The Trial

After studying textile design at the Royal College of Art, John Tunnard began his career as a designer and fabric-buyer for John Lewis in London. In the 1930’s, he moved with his wife to Cornwall, establishing a silk block-printing business. It was while he was in Cornwall that Tunnard turned towards painting. Identified as an English Surrealist, his paintings were shown alongside Yves Tanguy, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper. He was widely regarded and exhibited during his life, with an early career exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘Guggenheim Jeune’ gallery in London, (open between 1938-9). He would produce two major works for the 1951 Festival of Britain – a painting, The Return (1951) and a mural for the Regatta Restaurant. Influences on his work include Modern fabric design, an interest in marine life, free-association music (Tunnard was a keen jazz player), and the natural world, (he also collected rare insects for the Natural History Museum while it was still a part of the British Museum).

A play on perspective gives this painting its macabre ‘down the rabbit hole’ ambience. This painting leads its viewer into a world of multiple planes, lines and voids. Peering into its visual machine, one’s investigations are quickly interrupted by a disappearing line, or a strike that crosses one’s view or bends one’s vision along a new route. The viewer’s eye experiences a kind of paroxysm while looking at this painting. A darting effect is produced that leaves us confused as to the ‘real’ nature of the pattern itself. Whatever was first understood becomes distorted and we are left with such questions as: where is the front? where is at the back? what indeed, is happening here?

A number of motifs within this work are common across Tunnard’s practice at this time. The ochre-yellow figure to the right recurs in the work Ghost painted in the same year, and the sharp base-point of tentatively poised shapes are present in other paintings at this time. Voids, doorways, red colour accents, white scores across the composition and generally a dark, nocturnal palate, are all present throughout a body of work that Tunnard painted across the final years of the Second World War.

A conscientious objector, Tunnard spent most of the war as a coastguard on the Cornish coast. In this role, his regular view would have been towards occupied France and across an embattled mass of sky and sea. An active stage of war, this coastal strip was the southernmost ‘front’ of Great Britain. A distorted political space, The Channel, much like this painting, was ideologically abstracted by opposing forces that brawled across it.

The sea meets the sky in this painting, which recasts an agitated and sombre character of war. As a critic of The Times was to later write about Tunnard’s work during this period, his:

‘imagery seems to spring directly from the war, from a time when deserted airships beneath the moon and skies scored with the smoke-trails of aerial battles brought a sudden anticipatory glimpse of the space-age. Mr Tunnard’s obsession with the dynamics of flight, and his visions of an upper ether patterned and articulated by them were never… documentary records, but more like romantic pictorial science-fiction.’ [1]

© Gemma Sharp 2010

1. Imagery derived from War. Mr John Tunnard’s Paintings’. The Times, 7th December 1959. p14.