Alexander Mackenzie, painter and teacher: born Liverpool 9 April 1923; married Coralie Crockett (died 1973; three daughters); died Penzance, Cornwall 18 September 2002.
Alexander Mackenzie was a Liverpool-born and -trained painter whose austere abstractions of landscape motifs placed his work centrally in the modern St Ives School. A tall, urbane and scrupulous man, he came to Cornwall in 1951, participated as an active member of the Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives (joining in 1952 and soon after becoming a vice-president during a particularly fractious moment in its turbulent history) and later became head of Plymouth College of Art.
Alexander Mackenzie was a Liverpool-born and -trained painter whose austere abstractions of landscape motifs placed his work centrally in the modern St Ives School. A tall, urbane and scrupulous man, he came to Cornwall in 1951, participated as an active member of the Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives (joining in 1952 and soon after becoming a vice-president during a particularly fractious moment in its turbulent history) and later became head of Plymouth College of Art.
Mackenzie was born the son of a doctor in Liverpool in 1923. Although his family moved to Yorkshire when he was nine, Mackenzie returned to his home town shortly after the Second World War, studying at the municipal college of art in Liverpool between 1946 and 1950. A distinctive concern for taut structure and an ordered expression of space took hold at an early stage thanks to the tutorship of strong draughtsmen like Alfred Wiffen and Robert Timmis. Drawing would remain an essential component of his work and, like Ben Nicholson in St Ives, whose support and patronage he would enjoy, Mackenzie alternated between simplified and stylised renditions of landscape in studio paintings and equally spare but more directly observed representations of architectural, geological or topographical motifs in his eloquent line drawings.
Sensing the unhealthy competitive cauldron of the St Ives art colony, Mackenzie moved across the peninsula in 1953 to the nearby but very different working port of Newlyn, once home of the turn-of-the-century Newlyn School painters. From this base, he started a family and developed his career not only in St Ives but in London itself, where he enjoyed significant group exhibitions culminating in his joining the Waddington Gallery in 1958. He also exhibited at the Redfern Gallery and in 1960 staged a solo show at Durlachers Gallery in New York. He also appeared in surveys of contemporary British art such as at Bradford and Plymouth art galleries in 1960.
Nineteen-sixty was highly productive for him, yielding most of the 29 pictures that formed a solo Waddington exhibition the following spring. A controlled energy and movement characterised these pictures, some of the best of his career, that relayed the colour, texture and settlement pattern of the Penwith landscape within rigid, architectonic formats. The accommodation of scratched, rubbed or faded natural textures within interlocking geometrical forms encapsulated an artistic vision that was both sensual and cerebral.
The atmospheric Nocturnal Landscape (1958) analysed a landscape in palpably sculptural terms yet captured the elusive moonlit mood of neo-romantic art. He saw landscape in terms of bones and sinews much as a sculptor would. In common with St Ives colleagues like Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Ben Nicholson or John Wells, Mackenzie expressly avoided figurative imagery while conjuring human presence of a temporally distant kind in terms of shapes and forms deposited on or below the surface of the landscape by ancient settlements, burial mounds or stone circles.
In Painting (1960), a work commissioned by the architect John Crowther and shown in 1985 at the landmark "St Ives 1939-64" exhibition at what is now Tate Britain, Mackenzie emulated Peter Lanyon's landscape vision of anthropological topography. Manhattan (1960), on the other hand, was less of the earth than sky, taut and horizontal wisps of colour striking an atmospheric note.
As it developed during the 1960s and beyond, Mackenzie's art became more thematic, its more schematic and site-specific content alluding to particular places visited across Britain or the Mediterranean. He tidied up his style, allowing the insistent linear elements to float above densely textured surfaces. A work such as Sacred Circle (1991) evoked the experience of seeing an ancient landmark aerially. This gave much of his later art a cartographic and conceptual quality in which the tableau-like picture plane became spatially ambiguous, while etched with the unmistakable imprint of a past civilisation. The ability to invest the symmetrical rigours of abstract art with a mysterious feeling for the past made his work attractive to a broad range of collectors, the rock star David Bowie visiting Mackenzie's Penzance studio during the 1990s and purchasing several works.
Retiring from his teaching post at Plymouth College of Art in the early 1980s, Mackenzie returned to Cornwall and painted full-time in his house in Morrab Road, Penzance, a few yards from Penlee House Museum. After the death of his wife he settled with a new partner, with whom he made numerous sketching and hiking trips to other parts of Britain.
While enjoying an established position within modern Cornish, and indeed British, art Mackenzie generally did not court publicity. His commercially successful solo exhibition at Austin Desmond Fine Art London, in 2000 was his first London exhibition since 1968, though his work was exhibited regularly in group surveys of 1950s art and his works from that period and beyond commanded growing prices in the auction room.
Without ever changing his essentially pared-down style Mackenzie did, on occasion, paint fairly conventional views of farmsteads and small villages. These subjects were, however, as much involved in the ancient plans and patterns of rural settlements, as they strove for a purely formal expression of the architectural rhythms of clustered buildings. An interest in man-made divisions of favourite landscapes in Wales and Yorkshire led Mackenzie to make numerous studies of ancient field patterns as defined by dry-stone walls, ditches, hedges and other markers.
Mackenzie's steadfast vision allowed discrete formal experiments with collage. The way his work influenced a younger generation, who included Jeremy Gardiner, Patrick Haughton and his son-in-law Dick Chappell, proved how durable an inspiring his example remained. Both as a man and artist, Mackenzie never succumbed to whim or fashion and, while being a quiet presence at its core, retained a sardonic and circumspect eye on the machinations of the art world around him.
Peter Davies |
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P.O.A
