow of ideas and feelings to manifest. Forms emerge, spatial relationships suggest themselves. Some elements assert themselves, resonating, demanding prominence. Others fall by the wayside, are voted out, and must leave the story ignominiously before painting begins. Mortimer says of this intuitive way of working. ‘I don’t really know what it’s ever really about. It’s all quite subconsciously driven. The automatic drawing is really, a low-stakes way to start a bit of creativity, I’m not especially trying to do anything, but I often end up spewing out whatever I’ve been mulling over.’
In Cliff Man, we see that while this process shapes the final painting with an atmosphere of ambiguity, there is nevertheless a sense that every element has arrived with conviction, even if precise meaning is elusive. As his narrative-building suggests, Mortimer doesn’t construct allegories in a literal sense but allows his motifs to grow and cluster around one another, until a scene intuitively feels right.
The landscape of Cliff Man exemplifies this logic. Mortimer doesn’t offer associations with a specific place, but rather, the clustered harbour town, stone quay, islands and ruined tower evoke a sense of coastal places, fused with elements drawn from elsewhere in a broader, imaginative geography shaped by memory and possibility. The artists places his foreground elements neatly, laid out with precision - agave, rocks, animals, figure. Each is clearly legible, with minimal overlap, contributing to a tableau-like presentation rather than a naturalistic scene.
This fondness for wild vegetation stems back to the artist’s childhood. When growing up in what he describes as ‘a drab little town in the middle of England,’ he often drew palm trees and monkeys. In Cliff Man, those early impulses remain visible, as a way of building a setting from layered recollection and motifs. Mortimer explains that he will add elements simply because he likes how they look architecturally – here, we can see how this deep pleasure in forms, ruins, plants and islands is central to the work.
At its heart, Cliff Man perches between stillness and drama. There’s a hint of Henri Rousseau here, in Mortimer’s clean composition, amplified by the dense gnarly foliage to the fore, as well as in the dead-eyed confrontation of the viewer by the central figure. He is planted barefoot, arms folded across his body, expression difficult to read; is he confronting us? Or indifferent to our presence? Around his static bulk though, the painting is humming with semi-hidden stories: the harbour settlement recedes to the left; a (naked?) figure, semi-obscured, moves mysteriously among prickly pear and – is that a sheep - down to the right? That poor goat is being roundly savaged in the foreground; and all the while the sea calmly ripples in neat, pointed wavelets.
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Mortimer says that he was once told that his animals seem more intelligent than his people, a perceptive observation in this case. The intensity of the attack in the foreground is in stark contrast to the human’s passivity. ‘It’s just nature, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Watch any wildlife documentary and you’ll see, I don’t know – lions eating antelopes’. The artist explains that he wanted to give the central figure a ‘closed off’ vibe - self-contained, perhaps not especially troubled by what’s unfolding nearby. Mortimer himself suggests that perhaps the man owns the dog and is simply ‘letting it get on with it,’ comparing the scene, with characteristic humour, to distracted dog owners in a park.
Art historically, the work invites comparison with an especial area of the artist’s interest, Northern Renaissance painting - especially the frenetically populated landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. Mortimer is particularly fond of Bosch, whose paintings he first encountered at seventeen and whose example confirmed a long-standing fascination with densely peopled, event-filled landscapes. He also draws the unlikely but completely logical connection to another long-held influence, Martin Handford’s ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle books, where you must identify the titular boggle-eyed figure amidst dense crowd scenes. ‘I’ve got the Where’s Wally? Compendium and its absolutely astonishing, those crowd scenes. I think I had that in mind when I was a child and then later when I saw those Northern Renaissance paintings, it was like, ah, that’s where that comes from’.
The painting’s mood also depends on its surface. Although Cliff Man appears highly finished, Mortimer emphasises its material density. This painting has been built, layered, abraded and reworked. He uses gesso to raise areas of the surface, works back into them with a stylus, and then applies different kinds of paint, rubbing, sanding and flicking materials into place. The sheep, stones and rocky foreground are shaped through these processes, and the town and jetty are given both solidity and erosion through accumulated handling. ‘I think the word is glaucous,’ Mortimer says of the stony textures of buildings. ‘It’s like a white powderiness. To get that, I used some raw colours and then washes of white and greys on top of them, to get those textures of the stone, the se, the skin and everything. It’s like, when you look at a piece of wood or a stone, when you really look closely, you can see more colours and textures.’ This stratification gives Cliff Manmuch of its quiet complexity.
This is also evident in the sea, one of the painting’s most distinctive passages. Mortimer takes especial pride in his sea, in the meticulous brushwork that reminds us that this artist is a master of delicacy and precision in handling light, perspective and colour. He moves the water around the canvas with controlled dynamic energy, its bustling motion offset by distant islands hovering beneath a calm, gunmetal sky. The artist describes producing the wavelets with very thin washes of oil paint and a square brush, applying repeated marks and then working back into them with the end of a brush or stylus. His method layers a murky orangey-brown wash beneath the blue, almost reddish, which generates a decidedly marine-like green – all in all, lending such depth and richness to the sea that one can almost sniff a briny tang.
Colour throughout the painting is similarly controlled. Mortimer deliberately avoided the bright blue skies that had appeared in his recent works, choosing instead what he calls an ‘English gun metal grey’ sky. Across the muted stony foreground and silvery tree trunk, bright outbursts from his palette perk up the horizons - vivid greens in the distant hills, the chestnut-brown and red body of the dog, the scarlet at the sheep’s neck, the blue sea bouncing light around the composition.
For us, as for the artist Cliff Man is a supremely satisfying experience, not least because elements of light, colour and shadow ‘came together quite straightforwardly.’ But this isn’t to say the work is simplistic – anything but. This is a work full of intriguing decisions, questions and layered references. It’s precise and open: a coastal scene built from subconscious drift, remembered forms and painterly experimentation, imagined together by a patient, searching intelligence. Rather than telling the viewer what to think, Cliff Man invites sustained looking - and rewards it, in spades.
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James Mortimer - Cliff Man
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