This article is an extract from the Monograph published by Art Space Gallery:
Ray Atkins
with illustrations of Atkins's earlier work.

...
Ray Atkins doesn't regard himself as a 'landscape' painter. Nor does he link himself to past painters of landscape in the way Van Gogh latched onto Millet. His paintings are absolutely distinctive. his endeavours however are aligned with those of certain artists who made a virtue of working within the landscape. Cezanne, seen in postcard reproductions and in the National gallery, were Atkins's first landmarks in art. Cezanne's painting habits and assumptions, mediated through those of Bomberg, have inspired an insistence on sustained contact. People may be painted ('from life') in the studio. A view may be secured, ready-framed, from a window; but for a proper grasp, a true coming-to-terms, and for the full works, so to speak, it is necessary for Atkins to go out and paint on the spot.
...
Citified art tends to be concerned with signs and codes, with sharp angles and alienation. The close-up serves as the most positive alternative to the urban vista. Chronologically (which is how Atkins believes his work is best seen) the work unfolds: fron Quentin Crisp as life model, and the dark drawings of figures and the materials of the still-life and the deep regeneration of The Black Still Life, to the hugeness and weightiness of the two early masterpieces, Milwall Entrance I and Milwall Entrance III. These are far downstream from Monet's studies of the Thames from the Savoy - very much passing the time of day - of Whistler's ethereal lower reaches. The paintings cover six feet square and eight feet square respectively. They were massive undertakings, particularly for 1966-7 when fashion-conscious were apt to be intent on dematerialising or boutiquifying.

In his self portrait as Nick Spirit, 1967, Atkins worked himself into a state of impasse. He could push himself no further, no lower. It was a literal representation of the fact that paint doesn't respond to bullying, that it can catch on brilliantly. The move to Reading and the decision to paint more in response to the promptings of what lay around enabled him to surface once again and take in the profusion of things that could be painted. A world opened up, the upper Thames with gasworks floodlit, building sites and a back garden observed through the seasons, the grasses matted then stirring into sharp green life, washing hhung out, giving him the deploy patches of bright local colour.

Moving to Cornwall in 1974 meant a new climate and a fresh range of landscape. Not the clean-cut Cornwall glimpsed by Ben Nicholson over many a window-sill. Nor the coastal verticals of Peter Lanyon: landscapes upended and made to look like buffeted pelts. Atkins went nowhere near St. Ives and the narrowness towards Lands End. His Cornwall is inland, mainly, towsled and spoilt in the sense that it consists of scrub and quarry: land worked over and worked out.

Views of scrapyard with car bodies piled high and alien colours gashing the vegetation were splendidly defiant assertions that Cornwall didn't have to be a cul-de-sac of the picturesque. Like Van Gogh going South to find factory chimneys behind the classical remains of Roman Arles, Atkins campaigned, in his way, for directitude. Normally Cornwall is treated by artists as an extremity to be stormed at or bowdlerised. Some add spume, others make it razor edged. Atkins discovers it.

The paintings are big operations. First the site has to be found, chosen not just for its suitability as a subject but for its unobtrusiveness or seclusion. There has to be a fair chance of not attracting vandals. The scale of the work, ever since the Milwall series, has been cumbersome. 'I drive myself as hard as I can', Atkins says. Not for him the 25in x 36in canvas ('landscape size') carried under the arm or strapped to his back. The massive boards he uses have to be manhandled to the spot and secured to A-frames with cross bars and guy ropes weighed down with boulders. The painting surface normally faces away from the prevailing wind. That's some protection; even so, the progress of each painting is affected by all sorts of circumstances: wind ( a huge painting had to be hauled up not long ago from the depths of the quarry) and cows are the most obvious threats.
...
The size of the paintings also engages. The Sea, painted in 1978 on National Trust property on the north Cornish coast looking towards St Ives, is a mighty confounding of the picturesque. Entire school of Cornish art have been devoted to the crash of breakers on such cliffs. Here though Atkins has achieved the height, determined the mass and creep of the sea, and with that an entire realm of light and chill. Inland, a different scale operates. The junked cars and tractors in Scrapyard IV, 1989 are monumentally abondened. The forms no longer function, except as crumpled colours dumped on the living landscape. Atkins resists the assumption that such a place is an eyesore. The painting has to be as-found. There is no editing. And unlike Kokoschka, who introduced all sorts of allegorical distractions into his painting of Polperro, Atkins adds nothing, either. One of the determinants of his paintings is the need to stay around, to adjust to the weather, to learn the place.

Knowledge of the site is expressed in immediate terms. The paintings are extraordinary feats of assimilation, wider than armsbreadth, quite often, and taking in both the far prospect and the squelch underfoot. Living, as he has done for some years now, on the lower slopes of Carn Marth outside Redruth, Atkins is as territorial as a fox. His painting sites include the prehistoric as well as the post-industrial, the blare of gorse as well as the paleness of the claypit. Colour, since his Thames Valley years, has become as audacious as Van Gogh's when he first set up his easel in the Crau, that first springtime in Provence when the Mistral still blew.

Colour alone is inadequate; for the paintings to work as they do there has to be a sense of structure and formation. The lie of the land gives rise to dramatic leaps and voids. Goonvean Pit, 1994 is both panaroma and sheer drop. The skyline is marginal, the vegetation is little more than a fringe, the wires connect spoil to spoil and the turquoise pool floats serenely in the vast disturbance. Looking across the area of United Downs-Ting Tang Wood, south east from Carn Marth, Atkins registers the change of use from mining, to scrapyard to industrial estate. This part of Cornwall, exploited for as long as almost anywhere in Europe, appears to thrive on disregard for conventional beauty. Here, the gorse survives, and the prickliness of scavengers and borderline farmers, the builders of inappropriate bungalows and the tringers of electric cables across hilltops, ultimately defends the land against those who would dcelare it valuable for tourism only.

Much art at present is touristique. Issues are raised, labelled like beauty spots, and iteneraries are mapped. Art comes supplied with commentary, art that doesn't take too long, art that employs irony as a failsafe feature and that relies on prejudice rather than awareness. Painting is disadvantaged by such art assumptions. It's too meditative, too slow.

There is no need to label Atkins 'heroic' in his persistence. The difficulties he makes for himself are essential to the outcome. Without them he would lack the resistance necessary for deep impetus. Painting on board rather than canvas gives him another sort of resistance. he dedivates himself to laborious cultivation; his is a kind of fieldcraft and makes him more the hunter-farmer than the painter of pleasing projects. Far from being a late Impressionist, or stylebound Expressionist, he is a painter responsive to what he experiences by seeing and feeling.

The studies of figures stretching, turning, exercising themselves, are another aspect. They can be regarded as specimens, or as examples: as typical bare humans of the species that goes around naming and claiming, working and despoiling the world. "How can you improve on nature?" Cezanne asked. Paintings can't, except in the sense that a good painting, a truly accomplished painting, is itself natural. It goes on happening. What Ray Atkins paints, and the awy he paints it, the way he goes out and secures it against the odds - the painter home from the hill - is revelatory.

He makes us recognise.