Miles Richmond, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and Dennis Creffield, The New Forest, 1950
Produced by Philip Cairney, this film gives a brief introduction to English painter Miles Richmond (1922-2008), who developed his style in the late 1940s whilst training with David Bomberg. A founding member of the Borough Group, his work was also deeply informed by William Blake, Paul Cezanne, Rainer Maria Rilke and the science behind human perception.
“Painting has led me to question the assumption that we simply look out at the world.
My research suggests that we both look out and look in, and the world is literally within the mind of our complex identity.”
A Mountain
Blue fist lightly clenched. Fist of right hand, for the thumb, where the pass picks its way across the mountain, is on its left. A back of a hand laid on a mule's neck; its too hot on this road for horses. On the thumb a smear of blood, a thistle scratch, no more. Several of the same thistles grow here as in North Africa and the Middle East.
A mule's sense of tomorrow is probably similar to a mountain's; tomorrow is waiting for them, never the other way round.
Turn the painting upside down and see the carcass of the mule, sprawled on an asphalt road eventually leading to Cordoba. In the foreground sky, now above the carcass, a vivid sunset; tomorrow will be as hot as today.
The energy of the fist, mountain, mule, thistle, is the one and same energy and it is the energy found by the artist when making this painting. It didn't come from the mere act of observation, any more than it came from any manual act of gesturing. It came from quitting the self, and feeling, with all six senses, his wary way into the
jurisprudence of the elemental, which holds together the known (and unknown) laws of geology, climate, anatomy and the longings of the soul.
John Berger
An Oak
I saw Miles today. Here in a field at midday. The air was clear and
washed by days of snow and rain. He stood out in the cold, fearless of
the nights to come. His ageless branches stretching out above the
green grass of autumn.
Light, he said, is being born everywhere. Look at my orange leaves
now: they may stay forever in your eyes.
"An oak", I whispered ... but the word itself seemed overcrowded with
old woodcutter's stories and not large enough to shelter even one of
those unique leaves.
At first I didn't notice it : a crow in his tangled hair. Then it made
itself more visible flying across the blue sky, and more so when it
turned black against a white cloud, and cawed. I smiled, and listened
again.
Roots remember all things, like a good drawing, he slowly said.
One by one, each caw found it's way towards the oak's dark trunk.
Miles dilated his veins so the caws could enter more easily, and
without losing their sharp tone of insurrection, they then travelled
inside him. Many times the crow's caws rose and fell within the oak's
golden sap, before reaching the silence of the frozen ground.
What if we turn the earth upside-down? I asked.
Same thing, he replied. All that has grown and all that has fallen
leaves a line and a shape somewhere, you just need to know where to
stand. See the smoke coming out of the chimneys of the village, see
how it meets the light....
Tomorrow I will show you how green in the snow my leaves still are.
I looked down at my feet. Prayed and carried on.
Yves Berger
Miles on Skerray, Scotland.