Peter Liddle (b.1940) is a British Landscape Painter and Sculptor. During his formative years in London he painted abstract works often experimenting with the optical effects he found fascinating in Vasarely and Seurat. Since then he has lived in both Cornwall and Cumbria where he allowed the wild and rugged natural beauty of his surroundings to enter his imagination. However, the optical potential of colour remains significant in Liddle’s work and one can often spot a lay line flashing across his canvases.

Liddle has a keen interest in Renaissance techniques of composition and has entertained tour groups in the galleries and streets of Florence with his stories of Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Donatello.

Liddle also spent many years teaching life drawing and painting at evening classes at Ullswater Community College in Penrith.  He made a big impression on his students, so much so that one of the many pupils who later became professional artists said he might never have considered a career in art had it not been for Liddle’s classes.  I was one of his students too and have had a passion for art ever since.  We kept in touch after I left Ullswater and often discussed our latest projects and trips – his to the wild places of the British Isles and mine to the galleries of continental Europe.

While an architecture student I had often wanted to design an exhibition space for Liddle but the opportunity never arose and it took several years for me to begin the project in earnest.

Satellite image south west of Penrith, Cumbria. Top left Ullswater, bottom left Haweswater

Satellite image of house, garden and farm buildings

At the time I began designing, Liddle lived at a remote cottage on a fell near Askham, between Penrith and Shap.  The natural site for the project was a barn adjacent to the property.  However I was in Austria for a period of months and had to begin with only a vague memory of the existing building and no survey drawings.  So I started designing an entrance and entry room.

Watercolour of doorways

I had become fascinated by aquiline ripples after staring for hours at the reflections of an alpine lake and designed the portals in a way to capture the essence of moving water.  I imagined I could do this by casting the form of striations found in sandy beaches.   The first sliding doors would be turquoise glass etched or cast with ripples and the second pivoting doors would be of bronze (the first Renaissance reference).

Below are some studies I completed in lead from the beach at Allonby, West Cumbria, where Liddle often goes to collect drift wood for sculpting.

Beach Casts lead ø10” & 8”x14” (2011)

Watercolour of entrance room

I envisioned the entry room as a decompression chamber where you might stop or a least slow down and prepare yourself for the experience. For that reason it is the most richly coloured and textured space featuring several kinds of natural stone including the highly prized, local Shap granite which has a beautiful pink pattern with large crystals.

Once back in England, I resumed work on the project and began deciding out how to integrate the entry into the existing barn and how to utilise the rest of the space.

In order to accommodate the height needed for two floors, the eaves had to be raised and I took the opportunity to reorganise the roof.  A flat roof would be inserted over the entrance and planted with meadow flowers and grass to give the impression of a ruin.  The main part of the roof would be reinstalled with a radical twist.

Several considerations informed the design of this roof.  I wanted to introduce north light and had been taken by a sky light in a Hans Scharoun building where the roof appeared to bubble up to form an opening similar to an eyelid.  I also wanted to continue the wave motive and make a dramatic architectural statement to counterpoint the relatively simple interior.

In order to maximise the drama of the interior and particularly the roof I wanted the upper storey to take the form of a gallery or balcony – opening up the space.

The floor of the exhibition space is a dark grey concrete, bordered and broken by bands of carrera marble (another Renaissance reference.)

The furniture is all bespoke, each a celebration of materials: timber, brass and steel.

The video below explains Liddle’s work, the site and includes a detailed walk-through.

Saturday 11^th July, 2009 saw the opening of the Antony Gormley solo in Bregenz, Austria. A physical monograph across four floors, spanning over 16 years of his career, it is his biggest retrospective in Europe to date. And, as I am currently living in the country, it was one that I refused to miss.

I sat opposite Peter Zumthor’s acclaimed Kunsthaus in the adjacent coffee house, trying to pass a few minutes before the doors opened. All the time watching Bregenz’s great and good assemble. There was hubbub, an eager anticipation and everyone was feeling a little more important than usual. When I could not wait a minute longer, I left my unfinished drink and crossed the square towards the hazy cube, a shower of shingles glowing golden in the evening sun like frozen sheets hacked from the Bodensee behind.

‘Body and Fruit’ (1991/93) occupies the foyer. Two bulbous lumps, which could originally have been a number of varieties of fruit and are now expanded beyond recognition to many times their natural size, hover a few centimetres over the Terrazzo floor. Their mass renders them planet like, but they are still immediately identifiable as fruit, perhaps even juicy despite their gross size and inedible material. This play with scale, quality of finish and absence of explicit purpose are hallmarks of the assembled work. But each is quietly purposeful.

Above is ‘Allotment II’ (1996), the spatial representation of 300 inhabitants of Malmö, whose “intimate measurements” were transferred into hollow concrete shells, each just big enough to hold the sitter. In his opening speech Antony talked of mnemonics, memories made physical and this work is just that. Like a photograph, it records an event. Surely an exciting, strange and memorable one for the subjects and as one walks around this can be felt. There is an atmosphere of a village fete, the cubes stand roughly on a grid but there seem to be family groups and more open spaces where visitors gather to talk. The overall composition is indiscernible; you can only glimpse islands in a united party. You can walk between them, stopping when you meet a giant or someone roughly your size and gaze into their vacant mouths, perhaps imagining the person whose body gave rise to the form, but you imagine them in a parallel space, far away and free, not imprisoned inside.

On the third level is ‘Clearing V’ (2009), a twelve kilometre looping coil of aluminium tubing. Unlike the previous installation, whose only clue in the stairwell was the gasp of the person in front of you, it reaches right into the landing at the top of the stair. You are forced to enter it, climbing over the limbs and ducking through the gaps. There was a warning that the dyed aluminium would rub off black onto your clothes if you brushed it but the gallery goers were risking their best. One woman was even crawling, perhaps having found herself trapped. This work is unapologetically artificial, no attempt is made to bring an aspect of ‘realism’ or naturalness. Nevertheless, a familiar parallel world is conjured, or at least room was left for one. I recalled rummaging through a thicket near my home in Cumbria which was maintained by one of the village elders, a farmer and a painter. It’s a dow spot or ‘enchanted spring’ a mixture of depthless bog and native trees woven between wild orchid hybrida. Despite appearances there is something common in spirit.

Many people were complaining of claustrophobia by now. The absence of vistas and the heady combination of art and architecture was intense, almost painfully so. But the final floor was something of a release. It is the most light, not having any concrete overhead and you feel you have worked your way through to the clouds.

‘Critical Mass II’ (1995) has found a fitting home here. As I walked around I pondered on what might be inferred from this arrangement of all but androgynous figures. Should I recognise statues as specific characters? I decided not but there is certainly allegory present, perhaps something about society. The installation is composed like a painting, a great one. Somewhere off centre a heap of stacked bodies lie. Others range off from it or hang solo, thinking, looking, rebelling or in some way stretching themselves. Some obey gravity others defy it by sitting on the walls, not by hanging. There is even a group in free fall, a squadron of dive bombers, noble and sleek. None of the body’s forms acknowledges its neighbours nor are they wrought with any expression. Any communication, in the conventional sense is therefore limited to the arrangement, the rest must be imagined. They are ridged and bear, I also noticed that their feet were cast flat soled, i.e. in contact with the floor, like Greek plasters casts, even when the figures are not standing. Many are repeated, but each is deployed in a new way gaining a new meaning from the circumstance.

On close inspection of the heap I imagined the figures self-aware, aware of their position and even that of their neighbours in relation to them. And if that position was uncomfortable they stoically bore it in a self-contained manner. Although they seemed to acknowledge each other to a limited degree, they remain unable to truly understand each other, they just focus on their own private experience. You want them to talk. However these anonymous figures are open for interpretation and as Antony said, we viewers are the ‘subject of the works’, which remain objects, essentially empty, it is ‘we’ who interpret them and who are altered or not. When you have had enough and the elevator doors close this room off to you, containing it, a single seated thinker faces you across the room and you can be sure he will not be moving.

The Antony Gormley Solo is running until October, so if you’ve been meaning to visit the Bregenz Kunsthaus, now is the perfect time to do so. You can fly into Zurich which is only a couple of ours west or a number of closer airports. Alternatively get on your old 125 and drive down the Rhine.
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/

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27^th June cont.  Renzo Piano was the first ‘star’ architect I really had any appreciation for.  I had visited Potsdamer Platz and the Pompidou Centre before I became architecturally aware and was moved by neither.  What I really fell in love with were his workshop, set above the cliffs outside Genoa and accessed by a glass elevator, and also his ocean going yacht.  Both consummately detailed, appearing like a part of heaven on earth, and so when I’d completed my first year of studies I went in search of as many of his buildings as I could, I even stopped in Genoa and rang up the office, asking in borrowed Italian if I could visit the workshop.  “No,” came the answer in English.  But it won’t be the last time I try.

The Beyeler Foundation has a right to be held among his finest works, perhaps even first.  It sits majestically on a little rise surrounded on three sides by parkland and protected farmland and on the entrance façade by the main road through Riehen.  This front is bounded by a substantial wall of the same deep maroon, (Patagonian) porphyry, a stone prized by Imperial Rome and even the Greeks.  It is used as an applied finish and no lie is made of this.  Each regularly shaped oblong (50cm x 25cm) is stacked directly over the previous.   Joints run unbroken across the entire length and height of the façade.  Yet it is not without a quality of stonelyness, the copings are dealt in chunky 8cm thick slabs spanning 3 blocks or 150cm, a key length in the arrangement of the plan.  Its texture and colour are quite memorising and combine with the landscaping to form a suitable shell for the rarefied and exotic collection within.  The entrance grades down to a little below street level, to the level of the pond.  A lily pond that laps outside the room built to house Monet’s most admired painting.  But when I visited it was hung in the first hall.  It had a wall to itself and there would have been little point putting anything else beside, infact for me there was almost no point in having anything else in the whole museum.  After an hour or so of staring into its galaxy of colours, which move perpetually across a curtain of deepest blue and purple, each area a dance of joyful abandon to rhythm, light and colour, I retreated to the garden for a pause before I could hope to make anything of Matisse, Picasso or even Cézanne.

Outside was glorious. The glass slates that levitate over the masonry appear to glow in the bright sun like the thinnest cut marble.   To the south cattle graze amongst cherry trees and the sound of their bells travels up to the ‘English Style Garden’.  Remind me to pay more attention to our gardens when I return for whatever inspired this must be truly fantastic.

Recuperated I returned and was very glad I did seeing much of the collection and also the Giacometti special, a huge assembly of Alberto’s most famous elongated figures but also and most interestingly a large collection of earlier works and also work by his family.  My favourites being a series of curious game like sculptures in wood, wrought iron and stone and some canvases of Alberto’s father, Giovanni, whose application of paint and staring self-portraits are incredibly intense and vital.

As I left there was a cacophony of sound erupting from loud speakers.  Across the road a rock festival was in full swing, fortunately and in credit to the buildings engineers there was never a hint of this inside.  And so I saddled up and headed for Austria crossing most of Switzerland in an obliterating rainstorm.

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