English painter and printmaker. He studied at Goldsmith’s College of Art in London (1921–6) and began his career as a printmaker, producing small, poetic, densely worked etchings of rural England, thatched cottages, and fields with stooks of corn (e.g. Pecken Wood, 1925; London, Tate), influenced by the early etchings of Samuel Palmer. Although he gave up etching soon after the collapse of the market for this work in 1930 and turned to painting, he did not begin to find his way as a painter until 1934, when he made his first visit to Pembrokeshire (now Dyfed), Wales. During the difficult transitional period he supported himself partly by designing posters, china, glass, and other forms of applied art.
The bareness of the landscape of west Pembrokeshire around St David’s, which was a revelation to him and a source of repeated inspiration, made the production of finished works of art en plein air difficult, and Sutherland began to make drawings and watercolours in a sketchbook, which he could work up in his studio into paintings such as Entrance to Lane (1939; London, Tate). He became fascinated by objets trouvés such as root forms and fragments of thorn bushes that demonstrated the principles of organic growth: in Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods (1940; London, Tate) and related works he isolated them from their surroundings and presented them close up, sometimes in violent foreshortening, so that they became mysterious and threatening ‘presences’. Not only did the objects take on a metamorphic character, with suggestions of animal or human forms, but their dramatic impact was enhanced by rich, emotive colour.
From 1940 to 1945 Sutherland was employed as an Official War Artist to make depictions, mainly drawings, of bomb damage in South Wales and London, blast furnaces, tin mining in Cornwall, limestone quarrying, opencast coal mining, and finally, after the liberation of France, views of the bomb damage done by the RAF to railway marshalling yards and flying bomb depots. His pictures of air-raid devastation in London, showing dramatically lit shattered buildings under an oppressive black sky, such as Devastation—City—Fallen Lift Shaft (chalk and gouache, 1941; London, Imp. War Mus.), are among the most vivid and memorable records of the Blitz. In 1946 Sutherland painted a large Crucifixion for the church of St Matthew, Northampton, inspired partly by the Crucifixions of Grünewald and partly by photographs of the victims of the German death camps. It was both his first life-size representation of the human figure and the first of several paintings on religious themes, and it was preceded by a series of studies of thorn trees and thorn heads suggested by the image of the crown of thorns (e.g. Thorn Trees, 1946; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.). (SOURCE, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T082470?q=sutherland&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit) Accessed, 27 October, 2016.
