I had the pleasure of visiting the Norman Ackroyd exhibition in Bath recently.  Norman died a couple of years ago and he’s one of my heroes and has definitely influenced my work.

I so enjoyed all of the prints, but what I really loved was seeing work from all through his life, from the mid-70’s to when he died – seeing the threads through all of his work, and how they were picked up time and again to play with.

It allowed me to see the slow evolution of his discernment and refinement of his technique, until, in the end, he was making pictures of the absolute essence of what he loved and paid attention to.  One of the things that inspired me was seeing how long it all took – a lifetime really. It made me realise that slow and steady distillation is just fine.

I’m guessing this evolution was not quite as obvious to him at the time he was making the art (just as it’s not obvious to us, as we make over the years), and there were certainly detours to little visited areas and occasional bows to the fashions of the time.  But then the thread is picked up, or makes itself visible, again.

And this is the value of the retrospective – it allows hindsight, comparison and distance.  It also allows us to see wrong turns, back alleys, or paths only half walked – which is as interesting to an artist as the ‘famous ones’.

Unusually for an artist, perhaps less so for a printmaker, Ackroyd stayed steadfastly working in monochrome (bar a few rainbows, judiciously placed, in earlier work), and this of course is the most obvious thread. All the work in the exhibition is either etching or an intaglio printing process of some sort – this too he seems to have decided on fairly early. Depicting light too, is a constant.

Because of these self imposed parameters and constants, it’s a little easier to see what has changed over time.

Always a ‘landscape’ artist, the types of landscapes change over time, with the earliest piece here (1976) being a Yorkshire landscape, then others of gardens and interiors, before, in the 90’s, he obviously honed down his places to those on the West coasts of Ireland and Scotland. These were the landscapes he could most fully use to express himself.

He must have known by that point that light and weather were what drove him, and so went back again and again to the places that produced the best in him.  He was also at an age that cares less for fashion and what others think by this point.

Seeing the work altogether shows his move away from line as well. Traditionally, etching has been seen as a medium for drawing and linework, and at first Ackroyd seems to follow along with this.  But very soon, he dispenses with it, finding instead ways to depict beautifully nuanced drifts of tone (how does he do it?), before really making this his signature gesture and becoming the undisputed master of it.

I have recently hung my own solo exhibition, and hadn’t expected to see my own threads running throughout the work.  Recurring mannerisms, motifs, influences, gestures, colours, a certain roughness and raggedness have all made their presences known.  So that, although it’s still very difficult to see the threads, putting all the work together allows for a certain amount of understanding and coherence. An opportunity to further distill the essence moving forward.

At the very least it’s allowed me a tentative faith that, over time, my art is evolving and growing, yet all the while creating a coherent, connected pattern. And that is something to aspire to.