Leonard McComb

Tulips: Leonard McComb

I have just been alerted that the Artspace Gallery is hosting an exhibition of the work of Leonard McComb. He is one of those artists that I often go back to, he is a sort of lodestone that sucks me into his world, as well as being someone against which I can test myself. Nature and energy were often cited as his subject matter, but I have always put him in the category of those artists that deal in uncertain certainties.

There is something about seeing and its relationship to touch, as well as a fluctuation between mass and space, alongside something of the spirit inside the body, all compressed into the best of McComb's drawings. A spiritual radiance can sometimes be seen emanating from his drawings of flowers. it feels as if he touches the petals with his eyes, caressing them with directional marks, as he feels around the mass of their reality. Small marks, like bricks, can make solid edifices; as I put it in a former blog post on his drawings; "marks that at their inception appear to be looking for the form, but as they build up, they energise the image, eventually space and mass interpenetrate, all now vibration". He can at times capture the material condition of an object and in the same moment make it as transient as a soap bubble.

Leonard McComb at work on 'Rock and Sea , Anglesey,(Benllech)'

I remember going to see his monumental drawing of the coast entitled “Rock and Sea , Anglesey,(Benllech)”, I think it was in Sheffield, but where I saw it doesn't matter, it's a giant drawing made out of pencil, brush and ink on watercolour paper. Because of what I was doing with my own work at the time, I was reinforced in my belief that you could create monumental art by gradually working across small sized pieces of paper and constructing a final piece from the fragments and although making images of interiors, I too wanted to capture the way I was immersed in looking as an experience and his work was a fine example. It was also an answer to working and living at the time in a small terraced house. But his work also had a profound experience on me in relation to a much wider idea of art as a doorway into the spiritual.  

I'll see if I can explain, as well as try to tie in some of my thinking about the visualisation of invisible forces. When I used to work on the foundation course at Leeds, one of the reoccurring themes was the drawing and painting of a fish brought from the local fish market. It was an activity often promoted by Gavin Stuart, the oldest member of staff at that time, someone who had worked alongside Tom Hudson, Terry Frost and Alan Davie. Fish were looked at as objects of wonder, their iridescence hard to capture and their life form in death a reminder of mortality. Students would struggle to make convincing representations, but in the struggle would begin to come to terms with what it meant to confront a serious subject. 

McComb took on the same challenge, several times. Sometimes I think he missed the mark, but at others he was able to touch one of those experiences that transcend the everyday and elevate it into myth. 

Fish: Leonard McComb

In this image of a fish on a plate, the plate receives the aura of the fish and becomes an aureole, that circle of light that normally surrounds the head or body of a person represented as holy. Energy radiates out through the brush-marks, the paint being applied in such a way that it indicates the mass of the fish and some aspects of its physical presence, such as its iridescence, whilst at the same time the paint marks are open enough to suggest that it is a vibrating energy form, perhaps even a ghost of its former self. 

Flower painting

McComb at one time stated that nature's 'forms and shapes radiate from a centre’. I'm not sure that is right, but he did 'see' some sort of radiant energy surrounding the forms he was trying to represent. In the flower painting above it is the air around the stems and flowers that is energised, the glass vase begins to vibrate to its own tune, whilst each flowerhead sits still, surrounded by now revealed invisible forces. It is easy to see this in a painting because the marks are more substantial, but some of his drawn images almost dissolve back into the paper out of which they were envisioned. 

Flowers

The image of flowers above is almost impossible to see as a reproduction. Something I curmudgeonly like in a time of easy image reproduction and the dominance of the screen. In my earlier post on that feeling of an uncertain certainty, I put McComb in the company of Cezanne and David Jones, both artists that had strong convictions about the world they were experiencing, but who as they struggled to articulate their visions, found their images becoming less and less solid and more and more like dancing energy fields. 

This work is a type of vanitas, a reminder of the fragile nature of life. McComb was also a trained sculptor, and as such he would have been very aware of the materiality of thought; so to produce the flat work that he did and to position it on such a delicate fulcrum, balanced between awareness of mass and of spiritual forces, he must have in my mind also have been an animist at heart. He was able to send his mind out into the things he drew, out into the sea and the rocks, where for a while at least he would have inhabited the world he saw, so that what he was drawing was not the sea or the rocks, but his own mind as it conjoined with the spirit of the world. 

The exhibition LEONARD McCOMB, Body and Spirit Paintings and Drawings, is on 9th of May to 4th of July 2025. Michael  Richardson  Contemporary  Art, the Artspace Gallery, 84 St. Peter's Street, London N1 8JS

See also:

The Artspace Gallery
The uncertain certainty

Body auras

Lines as symbols of invisible forces