Pursuing the Intangible

David Haughton: Pursuing the Intangible

 

If you are lucky to be in St Just on a clear blue and sun filled day with the sea glittering in the distance, (early May is a good time) you will see how the light bounces off the pavement and the granite walls bringing a clarity to the eye and a stillness, on quiet days, to the scene that somehow almost wraps around you.

This was the experience of David Haughton visiting St Just for the first time, by bicycle from Nancledra with his friend and fellow painter Kit Barker. It was in the spring of 1948 and his 'discovery' of St Just was for David a "turning point", one he could only explain in terms of the "divine" and of transcendence. The experience was akin to what mystics have found, "impossible to describe in detail, and they use very generalized terms. But once one has experienced anything of that nature it is impossible to forget it." (from a letter, DH to Norman Levine)

 

Since that spring day St Just became the source of almost all of David's work and preoccupied him for the next forty three years.

David was a slow, painstaking painter. "I like a surface that shows that it is closely worked, every inch considered, the medium loved and respected." If that fateful discovery of St Just was as David alternatively considered, "merely a freak of one's chemistry," one can see how the clarity and detail he found amongst St Just's  rows of cottages and long empty back streets, affected his abiding taste for "stillness, harmony and order".

 

David knew too well, "To attempt the marriage of so intangible a thing as atmosphere with an absolute watertight construction is no easy job." Was he attempting the impossible? Thankfully enough examples of David's drawings and painting have survived to give us a tantalizing insight into the strivings of one man and his pursuit of the intangible. A pursuit that returned him again and again to the streets of St Just-in-Penwith.

Stephen Prince

 

DH quotations from Norman Levine: David Haughton's St Just
(The Painter & Sculptor Summer 1961 (Vol.4))

 

 

Promises of David Haughton original works for the planned DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, (from 14 January to 18 March 2017) are gradually filling a substantial file at Penlee House in Penzance. The interest in, and the enthusiasm for this planned exhibition is most welcome, and gratefully received by myself, curator Katie Herbert, and director Louise Connell.

 

Please contact: stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk

or Louise Connell at

Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Morrab Road, Penzance TR18 4HE

info@penleehouse.org.uk

 

 

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