Tim Sainsbury by Elizabeth Williams

It is tempting to think of a memory as something containable, a completed artefact which can be placed carefully in an appropriate glass case in the mind and preserved intact for those occasions when you might need to consult it, for reassurance about what once happened and who you were then. Disturbingly, though a memory may be framed or contained, it will not be stilled. Behind the glass, the process of growth continues with the head that contains it. The recording in paint of this organic development of things from the past is one of the factors which makes the work of Tim Sainsbury so absorbing. Memory, and his own memories, are central to his work. His grandfather, for example, surfaces as 'The Bird Maker', a man who clipped hedges into shapes which made of their creator something more than a mere hedge trimmer. When one considers that birds for Sainsbury can be an emblem of freedom, and of man's aspirations or need to escape, this Bird Maker becomes at once the real Welsh farmer and also a symbol of the potency of the artistic imagination. A person located in a specific past can be transformed by both memory and imagination into an almost mythical being who can create out of vegetation a variety of new life - life which gives its maker, perhaps, the chance to escape the constraints of whatever might contain him or bind him to the earth.

(The Bird Maker is (surprisingly) the only painting remaining from the

'Red Gallery' that, to date, has not sold. It can be viewed via the Art

Gallery where you can also view the inspirations behind this painting

in the Artists very own words. If you want to go straight there click here

The same grandfather appears again in the haunting painting 'Little Farm'. This time, the green-blue melancholy of the colouring, the chiseled awkwardness of the characters, even those standing close, separated in the direction of their gaze, counters the optimistic notion of the remembered grandfather in 'The Bird Maker'. In the painting 'Little Farm'. Sainsbury recalled his father who had worked on his grandfather's farm for no payment (apart from money for cigarettes obtained from his sister who was a schoolteacher) until he married at the age of twenty-seven. However, the painting is not simply autobiographical - he has described it as being about youth and age, and the quality of distance between them. The way in which the figures and the farm are encompassed in the landscape, the surfaces of the house almost a dream and the features of the characters like things carved or growing, also suggests that what may separate human beings is, in the context of the remembered landscape, less significant than that which binds them together. The remembered person is therefore in the artwork, as in memory itself, many people at once.

Sainsbury's paintings and sketchbooks are peopled by figures from his childhood, and set in the Welsh landscapes of his memory. 'Strange Meeting' introduces the old man who used to spend his days sitting in a hedge watching people go by in the bus; a slow lichen seems to have overspread his face in the time spent waiting, but whatever fire it is which animates him is present in the earth and the sky, as well as his waistcoat and half seen aims. He seems to represent a watchfulness in the land itself - something more than human. Then there is the veteran in the blue suit, whose red tie looks like blood and whose face has been stripped to a bare scream and skull - a real person in a real uniform, who nonetheless encapsulates an all too graphic experience of universal horror. Asked to discuss how he can paint so successfully from memory, he replies that it involves a lot of cheating: "you start buggering about on canvas until you get something you recognise". What he is referring to is an emotional response in himself to a landscape or person which could have been dormant in his memory for years, and the truth of the emotion he recognises communicates itself to us. What he paints is recognisable, though strange; at times it is our own past viewed through the filtered, fractured light of a stained glass window.

Stories he has heard as a child, fragments of gossip, are retold in paintings and sketches. In 'The Two Fires', a man (with a wife and a mistress?) stands hulking in the foreground of a painting in which the smoke of two fires can be seen spiraling into the sky, and two figures stand in the doorways of two different buildings on either side of his head. Sainsbury is chary of telling the exact story ("If I knew, I wouldn't have painted the picture, would I) and his attitude is a reminder not only of the danger of fixing his characters too specifically, but also of the essentially narrative quality of his art.

These narratives, however, though they may have come from words, and will inevitably be returned to words as people communicate what they have seen, are located in pictures. It is interesting that one of the works of fiction which has had an abiding fascination for Tim Sainsbury has been Ray Bradbury's 'The Illustrated Man' - here the body tattoos of a man wholly covered in pictures come to life for his companion (not the illustrated man himself) to relate. The telling involves a heavy price for the narrator who sees at the end of the sequence his own murder at the hands of the man whose stories he has told. Sainsbury's own painting 'The Illustrated Man' is perhaps a reminder that his pictures must tell their own stories, and if we try to fix a meaning onto them, we destroy the possibilities of other readings in ourselves. Their multiple relevance give his paintings the quality of pictorial myths.

That the kind of religious experience behind mythology is important to Sainsbury can be seen from glancing through his sketchbooks which are full of mythical figures such as the Moonraker (who tries to catch the moon from a pond) and the bird men, wearing the skulls of birds on their heads. Sinister though these men appear, they are men with dreams, who cannot go anywhere because they are confounded by their ideas - and by their human weakness. The skulls of creatures who can fly, can escape, offer them the possibilities of a new persona, if they believe in them. Talking of his painting 'New Song in an Ancient Setting', Sainsbury recalled a childhood of being taken to chapel to worship a God in whom he did not believe - worth it, he said, for the thrice annual chapel teas. Eventually, his mother gave up insisting on his attendance. His work, however, reveals a profoundly spiritual awareness only superficially at odds with the dismissive earthiness of his own voice. In 'New Song in an Ancient Setting', dark hunched figures labor up an increasingly bright pathway towards a chapel lit with the brightness of the golden, fire-coloured hills. The sky behind them is dark, like the heaving foreground, suggestive perhaps of the turbulence of human existence, which can often appear to have no coherent meaning. The light of the 'New Song' is Christianity, a hope, in a setting which has seen many different expressions of human longing and spirituality through the ages. However, as the connection

between the hills and the chapel makes clear, this form of Christianity is not a final answer, but the latest expression of an abiding truth which has to do with the relationship between man and the land from which he comes.

The continuity of human presence in the landscape, in a religious context, is signaled in some paintings by the silhouetted tumuli - put in his work, says Sainsbury, to establish a time span - from time immemorial to the present day. These burial mounds also remind us of human mortality, and the human need to make an impression which will last long beyond the departure of the individual body. Sainsbury's work is no more reassuring about death than the landscape he paints. It is not a conscious theme of his paintings, but the watchful eyes in the clumsy, battered faces show an experience of suffering which gives his characters a kind of beauty. It is all there in 'The Old Man and the Sea' - layer upon layer of life on a face which is itself a landscape. The dribbled lines, which he has said were an accident of technique, arose out of frustration with a painting he did not think was working - but these very lines succeed in conveying both a sense of the multiple whip marks of age, and, ironically, because of the structure they provide, a kind of timeless quality to the face of the old man who has returned to the sea to contemplate his origins. Ultimately, then, the success of Sainsbury's work can be said to lie in a harmony between theme and technique, between the specific and the universal, seen in the close relationship of man in his landscape, both remembered and imagined. His work challenges the notion of memory as a kind of museum. Experience is subject to change even after it is complete. But look at the world through his paintings and you realise that though this may involve an acknowledgement of suffering, it is part of the essence of life itself.

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