Foreword by Julian Bell
Don Faulkner's work is about time and against time. Against time, in that it has refused to fall in with the broad drift of art fashions over the past fifty years. Urban notions of the zeitgeist - whether these entailed outsize abstractions, so called 'bad' painting, or forgoing painting altogether - have had no place in a career devoted to beautiful craftsmanship and to intimate, modestly scaled images. The sheer fact that someone somewhere, a long way from London, has been producing such finely wrought and lyrically exquisite images as Faulkner's print of The Dream of Gerontius or as his portrait of Ursula Mommens rebuts many a common assumption about 'what artists do nowadays.'
Faulkner is emphatically an out-of-town artist. Provincial? Not exactly, because to be provincial is to defer to the primacy of the metropolis. But 'pastoral', yes. If there is a tradition that Faulkner's oeuvre cleaves to, it is that headed by Samuel Palmer and revived in the 1940s by 'Neo-Romantics' such as Cecil Collins and the early Graham Sutherland. For such artists, the English countryside has been at once a language of the heart - a vocabulary of equivalents for our deepest feelings - and an object of study and wonder in its own right.
Faulkner, himself brought up in rural Shropshire, had his awareness of the environment quickened by life-threatening experiences. Having started out in a 1950s realist idiom (for instance in the 1959 lino cut Butchers of Leintwardine), he turned towards the constancies of nature - hills, trees, the moon - with an almost pantheistic reverence.
Don Faulkner's work is about time and against time...
His repertory of tactics became increasingly diverse, from rumbustious impastos to a deft manipulation of coloured pencils, from punctilious drawing from life to driven imaginative design. The reason for this proliferation of surface effects and styles (whether 'realist' or 'symbolist') is, I think, that Faulkner's underlying agenda is contemplative and metaphysical. His mind roves further than his eyes. 'What changes?’ his pictures ask. 'What stays?' Repeatedly, they prod at the questions about long-term time that concern the geologist, the archaeologist and the biologist.
What has been striking in the years since Faulkner's retirement from teaching has been the sheer brio with which his work has quickened and flowered. Batik has lent itself to his legerdemain, a playground for subtly interwoven ripples and dazzles; relief prints such as the Orchards in Bloom have further unfolded his delight in visual rhythms; in his ink designs, for instance Fishes and Strips, those rhythms swim in exhilarating hues, above all the radiant orange that becomes the keynote of these more recent works.
In Faulkner's reaching towards pattern and towards what he calls 'the essential character' of living things, he hits on a kind of visual answer to his questions about time. And in his exemplary good craftsmanship, he is building, moreover, to last.
Relief prints such as the Orchards in Bloom have further unfolded his delight in visual rhythms...