Garrick Palmer

1933-2023

Garrick Palmer has died.

I first came across his work a few years ago when I found one of his paintings in a clutter of random things at an antique fair. I was instantly smitten. The stall holder and I did some fierce bartering because he said he knew it was by someone ‘good’. I prevailed, picked it up for a price that didn’t make me weep and bore it home triumphantly. Sadly it is currently in storage or I would post a photograph of it here.

Palmer was a man of many talents, a member of the R.A., the Royal Society of Painter- Printmakers and the Society of Wood Engravers. He painted, had a flourishing second career as a photographer and was a talented wood engraver. He taught at Winchester School of Art and did a series of commissions for the folio society amongst other things. Some of his work is held in the Tate as well as other museums and galleries.

I didn’t know any of this when I bought his painting. I just knew that I couldn’t take my eyes off it and that if I had the means I had to possess it so I could look at it every day. I didn’t need to be told it was by someone ‘good’. I knew it was a good thing. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I love his works because they are fiercely strange and wondrous. The landscapes are recognisably earthy but at the same time they are imagined and presented in such a way as to make them seem entirely otherworldly. They have an air of otherness about them that remind me of some of the more grotesque of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations, like the ones for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.

The deeply scored lines that are his signature style make every landscape look as if you see it through shards of broken mirror. There are steps and hesitations, gaps and bridges between planes that destabilise the process of seeing and understanding. Even though each picture is clearly a coherent whole and the whole body of work is part of a singular viewpoint, it invites fragmentation. It requires you to slow down the process of looking and piece together what you see.

Everything about his pictures startle the viewer, from the bold, black incisions of line to the choice of colour palette. The picture I have is the colours of earth and charcoal, mud and water, clay and winter air. Even though it takes its language and form from the earth, the decisiveness of the palette along with the ruthlessness of the mark making give it an ancient, deliberate quality that feels like it’s carved out of something weathered and enduring rather than made by a man in a studio.

In other paintings, the colours blaze. Acid greens and eerie yellows dominate some works, great swathes of bursting orange push the surface of paintings forwards into your face or deep into a receding hollow of green. It would be no surprise to find a Green Man wander out of the middle of one of these works and disappear in a flurry of leaves. There is something uncomfortably mythic about his work that delights and disturbs.

For me, Palmer’s work is unsurpassed in tapping into the complex relationship between people and the land. Nature always seems on the verge of declaring war in his paintings. There is the sense that at any moment, something could unfurl from the edges of a piece and cut your throat in the most elegant but savage of ways.

You can find examples of his work, including the pieces featured in this post here and here.