Tyson’s work taps into Nature’s deep dynamics

Oct 13 2008 by David Whetstone, The Journal

Former Barrow dock worker Keith Tyson went on to win the Turner Prize. Alan Sykes enjoys the artist’s latest exhibition.

IT’S a major coup for Carlisle’s Tullie House to have secured an exclusive big exhibition of new works by the Turner Prize-winning Cumbrian-born artist Keith Tyson. 

As the show’s curator, Fiona Venables, said at the opening: “We chose him because he’s good, not because he’s Cumbrian – although that is a bonus.”

Tyson studied at Cumbria College of Art after he stopped being a fitter at the Barrow dockyard and did one or two projects at Tullie House while he was at college, so it was a double home-coming for him. 

Keith was somewhat laconic on the subject, saying: “I remember walking up to the art college with a mixture of trepidation and ‘What do I know about art?’ and also thinking: ‘thank God I don’t have to get up for the shipyard.’”

The series shown here is mostly his new Nature Paintings, with loans from a number of public and private collections – including one belonging to Damien Hirst.

These are a mixture of paints poured slowly on to an aluminium or glass surface and allowed to dry at different speeds and temperatures, depending on the effect the artist is seeking to achieve – so nature, through gravity, temperature and chemistry, is directly responsible for a significant part of the effect.

As the artist puts it in the excellent catalogue: “I think the reason people find (Nature Paintings) beautiful is because they’re reminiscent of what we are – the deepest dynamic, just maths and energy and thermal dynamics.

“When you look at the Earth from above, you’re struck by how incredibly detailed it is and how effortlessly Nature reveals these things to us. I just want to do the same in my paintings, I suppose.”

There are some Nature Sculptures as well – rectangular white-painted boxes of epoxy-resin cast over a variety of materials, which dominate the floor space in the centre of the gallery. 

For an occasional gambler like Keith, the element of chance that makes up each picture is interesting as well.

In some we appear to be seeing huge spaces almost infinitely remote, and in others the results look like something under a microscope.

Tullie House has a history of collecting contemporary art going back to the 1930s. The gallery is keen to return to collecting after a lapse of some years and, commendably, would like its first major purchase of a contemporary artwork to be one by Keith Tyson.

In 2002, the year Keith Tyson won the Turner Prize, a publicity-hungry junior culture minister called Kim Howells wrote on a wall in the Tate Gallery (and then tipped off the press that he had done so) that the exhibition was “cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****”.

The Nature Paintings exhibition shows just how fatuously shallow an assessment that was. These are richly appealing paintings, with a luminous warmth that comes from the depth of the beauty.

Keith Tyson’s Nature Paintings exhibition is at Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle, until November 30.