Gervase VII

Patrick Procktor met twenty-two-year-old model and aspiring pop star Gervase Griffiths in London in Spring 1968, when both appeared on the catwalk at a show of menswear by the artist’s friend Mr Fish. They became lovers, and for the rest of that year Procktor painted, drew and photographed the young man constantly. Offered a show in New York that December, he decided that Griffiths would be its sole subject; the present work was amongst the forty-four that were included. The subtle economy of treatment here is informed by Procktor’s work in watercolour, the medium he first took up whilst holidaying with his friend David Hockney in Europe in the summer of 1967, when Hockney, frustrated by his own attempts, presented him with his box of watercolours (see D. Hockney and N. Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, London and New York, 1976, p. 149). Procktor soon realized a natural affinity, going on to achieve great renown as the best watercolourist of his generation. Compared to Hockney’s paintings of similar subjects, Gervase VII appears less obviously stylized and more naturalistic, though it in fact results from a brand of highly considered artifice, in which the figure is subject to distortions and elongations typical of the artist’s portraiture. In a letter to the New York gallery, Procktor wrote that the paintings of Griffiths were ‘icily objective’, a statement that might be seen to run counter to his emotional feelings, but that was central to his artistic sensibility. He also added, in an ironic nod to American minimalism, ‘I conceived the show rather as though, were I another kind of painter, I might have chosen lumps of dirt, or identical neon tubes as a theme. Of course there is a difference – a human subject is both more diverse, and as a whole a romantic entity.’ The source of Gervase VII is a photograph taken in Morocco in October 1968, in which Griffiths, floating in a hotel swimming pool, is framed so that his figure is cropped, both at eye level and at mid-thigh. The painting therefore, with its interplay between the liquidity of both subject and medium, results in large part from imaginative invention (see a letter from Patrick Procktor to Mary Ratcliffe, Director of Exhibitions at Lee Nordness Galleries, 14 November 1968).

We are very grateful to Dr Ian Massey, author of Patrick Procktor: Art and Life (Unicorn Press, 2010), for preparing this catalogue entry.