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Notes
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Painted over a number of years in his patch of sleepy south London, Humphrey Ocean’s 'William Blake' is an ode to the unprepossessing, and the fascinations dormant there. Across two and a half metres, the view takes in a block of flats on the corner of Wood Vale and Forest Hill Road in Crystal Palace. It’s a view that Ocean would pass every day on the way home. Streetlamp, lawns and aerials (key suburban vocabulary) take their place under a blank sky, and ought to add up to a picture of the quiet life. Yet those details and the twiddle of 1950s railings skirt the main subject, the flats, whose frontage is allowed to flicker and fade away to the right, hinting at other layers. 'I like to paint where human beings have been, where they've done something to a place.
Unpeopled as this landscape is, it is enlivened by antecedents. Ocean’s flats were built on the site of an old railway station on the line to Crystal Palace; the line had been razed in the 1950s, but still, this is Pissarro territory. Camille Pissarro had taken refuge from the Franco-Prussian War in Norwood and seemed rather underwhelmed with the new railway and the suburban creep. In 'Lordship Lane Station' (1871), for example, red-brick terraces, grass banks and the train’s vapour trail slope away from the railway line – it’s all a bit sluggish. There is a ghost of that steam train, perhaps, in Ocean’s picture, in the way the trees drift off in a haze. With the title, 'William Blake', Ocean takes imaginative repossession of an everyday prospect. For a full painting description on the British Council’s website please click on the link below under ‘More on this painting’
Title
William Blake
Date
1992–1997
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
H 132.5 x W 244.5 cm
Accession number
P7633
Acquisition method
purchased from the artist, 2002
Work type
Painting
British Council Collection
Visual Arts, Arts Group, 10 Spring Gardens, London, Greater London SW1A 2BN England
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Professor Ben Pimlott, Warden of Goldsmiths (1998–2004) Goldsmiths, University of London -
John Monier Bickersteth (b.1921), Bishop of Wells (1975–1987) The Bishop's Palace & Gardens -
Professor Sir David Williams (1930–2009), President of Wolfson College (1980–1992) Wolfson College, University of Cambridge -
Lord Volvo and His Estate Wolverhampton Art Gallery -
Daniel Fergusson McGrain (b.1950), Footballer National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Portrait Gallery -
Sir Julian Bullard (1928–2006), Pro-Chancellor (1989–1994) University of Birmingham -
William Blake British Council Collection - 18 more