A Passion for Paint: Josephine Trotter's Great Britain

The death of painting has been proclaimed so often that it has become a bit of a cliché, and an utterly faulty cliché at that. Indeed, look at the world’s highest-earning contemporary artist - namely the Scottish painter Peter Doig, currently showing at the Michael Werner gallery - and you’ll see the lie in that idea.

So the esteem of figurative painting, such as Josephine Trotter’s rural landscapes at Gallery 8 on Duke Street in St James's, does not have to be rescued; nor does it necessarily belong to a retrogressive fogey tendency. Those artistic conservatives who claim that anything that isn’t either a portrait or landscape cannot be art are simply one side of a phony war, pitted against the largely non-painting modern artists and ‘conceptualists’ annually represented by the Turner Prize.

Trotter's latest exhibition, entitled ‘Great Britain’, is a series of vibrant and mightily pleasing oil paintings of British landscapes from the northernmost tip of Scotland down to Dorset and Devon. Full of movement, with swirling oils in bright colours, it's contemporary art that will speak to those who enjoy the sensuality of paint, while those who appreciate the more pastoral end of British landscape painting will immediately relate to them, too. Figurative but intense and slightly hallucinatory, one might even see Trotter's paintings, some of which are of her home county of Oxfordshire, as part of a quirky British landscape tradition that includes Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Paul Nash and David Hockney. And with their painterly swirls of sky and land, they also conjure up van Gogh as he geared up towards the controlled frenzy of his late period. 

‘Great Britain’, which opens this week, is Trotter’s 21st solo exhibition. Her last one, three years ago, focused on London Bridges. Before that, she often painted in France, Italy and Majorca, but her husband Angus Irvine had a serious accident that meant that they no longer go abroad. In characteristically best-foot-forward fashion, Trotter explains: 'I said to Angus: "There’s so much beauty in Britain! Who wants to go abroad?” I am very happy to be back in Britain which, one realises, is a ceaseless seam of inspiration.’

Just one painting in this latest show is London-based: a large canvas (3ft x 4ft), entitled The Queen on the Spirit of Chartwell . Usually Trotter paints entirely en plein air and completes a painting in a single day. This time she did the painting in two phases: the first from a balcony of a friend's flat overlooking the Thames where she made skeletal drawings six weeks ahead of the Queen’s Jubilee. ‘It is very topographical,’ she says. ‘Everything is in the right place: the BBC tower, the Shard, Battersea Power Station, the beautiful Wren church by Battersea Bridge…’’ After watching the flotilla, she returned to her studio in Oxfordshire to add 96 boats based on press cuttings and her own sketches. ‘It is a slight departure,’ she says, ‘but I think you would say “It’s a Trotter” because it’s the way I paint.’

In fact, a similar dedication to topographical exactitude underlies all Trotter’s landscapes. If you went to the place she painted, you would find that the hills, the trees and the fields were in ‘exactly the right place’, she says. This precision she puts down to her time at Chelsea College of Arts in the Sixties, where she was taught by the late British painter Euan Uglow. Life drawing was the mainstay, practised night after night, and Trotter emerged with a feeling for landscape grounded in human anatomy.  ‘I often think of my paintings of countryside as rather large nudes,' she says. 'Drawing is the groundwork, like practising your scales if you are a pianist, before you can go on and be more explosive. I know people who are quite successful in designer abstract art. If you ask them to do a life drawing with a model, they don’t know where to begin.’

Martin Gayford, art critic for The Daily Telegraph and author of The Yellow House and The Man in the Blue Scarf , wrote in 2011: 'Trotter is an artist who has a powerful feeling for the material she uses: oil paint, in all its glorious physicality. She says "I get so excited about paint, its quality and application. Also, I feel privileged to have trained at a time when drawing was the crux and bones of art education and very hard work. The thing is, I really love painting." That is abundantly evident from her exuberant work.'

Trotter’s first influence was Cézanne (‘such an intelligent and sculptured and thoughtful painter’). Later, she was inspired by the colourists – Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and – of course – Van Gogh. Her paintings may look extravagantly swishy, but there is an underlying tension to them. As the long-standing Financial Times art critic William Packer puts it: ‘Josephine Trotter’s paintings may look direct and simple in the statement but they are underpinned by disciplines long studied and hard won – disciplines of close observation, organisation and technical address, of light, space and form.’

Packer goes on: ‘A passion for paint is easier to claim than to prove. To sustain such passion over a now considerable career, and prove it constantly with ever more confidence and accomplishment, is more difficult still. Josephine Trotter is just such a painter.’

'Great Britain', featuring beautiful modern artwork from one of Britain's most passionate contemporary artists, is certainly a pleasure for the eye and the soul. If you're looking for top art in London, you won't go wrong with this.

Happy 21st, JoJo, and long live life drawing!