Art UK, Timed Auction

Many artists find their style, at some stage in their career, and remain more or less faithful to it. Dennis Creffield (1931–2018) preferred to work ‘like Billie Holiday sings the blues – and she says she never sings the same song twice'.

He began his career as part of the group of post-war British painters, including Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, who had first been taught by David Bomberg. He won early praise from the likes of major critics John Berger and David Sylvester for massy, brooding paintings of London, influenced both by Bomberg and by the monumental style of Cézanne – these were represented in the Tate Britain’s ‘All Too Human’ survey of British painting in 2018. But Creffield moved beyond his master, particularly after he relocated to Brighton in 1968. Today, he is best remembered for drawing all 26 of England’s medieval cathedrals over the course of a marathon six-month stint in 1987. R. B. Kitaj called these electric large-scale charcoals ‘the best things of their kind since Mondrian’s church facades’.

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