Capri-Caprices!
The under-drawing of most of these pictures follows the pattern of this sketch done onto an electronic screen...
In these evocations of the trip from the port to the villa of San Michele, we travel from the ship to the funicular railway, up past those close-packed, charming gardens experienced with the impertinent intimacy of the steep railway, to the square from which we take a bus that hurtles along snaking bends onto the cliff-hanging edgey road - here we can see the ship more or less from above, the angle is so steep, the cliff so perpendicular - the road taking us on to San Michele with its infectuous calm and sauntering gait leading you to the great view back down onto the port and across to Naples...
As for Goethe's storm, see below...
The Pictures
Sketchbooks — 2003, 2004
The Pocket Bushey Sketchbook
- has the sketchiest fantasies on this theme:
whereas The Big Red A3 Sketchbook moves towards the fullest realizations:
Paintings — 2004
Bird-flutter sunset over Capri after the journey up...
The Minotaur's Vision: omaggio lontano a p.p.
The Sublime Void: hommage to j.w.m...
Two hanging scrolls concentrate on the calm and thinner air of the vista from the arches of San Michele...
...while two smaller hanging scrolls tell of our gaze upon the moonlight.
Funiculi-funicula!!
The steady upward grind of the little railway to the town square of Capri...
It dawns upon me that...
Capri, 2005
a painting and four black-paper drawings, 2005
After-Matter
Goethe's Storm
In May 1787, Goethe found himself returning from Sicily to Naples; his ship was a slightly cramped French merchant vessel he had not greatly wished to have to take; moreover, departure from Messina had been delayed, though his flirty companion Kniep was happy enough to have more time with some new girlfriends. Mostly unwell on the first two days of the voyage, Goethe sustained himself happily on bread and wine. Amidst a restless set of passengers he and Kniep were fully content with the beauty of the setting sun. Night fell as Capri appeared in view.
So enraptured by the sights, they failed at first to notice that the ship was becalmed in that current which not only surrounds Capri like a halo but which, they soon learned, like an impercetible whirlpool, slowly draws ships to their destruction against the great cliffs. It is still a danger for unpowered vessels and their panicsome ship found itself in just such a timeless predicament. An attempt by a handful of men in the pinnacle to tug the ship, failed. Before retiring below Goethe gave a short but high-toned pep-talk to silence the wailing passengers. Crew and passengers were equipped with poles so that they might fend off the cliff, as they drifted ever closer to their doom and could hear islanders above seemingly already anticipating a goodly haul of booty from the wreck. At the last moment a slightest breeze arrived and the ship was able to escape. Next morning Capri was but a shadow on the horizon behind them.
Once ashore, the sweep of Neapolitan life was as if nothing like a calm could be imagined. Their luggage disappeared with porters — safely, as it happened, but the painter Kniep kept his portfolio under his arm, so that at least that would be saved if the porters robbed them of all the sea had spared.
Often I have tried to paint the unique, enchanting and unforgettable richness of calm that I found on Capri, but this story of Goethe nearly shipwrecked there by calm adds, I think, a spice to the recipie.
"Capri-Caprices in Essence..."
by Herbert Glenn
The essence of Jonathon’s landscape work is to evoke — and celebrate — journey rather than view, recollection rather than snap-shot. A major exhibition at Edinburgh’s prestigious Talbot Rice Art Gallery in 2002, for instance, entitled “RoadMovies”, concentrated on car journeys through the Scottish Border country and the south of France — where Jonathon now makes his home.
The present show, “Capri Caprices”, takes the form of variations on a theme, that theme being recollection of the intense impression made on the artist by a night and morning spent at Capri last September. The journey in question starts with arrival at the port of Capri, taking the funicular railway up to the town square, followed by a hair-raising cliff-side bus ride to San Michele, from whose calm and calming gardens the artist looks back down upon the journey — and the ship — and across to the Bay of Naples.
The pictures vary from the smallest line drawing to the artist’s largest canvas so far, but all are linked by a fascination with that frisson of calm and full view achieved after the travail of journey and glimpses. Jonathon does not work from photographs but only from sketches, memory and an element of fancy and fantasy that give his pictures their distinctive energies and exuberance.
Trained as a philosopher at Cambridge University, where he studied especially under Michael Tanner, Jonathon’s passion for music has led him to write and broadcast for the BBC about subjects as diverse as Wagner’s stage instructions and the ironic early history of the piano pedal. However, it was at the instigation of David Hockney, whom he has known for over twenty-five years, that he began to draw and then to paint. And, in his recent journey pictures especially, to sublimate in visual terms his love of musical journey epitomised in, for instance, Mahler’s settings of Chinese poems in Das Lied von der Erde.
As with Hockney, he has a thirst both for Picasso’s late work and for Chinese scroll painting ; the present work carries the influence of the major show of scrolls held in 2004 at the Grand Palais in Paris, scrolls in which geographical journeys set off a metaphysical resonance that makes looking — and memory — the vehicles of inner insight both of joy and regret.
5
Studios in the Var, 2004...
The story of the first of the Capri paintings...
Thanks to Peggy Donnelly and Isla Baring, as well as Richard Metzinger, Marquis d'Arbaud Provence, I have had wonderful studios, all located in the Var, in which to make the paintings that began their inspiration that day in September 2003, on board the Fulmara...
Here is a short picture diary of the process after the cruise...
The centrepiece big Capri picture
is now in a private collection in Sydney. Planning it began in Fayence, in
the Var...
and involved a brush on a stick...
and a
big palette mounted on a trolley...
Here I also worked on
sketches of olive trees and flowers...
The big Capri picture meantime progressed layer upon layer...
[30th April]
[10th May]
until a
few weeks later 
it was hanging between the trees of the Fouguiere at Correns...
Here
the artist had the ideal light and peace to work, and Daisy the cat for
wisdom...
-not to mention Jazz, Derek and Cynthia the 2cv...
Some
details of the big painting include a top view down from that hair-raising bus, onto the Fulmara 
and the standpoint of the view out to the wistfully mistful...
The
paintings were seen for an afternoon in the salons 
of the hôtel of the
Marquis d'Arbaud Provence in Correns before being rolled and taken to Sydney,
starting the journey in the back seats of Cauliflower...