About

The poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) wrote in God’s Grandeur:  

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” 

My work looks to explore such excellence, grandeur and beauty, which so often inspires a response.  The effects of weather upon the extremities of land are often variable and change quickly.  I love the way in which wind, cloud and rain change the light and therefore the form of the landscape.  Light in a landscape has become my predominant preoccupation.  Light comes from above but so often appears to come from within the landscape, as though the land itself would speak. I respond to the world around me and art is one way I try to make sense of it.  Many things inspire me visually, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Music, poetry, art and the bible are just a few of my other sources of inspiration, which you will see appearing in my work.

I was born in Hampshire and now live on the Wirral.  I have a BA(Hons) in fine art from Bristol Polytechnic and a postgraduate certificate in art and design education from Middlesex University.  I have been an art teacher at St Albans High School for Girls, head of art at Oswestry School, and since 2006 have been head of art at the Queen’s School, Chester.  I have exhibited in solo and group shows in England, Wales and the USA.      

Alistair Tucker’s pictures: a creative response by Melissa Harrison

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction, Rain, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She is a nature writer, critic and columnist for TheTimes, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among others. Her new novel All Among the Barley is due for publication in August this year.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil / It gathers to a greatness… (Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur)

Alistair Tucker’s pictures deal in air, fire and water, the land obscured or revealed in turn by these three elemental forces. In some, fire (light) and water are interchangeable, as sun pours down or pools in lakes and tarns, the sea blazes and rain shafts from clouds in rays. In others, the air thickens with drizzle and cloud, or becomes solid, a mass, like land. Tucker’s world is unpeopled; rarely is there a sign of human life. This is land for its own sake, not for ours: enduring and ancient. Some pictures have the sequestered feeling of a flickering image transmitted from the Moon, or Mars. Buildings, when they do appear, are obscured by trees or rain, or blazed down on by light. They are nearly always of the land, not intrusions upon it. These are landscapes caught in a process of transformation, changing both as the weather changes, and geologically, too, the ridged bones of high ground and the ancient shapes of valleys shown for what they are: restless, still being formed, on the move. They are filled with energy and movement; active, not passive; the passing of geological ages and the fleeting effects of light and weather captured, but not frozen in time.

Review of Alistair Tucker’s work by Brian Maidment, Professor of the History of Print and English at Liverpool John Moores University

It took me a while to connect my initial glimpses of Alistair Tucker’s work into something like a proper awareness of the range and energy of his output. I saw some of his work as part of a three-man show at the Editions gallery in Liverpool, where (to be honest) I had gone to see Norman Ackroyd’s work. Ackroyd’s intensely dramatic and technically brilliant landscape etchings had long been an enthusiasm, but I was instantly drawn to Alistair’s thinner but no less intense images, especially several rain and mist filled etchings of Carding Mill Valley in Shropshire, where we frequently walk. I shared my enthusiasm with my wife and picture buying partner, but somehow I never got back to see the exhibition for a second time. It was from our remote Shropshire base in Bishop’s Castle only a little later that I encountered Alistair’s work again in the Country Works Gallery in Montgomery. Here I saw several wonderful images that confounded the traditional categories of the print, categories that I have spent much of teaching life instilling into students. Here were etchings that were dramatised by brilliantly coloured overpainting in watercolour, drawings that refused to stay on the unbroken surface of the paper but were rather gouged into it and overlaid in other media, freely drawn dry-point lines swirling over etching, areas of aquatint softening etching and engraving .  Such confident and self-referential dramatisation of the making of the image as part of the image itself spoke to me of an immensely accomplished artist with a formidable repertoire of techniques at his disposal.  I began to look at the range of work presented on Alistair’s web-site, although my experience of the actual presence of his work rather defied the ordered division of work there into ‘drawings’, ‘paintings’ and ‘prints’. I began buying his work and, after some email correspondence, was kindly invited to see a range of his pictures and notebooks as well as his studio, a visit that only increased my respect for his restless technical experimentation and his vivid understanding of, and willingness to challenge, the expressive potential of the image on paper. 

But of course technique alone does not necessarily make for significant art, and, now having bought and lived for some time with several of Alistair’s ‘pictures’, (which can’t simply be called ‘prints’ or ‘paintings’), I have slowly tried to work out what I have found especially resonant in his work.  I think there are three elements of his work that speak to me – his awareness of, but not deference to, the traditions of British landscape art; his intensely focussed interest in the ways that the marks and gestures out of which images are made become inscribed on (and often in) the surface of his works; and (in a much less much cerebral way) the extraordinary extent to which Alistair, as an artist, has been drawn to so many of the places that resonate in my own personal history. 

As a landscape artist and a printmaker, Alistair’s work immediately alludes to a tradition of British art that runs from Cotman, Palmer and Blake through William Hyde to the Neo-Romanticism of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper. While bringing various of their own intellectual and emotional interests to bear on their reading of the landscape, all these artists operated essentially at the intersection between light and landscape, and insisted on the singularity and drama of the particular place at a particular moment in time. All these artists shared two other interests – the will to unsettle their landscapes with a ‘visionary’ element that reads significances and meanings into places, and a willingness to recognise and exploit the full technical and expressive resources of print-making media. I have had a long standing interest in this tradition, and I have a fairly substantial collection of British pastoral paintings and prints, including early Sutherland etchings that, despite their estranging moments of Modernist detail, refer directly back to Palmer, and of Piper prints that render familiar landscapes strange through their restrained but persistent critique of naturalism.  Alistair Tucker’s images, while rooted in a clear and detailed response to the landscape, are in the same way essentially dramatic in their sense of place and occasion and, in their acknowledgement of the possibility of ‘otherness’ or even the sublime appearing in the everyday play of light and shade in the landscape. His several images of aqueducts immediately recall the industrial sublime to be found, astonishingly given the gentility of watercolour, in Cotman or J.C.Bourne.       

I have suggested already how interesting and visually compelling I have found the complex surfaces of Alistair’s Tucker’s paintings, drawings and prints, and especially his ability to bring depth and drama to the normally passive and depthless plane of an image on paper. But while it is possible to offer some sort of explanation for these kinds of responses to his work, it is harder to explain the very particular and personal resonance of the places he has chosen to represent. Much of his work, of course, comes from places I have never been. But within his work there were several images that were joltingly personal because they centred on places that have mattered to me in very particular biographical ways. For example, there is a drawing of Fawley power station on Southampton water, which seems to me a successful exercise in the industrial picturesque. Yet for me, as a child brought up on the muddier side of Southampton Water, this image suggests a moment of aesthetic intensity found in the watery wastelands of the Solent, and thus a moment reclaimed from my childhood. Similarly South Stack lighthouse on Anglesey, where I watched from afar my climbing club colleagues from Bangor University putting up new routes in the late 1960s and, more immediately the many images of the wide country panorama seen from Montgomery Castle, rich with a recoverable presence of marauding clans, tribes and barons filing down the converging ruler-straight roads to the castle, fill out my personal history in visible forms. Images of the Long Mynd and Carding Mill Valley, too, represent much of the reason for our half-complete resettlement in Shropshire. Doubtless other people will find similar resonance in Alistair’s re-imaginings of ‘their’ British landscape moments. But Alistair Tucker’s images of a county not much given to the sublime, at least beyond Ironbridge, continuously supply me with a powerful visual and emotional reason for casting in my lot with Shropshire.       

Brian Maidment is Professor of the History of Print and English at Liverpool John Moores University.  Many of his publications are based on a study of early nineteenth century prints and their makers. 

Films

CV

Professional Memberships

2013 - 2019 Elected Full Member of Royal Birmingham Society of Artists RBSA

2011 Elected Associate Member of Royal Birmingham Society of Artists ARBSA

Publications

Aug 2004: Magazine feature for Art of England

April 2008: Film made by the Bluecoat in Liverpool. Ackroyd, Hicklin, Tucker: Three etchers talk about their

work.

Public Collections

The Grosvenor Museum, Chester

The Iowa Biennial Archive, US.

One-man Exhibitions:

2017 Grosvenor Museum, Chester

2014 Editions Limited, Liverpool

2014 RBSA Craft Gallery

2014 The Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth

2013 Radnorshire Museum, Llandrindod Wells & Wyeside Arts Centre, Builth Wells

2012 Bleddfa Centre – Presteigne Festival

2012 RBSA Craft Gallery

2011 Editions Limited, Liverpool

2010 The Granary Art Gallery, Weston Park

2008 HHA Studio, London

2008 CountryWorks, Montgomery

2008 Denbigh Arts Centre & Library

2005 Country Works, Montgomery

Group Shows

2020 The Old Lock up Gallery, Cromford

2019 The Grosvenor, 13th Open Art Exhibition

2017 Boundary Art Gallery, Cardiff

2017 The Grosvenor, 12th Open Art Exhibition

2015 Works on Paper Art Fair, The Science Museum, London

2014 National Open Art Competition, London

2014 Zillah Bell, Thirsk

2014 Liverpool Open

2013 Liverpool Open – 1st Prize

2013 Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA)

2012 The Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth

2012 Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA)

2012 The Chapel, Llangollen

2011 Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA)

2011 The Chapel, Llangollen

2011 The Grosvenor Museum, 9th Open Art Exhibition

2011 Wrexham International Print Exhibition

2011 The Architects Gallery, London

2011 The Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth

2010 CountryWorks, Montgomery

2010 Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA), Open Exhibition

2010 The Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth with Norman Ackroyd & Jason Hicklin

2010 The Architects Gallery, London with Norman Ackroyd & Jason Hicklin

2009 The Gorstella Gallery, Chester

2009 The Grosvenor Museum, 8th Open Art Exhibition

2009 Anon 2 Theatre by the Lake, Keswick

2009 The Lichfield Festival

2009 The Architects Gallery, London

2009 The Chapel Llangollen

2008 Editions, Liverpool with Norman Ackroyd & Jason Hicklin

2008 RWA, Bristol 156th Autumn Exhibition

2008 Castle Gate House Gallery, Cockermouth

2008 Weston Park Art Fair

2007 Ludlow Assembly Rooms

2007 Rhyl Arts Centre

2007 7th Open Art Exhibition, The Grosvenor Museum

2007 Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA), Open Exhibition

2007 Wrexham International Print Exhibition

2006 154th Autumn Exhibition, Royal West of England Academy (RWA)

2006 The Lund Gallery, North Yorkshire

2005 Wrexham International Print Exhibition

2005 The Chapel, Llangollen

2004 Iowa Biennial Exhibition of Miniature Prints

2004 Wrexham Open

2004 Shropshire Print Open

2004 The Chapel, Llangollen

2003 Zillah Bell Gallery, Thirsk

2003 Shropshire Drawing Open

2003 Potteries Museum & Art Gallery Stoke-on-Trent

2003 The Summer Exhibition, The Tabernacle (MOMA), Machynlleth

2003 Wrexham International Print Exhibition

2003 Wirral Open, Williamson Art Gallery