A Pattern of Indirection: Influence and Individualism in the Paintings of Ceri H Pritchard

Harry Heuser

The paintings brought together in this catalogue were produced during a single decade of an artistic journey that formally began in the 1970s. To some extent, this accounts for the sense of cohesion we derive from seeing them displayed alongside each other, singular as they may strike us when we encounter them separately. Due to, yet all the same irrespective of, the imposition of a curatorial logic, observable patterns, identifiable themes and variations emerge that, along with the medium of oil painting they have in common, contribute to our appreciation of those individual works as constituent parts – a body of work.

As satisfying as it can be for artists and audiences alike to find that the proverbial dots connect and that a creative output amounting to a sustained project is coming into focus, the impression viewers may have of a design that was methodically followed is belied by the winding and divergent paths – the circuitous routes, the detours and dead ends – by way of which that discernible whole has been arrived at. How did we – how did he – get there? That is a commonly asked question, a straightforward or simplistic answer to which Ceri H Pritchard tends to resist.

The title of this catalogue, on which Pritchard and I settled after some deliberation, is meant to signal the unpredictability of a pattern that, clear and compelling though it appears in hindsight, was unlooked-for rather than envisaged, let alone consciously planned. Packed into that decade of the artistic endeavour showcased here are seventy years of lived experience.

The course Pritchard chose to pursue is far from linear. The dots we see as connected nonetheless correspond, at least to some extent, with points on a map, as Pritchard, who was born in Birmingham, England, and raised in north Wales, spent much of his adult life abroad; and, to varying degrees, the exposure to the cultures in which he immersed himself informs his practice and shaped his international outlook. As the cultural dislocations that contribute to his ‘eclectic style,’ Pritchard – who is fluent in French and Spanish – identifies the ‘years of living in Provence and southwest France,’ experiences that, in his compositions, have become ‘blended with the metropolitan flavours of Berlin and Manhattan and subsequently by [his] life in Mexico.’

It might be tempting to say that, notwithstanding what Pritchard calls an ‘individualist’ life, his calling was predetermined – in the blood, as it were – given that he happens to be the son of two well-known and similarly peripatetic British artists, the landscape painter Gwilym Prichard (1931–2015) and the figurative painter Claudia Williams (1933–2024); that his uncle, Arthur Pritchard (1927–1993), likewise, was a painter; and that he is named after the Welsh painter-printmaker Ceri Richards (1903–1971), one of Britain’s most iconic modernists and Surrealists. At the Chelsea School of Art, Pritchard’s mother had studied under Richards’ wife, the painter, embroiderer and illustrator Frances Richards and, she reminisced, ‘would sometimes see Ceri Richards queuing […] in the canteen at lunchtime.’

Young Ceri Pritchard features in many of his mother’s works from the mid-1950s to 1960s. Some of them anticipate his future by depicting him – along with his younger brother, printmaker Ben Pritchard (b. 1956) – in the act of image-making (fig. 1). However, as Pritchard recalls in the artist statement that precedes this essay, while his parents provided an environment in which creativity was fostered, they did not encourage their eldest son to become an artist by profession. If growing up in what Pritchard has referred to as a ‘parental artistic cocoon’ has shaped his development, it was mainly, as he puts it, ‘in regard to a drive, commitment and enthusiasm for a life dedicated to creativity.’ There seemed ‘hardly a moment’ when his parents were not ‘looking for inspiration or being actively engaged in creating.’ Every aspect of home life was permeated by their love of art.’ Even when at leisure, Pritchard was urged not to ‘waste time’ but to do ‘something useful,’ which was another way of prompting him to draw or paint, to read, or even simply to look.

An environment suffused with the ‘smells of linseed oil, terps and linen canvas probably has had an influence on my love of the paint medium,’ Pritchard considers, 'but my childhood was also full of my own experimentation…. I collected rocks and stones, I dismantled everything I found (old televisions and radios), I made strange primitive tape recordings and was fascinated by home constructed synthesisers.’ The practices and the ‘kind of ideas’ he would ‘pursue in [his] own work,’ Pritchard insists, have led him to take a ‘route’ that is ‘very different’ from the career of his parents, their similarly peripatetic life in France and Britain notwithstanding. Their work was, from the start, aligned with the Western canon but also readily suited to narratives of Welsh identity, as well as being committed by and large to the traditional media that Pritchard came to adopt only gradually, self-consciously, and with considerable trepidation. As much as there are ‘advantages in having artist parents,’ Pritchard reflects, ‘it can be a struggle to carve out one’s own career in their shadow.’ In fact, he ‘often felt’ that his was an ‘inheritance’ that he ‘would prefer to ignore.’

To be sure, in subject and mood Pritchard’s paintings are far removed from his mother’s joyful and often monumental figure compositions, most of which celebrate the bond between mother and child (fig. 2). Still, Williams’ conspicuous enthusiasm for colour and her partiality for the decorative is also prominent in Pritchard’s work. Meanwhile, the abstracted and rugged landscape paintings of his father (fig. 3) were concerned with questions of identity and belonging – with the unearthing of Celtic roots in ancient and foreign soil. Pritchard, too, engages with ‘hiraeth’ – a nostalgic longing for home; but his approach and the expression his questioning takes are entirely his own. Pritchard’s work draws on the unnerving sensation of estrangement that Freud termed the uncanny – the unhomely.

This is reflected in the otherworlds he creates on canvas, worlds in which the objects of our everyday are displaced and disorientatingly rearranged: the upset easy chairs and sofas that Pritchard’s compositions divest both of their function and of the comfort that we expect to derive from them; the retro-Sci-Fi of his outmoded television sets, none of which are plugged in and some of which gather in eerily family-like groupings to occupy the seats we generally reserve for watching; the screens that resemble smart phones and tablets but that, instead of transporting or connecting us, are made to serve as mirrors reflecting the futility of our alienating modes of communication and escape. In the Martian wilderness of his largely unpopulated landscapes with their unsettled settees and their ersatz flora of transplanted floor lamps, Pritchard dwells on the themes of uprootedness. However enriching his experience abroad has been, it has contributed to a feeling of dislocation, of longing yet not belonging. It is that feeling of yearning, disquietingly unrequited, that ‘intrigues’ Pritchard most and that ‘powers’ the art he makes.

In his determination to forge a path for himself, Pritchard embraced the tenets of Existentialism; in particular, he cites writings such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée (1938) among the literary works that have resonated most with him. According to Sartre, we ‘cannot decide a priori what there is to be done.’ We are not ‘ready made at the start’ but obliged to make ourselves. ‘No omens,’ Sartre maintained and, responding to a student seeking his advice, declared: ‘You're free, choose, that is, invent.’ In Sartre’s view, it is a freedom to which we are condemned.

Despite the apparent emancipation and democratisation of the artworld that was achieved through the interrogation of the Western canon and the programmatic rejection of traditional media in the 1960s and 1970s, Pritchard did not experience his academic training as liberating. From 1972 to 1976, he studied at Liverpool School of Art, and continued there for an additional year on a scholarship. Subsequently, at St. Martin’s College of Art, he enrolled on a course of Advanced Sculpture. Even though he had long experimented – and continues to experiment – with alternative media including sound art and electronic music, the alternatives advocated by academia struck him as no less prescriptive as the conventions and traditions with which his parents’ figurative art and landscape paintings can be readily aligned.

A spirit of rebellion apart, the institutional privileging of conceptualism, new media, performance and installation art further contributed to a delayed engagement with the medium of painting, at which Pritchard arrived via the collages that he executed during his first extended stay in New York City (fig. 4), where he exhibited in 1986 at Jon Gerstad Gallery, an alternative contemporary art hub in what was then a not yet entirely gentrified neighbourhood in downtown Manhattan near Houston Street. The Gallery closed the following year when the press declared downtown ‘dead,’ claiming the bohemian scene to have lost its edge.

Meanwhile, Pritchard’s unease about the market for commercially viable painting continued to linger, even after major exhibitions such as A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1981) and the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, New York (1984) signalled the return of curatorial and critical attention to the medium, as did the fact that the inaugural Turner Prize was awarded in 1984 to the painter Malcolm Morley.

Despite his networking in the contemporary art world – notably his friendship with the German art historian Hagen Lieberknecht (1940–2020), with whom he discussed the work of Joseph Beuys and through whom he got to meet the postmodernist artists Sigmar Polke – Pritchard regards himself as ‘somewhat’ of an ‘outsider’ in the artworld. He has never subscribed to any one movement, let alone signed a manifesto. There is no direct art historical referencing in his work. Absent are the strategies of appropriation and pastiche that defined postmodern painting. In his practice, Pritchard responds to modernism rather more obliquely.

The years he spent in Mexico, where some of the paintings in this catalogue were created (Cat. 1-9), made Pritchard aware of what he calls ‘a preexisting surrealist sensibility’ that has defined his practice since 2008. One year later, he began exhibiting his work in a string of solo shows in San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca de Juarez, and Mexico City. In an article published in 2013 in one of Mexico City's leading daily newspapers, La Jornada, on the occasion of his exhibition Reflejo y reflexión at ISMOS, Pritchard referred to himself as a ‘neosurrealist.’ A ‘surreal element has entered my work,’ Pritchard noted elsewhere at the time. ‘It could be the sunshine, the chapulines,’ he considers, ‘or fellow artists that have encouraged my exploration of a surrealist world. It could be the brilliant color and fantastical play of sound in the city of Oaxaca. Maybe it’s the rich and varied cultural heritage. Or the dramatic mountainous landscape.’

This echoes André Breton’s statement that ‘Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.’ Breton found the ‘surreal Mexico in its highlights, in its flora, in the energy that stems from its mixture of races and from its highest aspirations.’ Mexico’s ‘ever-active mythical past,’ its ‘marvelous social melting-pot,’ and the ‘unique way in which a keen sensitivity shows through in their expressions of black humour,’ was ‘very dear’ to Breton. It is key to Pritchard’s work as well. At the same time, Pritchard expressed uncertainty about the aptness of such a label. Pritchard’s ‘sensibility’ is more a feeling of affinity with writers and artists including Breton, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia, which he cites specifically, than it is a concerted effort programmatically to respond to the methods and manifestos of an avant-garde movement that originated in France a century ago, in 1924.

The English poet David Gascoyne declared Surrealism to be a revolutionary ‘instrument’ – a means of making us aware of the insufficiency – and the fallacy – of an order we accept as ‘reality.’ According to Gascoyne, the ‘fundamental ambition of surrealism is to dismantle all formal distinctions between dream and reality, and subjectivity and objectivity’ so that a new vision may emerge. To be sure, the term ‘surrealist’ with a lower case ‘s’ has been applied rather more loosely at times. Henry Moore, for instance, argued that ‘[a]ll good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements—order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.’

Pritchard, likewise, seeks to deploy elements of ‘order and surprise’ in compositions in which the ‘decorative and the illusionistic collide, and in which chance challenges notions of conscious choice.’ His paintings were abstract before they turned figurative, flat before they became illusionistic (fig. 5), and negotiations between abstraction and figuration continue to play out in his practice to date; in some works, the very image repertoire he built up over the years is being contested, as figures decompose and objects are dematerialised or, as in Anthropogenic Afternoon III (2021; cat. 30) and Precarious Moments (2024; cat. 52), are encroached upon by layers of paint. This reflects Pritchard’s ‘engagement with a process’ through which the notion of a work of art as a finished product is called into question.

Pritchard is intrigued by what he calls the ‘paradoxical nature of painting’ as a ‘process that can involve hours of solitary work to represent a singular instant of lived experience.’ More than being a vehicle or means to an end, his medium of choice is integral to his investigation into the freedom and self-imposed boundaries of the creative process. ‘I love the alchemy I associate with oil paint,’ Pritchard has stated. His tools include ‘brushes, scrapers, pallet knives, rollers, sticks’ – indeed ‘any means that vary the application of the paint.’ With an idea in mind, Pritchard tends to ‘lay out some marks in charcoal but, to a certain extent,’ ‘allow[s] chaos to intervene,’ be that a ‘colour left over from something else, or from a printed image or off the internet can set the ‘tone.’ The resulting image ‘should engage […] through its inherent optical qualities rather than be about anything particular.’ Painting, to Pritchard, is a process of ‘endless discoveries,’ a ‘series of decisions’ beginning with the choice to paint, the selection of materials, the act of determining on the composition, its shape, size and textures.

Such conscious choices aside, painting has remained a means for Pritchard to ‘explore the conflict between the controlled and the disorderly.’ The ‘challenge of creativity,’ for Pritchard, is ‘always […] rewarded by the element of surprise.’ He strives to ‘make paintings that change one’s visual perception, that produce wonder and anxiety at the same time.’

While acknowledged and noticeable, Surrealist affinities do not define or determine a gradually and constantly evolving artistic practice whose ‘imagery,’ Pritchard points out, ‘is as likely to arise from old photos, electron microscopy, circuit board diagrams and hieroglyphs. The cosmos is filled with visual ideas; you only need to be in a receptive state so you can catch them.’ Pritchard’s receptiveness to what we commonly term ‘influence’ has resulted in a meandering journey marked by roundabout approaches. In fact, Pritchard chose to visit Mexico only after he had come across references to Mayan culture in The Naked Lunch (1959) by William S Burroughs, whose exercises to expand consciousness resonated deeply with Pritchard, as did the writings of the Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing, whose existentialist stance on psychosis as a ‘psychedelic voyage of discovery’ was indebted to Sartre. In The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967), Laing declared that ‘[i]f the human race survives,’ future generations will ‘look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call “schizophrenia” was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.’ Pritchard has ‘always been interested’ in human consciousness and the possibilities of its expansion. ‘When I paint I try to achieve a feeling of some other world, some other type of existence.’

While his paintings are not overtly autobiographical, let alone automatist or stream-of-consciousness narratives, they nonetheless provide Pritchard with ‘opportunities to address deep-seated traumas and recover hidden memories.’ He has referred to his practice as an ‘archaeology of the subconscious that offers the means to explore an otherwise unknown territory.’ In particular, Pritchard’s paintings are expressive of the tension he perceives between creative freedom and the demand placed on art to reflect the external world, that is, the expectation to be both mimetic and relevant – to match in order to matter. This dichotomy is translated into visuals as reflective surfaces – screens or mirrors – and sources of artificial light that are prominent in many of Pritchard’s compositions and that, as sculptural objects, have been transposed from the picture plane into our physical environment (fig. 6). In his study The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), the literary critic M H Abrams identifies ‘two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives. The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind.’ Poetic vision and proscriptive expectations. Creative impulses and inhibitions. Such ‘[u]nresolved tensions’ and a general ‘sense of bewilderment, dislocation and unease are central to my work,’ Pritchard has commented.

Pritchard has acknowledged a ‘general atmosphere of desolation, pessimism and loneliness’ in his work, which is reflective of and reflects on a ‘dystopian future that’s lying in wait.’ At the same time, in his response to what Pritchard calls the ‘absurdities of modern life,’ despair is attenuated by irony and a comic grotesque quality akin to the Kafkaesque, The Trial being one of Pritchard’s favourite novels. Kafka’s ‘importance,’ it has been said, ‘derives from the fact that hie was probably the first and certainly the most radical writer to pronounce the insoluble paradox of human existence.’ The logic of ‘Paradox’ enables Pritchard to express both anxiety and bemusement at the present ‘State of Affairs.’ This is signalled as well in the titles he chose for the solo exhibitions that have been staged across Wales, among them The Strange Edge of Reality, which was presented in two iterations at Tenby (2016) and Oriel Ynys Môn, Llangefni (2020), Paradoxes at MOMA Machynlleth (2021), A State of Mind at Mid Wales Arts near Caersws, and A State of Affairs at Storiel, Bangor. The paradox Pritchard continues to explore, even – or perhaps especially – after moving back to North Wales in 2019, is the condition of being at home with dislocation and familiar with estrangement.

Expressive of an ‘individual’ life though they are, and without having been contrived to drive home a point, Pritchard’s work resonates because it taps into the zeitgeist. It corresponds with what, elsewhere, I have referred to as a ‘new landscape of painting – and a new painting of landscape’ – that is unlike the old positioning or posturing vis-à-vis the tradition with the aim of interrogating, invigorating or disowning it. At its core lies an estrangement from our environment – be it our four walls or the shared habitat that is our planet. The notion of being ‘at home’ with anything or anyone – our sense of belonging and our longing to make sense – is being challenged by culture wars and climate crisis, pandemics and politics, while the possibilities of coming together are exploited yet frustrated by so-called social media and the disinformation they propagate. Learning to move on is no longer a matter of understanding that we can’t go home again but that we cannot afford to stay attached to the conceit of home as a retreat. In this age of distrust, we must place trust in our ability to create, to imagine habitable worlds other than the inhibiting systems we inherited.

Catching up with Pritchard’s evolving work in his studio not long after the height of the coronavirus pandemic, I sensed a renewed purpose, a conviction of having arrived at something worth the departure and of forging ahead, destination unknowable. Working in isolation, in the uncanny environment into which our homes had been transformed, Pritchard had not only become even more ‘aware of the mystery […] of everyday things’ but, responding to a situation beyond our control, was also becoming more open to change and chance. Whether they strike us as primordial or post-apocalyptic, the cells that attack the compositional order contest the integrity of forms and figures, and the meaning we attach to them, giving way to abstraction. Pritchard also increasingly explores the possibilities of repurposing found materials ranging from wood panels to musical instruments (figs. 7, 8; cat. 48-51), dissolving distinctions between sculpture and painting as well as privileging the decorative of patternmaking.

Through his practice, and throughout his artistic career, Pritchard has become more alive and receptive to what he refers to as the ‘structures’ that are ‘part of the flow’ of his life – the heterogeneous influences that fuel his imagination and the ideas that infiltrate his practice. After decades of experimentation and self-questioning, an unforeseen pattern is coming to the fore.