Lung Ch’uan Ware and Window

Location

Country: China
City: Beijing
Place: British Embassy

Inspired by catalogues that the Victoria and Albert Museum have published on their East Asian collections of ceramics, Caulfied made a portfolio of eight screen prints of white ware (pottery with a white glaze) against a black or dark backdrop. This is one of the prints from that series. All the prints comprise a pared down palette that relies mostly on two colours, and on line, to convey subject and space. All the prints have shafts of light as part of their composition, shown here simply as a white shape drawn onto a dark ground. This particular print also has an accent of a green blue, perhaps suggestive of the green celadon glaze used by the Lung Chu’an potters of SouthernChina. The window, shown simply as a white
square offers the only hint of the setting that the vase is situated in. Caulfield said of his work:‘ I’m not actually painting from observation of light, I’m making up an idea of how light could appear to be. The angles of light in naturalistic terms could be totally wrong but they either help the composition of the picture or they help the feeling of light more strongly’. Writing about his depiction of light in the White Ware prints, the art historian and curator Mel Gooding remarked how light in these works was ‘reduced to the most beautifully precise sign in images of startling abstract refinement. Light is the very element of the visual, it is the determinant of colour, it discloses space.’

Born in London in 1936, Patrick Caulfield was a painter and printmaker. He studied Graphic Design and Painting at Chelsea School of Art, and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Caulfield started printmaking in 1964 and collaborated with key print studios in London. During the 1970s and ‘80s he also completed numerous commissions for mural, textile and theatrical set designs. Short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1987, Caulfield was later elected a Royal Academician in 1993. In 1995, he shared the Jerwood Painting Prize with the painter Maggi Hambling and received a CBE in the following year. His paintings and prints can be found in numerous public collections in the UK, Japan, Australia, Germany and Portugal. Two years before his death, he participated in a British Council touring group exhibition in South America. A survey exhibition of Caulfield’s work was held at Tate Britain in 2013.

Places

Subjects

vase (as Subject), still life, window

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Patrick Caulfield (1936 - 2005)

Title

Lung Ch’uan Ware and Window

Portfolio Title

White Ware Prints

Edition

17/45

Date

1990

Medium

Screenprint

Dimensions

width: 81.00 cm, height: 107.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Alan Cristea Gallery, London, July 2003

Inscription

br: Patrick Caulfield 17/45

Provenance

Alan Cristea Gallery, London

GAC number

17833