This essay was prepared for Lesley Duxbury's forthcoming retrospective in Victoria.

The Sky is for All, — the work of Lesley Duxbury .

David Bromfield

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him than in any other of her works and it is just the part in which we least attend to her . . .

 . . . every man, where ever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty has this doing for him perpetually  The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by a few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them: but the sky is for all . . .

John Ruskin : "Of the Truth of Skies", Modern Painters Volume 1

The democracy of the sky, 'almost human in its passions' , its inherent familiarity. has been a constant theme in Lesley Duxbury's work. The infinite quiet, the unassuming modesty of her powerful images and installations is matched by an inborn certainty that they must change. Shadows must shift. Light must swell or  fade, like life itself. Not that there are pictures in her clouds. They merely mirror our sense of being, caught between destiny and desire, which is more than enough.

The sky is the only arcadia for all, the one landscape our presence cannot destroy. Familiar and alien it hovers in our memory. It radiates timeless urgency born of our mortality. This helps explain Duxbury's fascination with imagery still saturated with its originary dilemmas, from two centuries earlier. Nineteenth century printmakers turned their eyes heavenward partly to provide accurate images of the mechanics of creation. Meteorology, however, like much else, emerged from a profoundly changed sense of being. The sky became an 'abyss in which the everlasting stars abide',  . clouds were tokens of mortality and their ensemble a theatre for memory and the imagination, to which prints and printmaking became the principal guide.    

Duxbury, printmaker par excellence, stages the current human condition in such a theatre, taking cues from her craft and its history. "What  a Day" 2001, began with the memory of a London weather forecast in 1996, which described the day ahead as "miserable" . Two identical inkjet prints of a cloudy sky, surfaces of dense, radiant, sooty greys each have a column of weather words overprinted in translucent, utterly  contemporary sans serif capitals. On the left, in blue, are positive terms 'BRIGHT, GLORIOUS, BREEZY . . .' on the right in yellow 'DREARY, BLEAK, OMINOUS . . .'. Beyond a demonstration of the inescapable relation of word and image, their opposition invokes the very weather of the soul, the metaphysics of light beyond darkness and the act of [re]creation we commit whenever we contemplate  the sky.

Words force the viewer to become present, to occupy the centre of the work, to choose a path across the shifting skies. This superb poetics of presence distinguishes  her recent work from conceptual/documentary photo-landscapes or installations by Richard Long who restages the natural sublime as excessive spectacle, a latter day Eidophusikon , Duxbury is concerned with it as a diffuse but intense presence, the product of two abysses, within and without the viewer, desire and destiny. Consider Sky Blue [1999] in which Azure, Indigo and other words for blue are printed over intensely brooding storm clouds. In groping for the precise blue beyond the clouds the viewer connects with the universal abyss.

Installations, such as Sudden Shower [1999], also place the viewer fully in the present moment, physically in the work. Duxbury printed narrow strips of paper in gradated greys, some with rainbows printed on the back .She installed them 'to represent a quick shower of rain– drops that had not quite reached the ground'.   The strips were brightly lit as if by the sun. From an acute angle a rainbow effect could be seen, a glow on the wall, reflected from the back of the coloured strips. Most visitors noticed this fugitive but powerful effect only as they left the space.

What a Day, and, Sudden Shower, depend on intimate relations between the traditional skills and intuitions of the printmaker, for example Duxbury's reverence for rich greys, and her willingness to use them to present the delights and dilemmas of contemporary presence in new media. Their restraint, their powerful modesty, above all their accessibility, are possible only through the limits this sets to digital extravagance. 

Her most recent installation, Deceptio Visus, extends their premise through a sequence  of contrasting images. Separate details recall the once passionate eye, the discriminating vision of the meteorologist, the moods inspired by different skies. In Still, pairs of small grey oval paintings of "those indistinct grey days so prevalent  in England" are embossed with numbers to show the time passed between the two. Like clouds, embossing, a printmakers device, invokes an intense gaze. In Hi-Low [a reference to barometric pressure] eight digital prints of stormy skies and eight flat blue lino prints both framed in their own colour are juxtaposed  in two grids. This intense  formal contrast  was reversed in the words on the glass over each. Sunny words over storms, stormy words on flat blue repeatedly  reposition the viewer within the work.

Duxbury grew up in Accrington, a Lancashire mill town on the northern slopes of the Pennines. A walk would take you up to the raw rocky moor where the ever changing weather rolls in from the coast, bringing far more than four seasons a day. Day or night, one is absolutely present in the spectacle, head in the stars, clouds dancing by with their swift shadows, sun after rain, a sudden rainbow.

Distance, her move to Western Australia  in 1992, prompted a need to recover this intense presence, at once absolute and transient, in the local scene. Since the landscape was spoken for by history, she and her husband Michael went out to sea, in kayaks. The result was a series of small mezzotints about 4cms wide showing light across sky and sea, their entire surface built up from soft, ebony clouds of ink seemingly blown across the paper by the wind, which was her chief concern. In White Flag, it twists a dusky pennant  across a velvet black sky above the mountain range of waves it has just raised. 

In mezzotint  an entire plate is treated with a spiked wheel, so that it prints a dense overall black. Light and highlights are produced by smoothing back the plate. The technique stresses the drama of light and dark. John Constable [1776-1837] chose it to reproduce his 'English Landscape' [1830-1832], a series engraved by David Lucas, [1802-1881] subtitled in 1833, Principally  Intended to Mark the Phenomena of the Chiar'Oscuro of Nature .  Constable came to believe that chiaroscuro was a fundamental principle of the natural order not a simple effect of light and shade, best seen in his skies. Duxbury's prints radiate a strong presence similar to the mezzotint  of Constable's cloud filled Weymouth Bay.

Her 1994 exhibition was "unashamedly influenced" by Constable. It featured Shadow, a mezzotint  and graphite dust print, a 470 cms long ribbon, which moved from dark to light and back to dark without an image. It appropriated Constable's habit  of writing notes about the weather on the back  of his sky studies [1821]. His text, "Morning looking south east very brisk wind at west, very bright fresh grey clouds running very fast over a yellow bed half way in the sky, very appropriate  for the coast  at . . ." was laid over the strip of light and shade. It too moved from dark through pale grey to white and back with the brightest  point at 'fresh grey clouds' . In Transit [1994]  20 small zinc plates were each etched with a single word Surface, Siren, Equator, Indefinite  etc and painted over with grey oil paint so that the word appeared printed  as in a cloud, subliminal unconnected.

Duxbury had discovered the other side of the sublime, the infinite incompletion of word and image, their ability to work together to draw the viewer into a voyage through time, memory  and the imagination,  in an attempt  to 'complete' the work.

I took the omnipresent timeless sky as a symbol to challenge time and space. I used clouds as a hidden memory device to revisualise the present in terms of the past. By evoking an image through the use of text the imaginative powers embodied in language hold possibilities to engage the viewer on a journey through time and question the notions of reality and imagination.          

Constable, and Turner, Duxbury's other idol, found similar possibilities. Turner exhibited his major works with poetry, usually from his own collection, The Fallacies  of Hope.  . Constable frequently referred to Bloomfield and others. An 1819 cloud study carries  a poem which reads in part            

Far yet above these wafted clouds are seen

[in a remoter sky still more serene.]

Others detached in ranges through the air,

Spotless as snow, and countless  as they're fair;

Scattered immensely wide from east to west,

The beauteous  'semblance  of a Flock at rest. 

Duxbury also uses words to charm viewers to take responsibility for their vision. In Out of Bounds, [1996] she silk screened text from English Landscapes  on the glass over silver gelatine photos of the W.A desert. One  had to view them through Constable's account. In the relief print Crepusculum, [1997] inspired by the mists of European autumn, a grid of flat warm greys in finely balanced, unframed squares, was overprinted with a silver text on clouds that became visible as the viewer moved in front of them, the first attempt to position the viewer physically in relation to the work.

This epiphany of the sensual eye, information and bodily presence continued in Gust,[1998] 13 photographs of wind blown clouds, accompanied by the Beaufort scale of wind speeds on the ground Drift [1998] a scintillating grid of grey overprinted with Kepler's texts on snow flakes and Every Cloud [1998] which used 33 embroidery hoops, each stretched with silk bearing one of Luke Howard's cloud classification terms from the early 1800's, embroidery like clouds, can be a screen for our dreams. It culminated in two versions of Dust [1999] suggested by nineteenth century comments about  the different shapes of dust in Parisian gutters and the mountains. Similar but irregular shapes of paper printed with gradated grays were floated over walls with fomecore so that the bright rainbow color on their reverse glowed back from the wall. In the later version. These fragments surrounded viewers on all four sides as if they were themselves at the centre of a sunlit cloud.

Duxbury's decade long dialogue with the sky is a remarkable achievement not only as an extraordinarily coherent body of work but as a recovery of the sky as a human  resource., Thanks to her, once again, the sky is for all.

Notes

  John Ruskin : "Of the Truth of Skies" Modern Painters Volume 1 Section III, Chapter 1 page 216 -small edition - George Allen, London 1897

  William Wordsworth – The Excursion, Book II quoted by Ruskin op cit page 218  

   Duxbury remembers the forecast because it was the days she set off for Paris to take up a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. 

  In 1781 The painter  and set designer Phillipe Jacques de Loutherberg [1740-1812] invented and presented the Eidophusikon a small scale theatrical diorama popular in London in the late C18th for its sublime "effects of calm and storm, sunset and moonlight, the accurate imitation of nature's sounds the approaching thunder the dash of waves on a pebbly beach . . . in agitated water he is very succesful" It encouraged Gainsborough to experiment with paintings on glass lit from behind and spawned a number of related semi scientific devices to engageand represent the sublime in landscape. See Jack Lindsay "J. M.W Turner a critical biography" Readers Union, London 1967 pages 50 – 51.        

  Lesley Duxbury letter to the author January 2002

  The full title of the mezzotints was Various Subjects of Landscape Characteristic of English Scenery from Pictures Painted by John Constable, R.A. For full details see Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming Williams John Constable, Tate Gallery London 1991 page 319 ff  Parris and Williams also point out that there is  no definite evidence that Constable's cloud pictures were inspired by the meteorological classifications of Luke Howard, as was previously suggested. 

  Lesley Duxbury - Spaces between Words Imprint Spring 1994 Vol 29 No 3 np

  See Lindsay op cit passim p 189.  Turner displayed this poem with his Slavers

Aloft all hands, strike the top masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce edged clouds

Declare the Typhon's coming.

Before it strikes your decks, throw overboard

The dead and dying—ne'er heed their chains.

Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!,

Where is thy market now? 

 Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming Williams, Conal Shields, John Constable, Tate Gallery. London 1976 Cat no 173 page 111. The poem is The Farmer's Boy [Winter] by Robert Bloomfield lines 245-62.