Secret revealed

The Flowers emporium in Shoreditch, which does such a competent job of purveying art to the chattering classes, shows an eclectic range of artists, from the geometrically abstract to the photo-realistic. Dennis Creffield (born 1931) belongs to neither extreme, but fits into that fruitful expressionist middle ground where the quondam students of David Bomberg struggle with charcoal and pigment to discover the ‘actuality’ of a subject. Flowers must be heartily congratulated on having mounted a decent retrospective of Creffield’s work, for we have seen little of it in London (besides an exhibition of the Orford Ness pictures a decade ago) since the magnificent English Cathedrals show at Camden Arts Centre in 1990. Now the greater part of its gallery space is devoted to showing some 66 works, both paintings and drawings, a good number borrowed back from private and public collections, including the Tate and the Arts Council. Inevitably, some of the finest images are not for sale, but a proper sample of Creffield’s work is on view.

Creffield is best known as a draughtsman, and the first and overwhelming impression on walking in off the street is of charcoal imagery: drawings of subjects such as anxious father, mother and baby, Nijinsky as Petrushka and the Cathedrals themselves, both English and French, occupying the end wall like the massed flanks of the army of God. (And these were drawn by an artist who does believe that the world is ‘the handiwork of God’.) There are paintings in this room, but they are surrounded by seven times as many drawings. The other downstairs gallery, looking out on to the street, showcases four large oils, including two versions of the lyrical ‘Lovers’ theme, intriguingly based on a 19th-century photograph of two girls in a bordello. Upstairs are earlier works, including a self-portrait done at the age of 16 on a tall thin panel, and a 1959 London landscape ‘The Isle of Dogs from Greenwich Observatory’, which emanates an austere but palpable presence.