A D R I A N  S T O K E S

PREFACE  continues

In D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers - Paul, the artist, could be describing Stokes's art when he describes his own work as:
More shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.¹⁵

Stokes's paintings have been connected to the reliefs he greatly admired of Agostino di Duccio at Rimini in which the figures issue like bathers out of the marble. The shimmeriness in Stokes's paint, using Paul's words, suggests a probing just beneath the surface of the canvas to locate the "real living"; that defining moment preceding the final emergence of the form. There are architectonic aspects to these works. To Stokes the canvas is also a wall - an "everyday surface of smooth and rough." In these paintings there lingers, perhaps, a nostalgia for Giorgione's lost Venetian frescoes which Ruskin, in Modern Painters, saw "the last traces of ... glowing, like a scarlet cloud, on the Fondaco de Tedeschi". Despite the formal variance, they nonetheless share affinities of approach with the "carved" aspects of Nicholson's reliefs of which Herbert Read wrote:

"The nearest analogy is in architecture: the facade. But not facades for a functional building .... Facades divorced from function, free facades - that is the briefest possible description of Nicholson's reliefs." ¹⁶
Two other names that have been invoked to assess Stokes's shimmery land and table-scapes are Morandi and Bonnard. Siri Hustvedt has charted links between Morandi's still lifes, the architectures of Renaissance cities and Renaissance art - including the background to Giorgione's Tempesta - that seem particularly suggestive in relation to the interpretation of Stokes's work. ¹⁷ David Sylvester claims Stokes as "a minor artist, but also an authentic one, an exquisite one and a poetic one. The poetry was that of painting whose manner and matter overlapped with those of Bonnard and Giacometti but was as English as that of, say Ben Nicholson (with whom Stokes regularly played tennis - good tennis)." ¹⁸ Stokes's art still awaits a full research and interpretation. It should be noted that, amongst his activities, Stokes put his painting first.