‘England’s most closely guarded secret’

Dennis Creffield is admired by artists but little known to the wider public. Andrew Lambirth meets this octogenarian artist as his new show on the theme of William Blake and Jerusalem opens

‘I’m a peripatetic architectural draughtsman,’ says Dennis Creffield, best known for his magnificent series of charcoal drawings of the medieval English cathedrals, commissioned in 1987 by the Arts Council. He has indeed travelled the country, drawing not only cathedrals but also Welsh and English castles, the pagodas of Orford Ness in Suffolk (laboratories that were used for testing the trigger mechanisms of atomic bombs), the stately pile of Petworth House in Sussex, and many aspects of London. He has also drawn and painted people, the living as well as the dead (Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart), and done his fair share of landscape painting. But it is with dramatic, expressive charcoal drawing that his name is most often associated.

Creffield was born in south London 80 years ago, and studied with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic from 1948 to 1951. He was only 17 when he started with Bomberg, one of the most charismatic and influential teachers of the century, and the experience was transforming. (Among Bomberg’s other students were Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.) Creffield’s liking for charcoal was nurtured in Bomberg’s classes, as was his ability to perceive what Bomberg called ‘the spirit in the mass’. Creffield became a member of the Borough Group, whose aim was to promote Bomberg’s work through exhibitions and his principles by example. Creffield later went on to study at the Slade where he was a prize-winner, becoming in due course an effective teacher himself and a substantial artist in his own right. He has had more than 20 solo exhibitions in the past 45 years, and his work is in public and private collections worldwide.