Ella Wright
Unsteady Ground

Consider the trees of the lake. What lichens grow in that flurried encampment of burnt umber and electric blue, with those branches skirting up from the water to the sky? What forms of cloud formations are these: cumulus or alto? How to make sense of that cauldron of fire, burning deep and dark, and which the naturalist might call the sandbank, irradiating in the foreground?

In Ella Wright’s Uprooted (2024), we find nature lost in a state of revelation. Yes, these are the trees of the lake, but this is a vision of an arcadian world reimagined in pendulous colour; reworked, transformed, transmuted. It is no longer the trees of the lake. ‘To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances’, as John Berger once said: ‘a drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at.’ As we enter Wright’s haven of forms, these are paintings of trees being looked at, and revelling in the unique exaltation of sharing in that looking with a stranger.

Wright studied at the Glasgow School of Art and then at the Royal Drawing School in London, and while her work bristles with the precociousness of an artist who long outclassed her apprenticeships before graduation, the marks of both institutions, and both cities, can be identified on her canvases. We can see the Glasgow of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Andrew Cranston in the ways that Wright handles the paint. While both Cranston and Wright paint landscapes with the verve and anxious vigilance of Les Nabis: Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, obsessing over the ways in which light can be kept out and colour kept in, they both offer a rawer sense of the world as a place for revelation as much as observation. As Vuillard and Bonnard captured the electrification of the City of Lights, as well as the gravity-defying blues of Riviera light, then Wright can paint the duskier tremor of a Glasgow or a Shoreditch into her extraordinarily luscious landscapes, lost to the kind of bonhomie that might soon be regretted.

Make no bones about it: these are ineffably joyous paintings, where the cornflower and pastel yellows of the sky, as in Hillside (2024), might sing to its counterpoint of hue in the foreground; or the garden green right there, right there in front of us, might appear to dance with the wild, pointillist footprints up ahead. But there is a darkness here too, or at least that knowledge held deep in our bones if not our sightlines that this summer cannot last, and will pass over soon into a long hibernal slumber, and so the light of its presence—its song, its dance–can still be seen for the moment. We find ourselves in a much darker scene in Outskirts (2024), and yet there is joy here too. Notice the bluebells around the roots of the tree, which half resemble the audience of an amphitheatre and the stage in the left foreground: songs of the season are often truest in midwinter. Up close with this painting, I’m reminded of Prunella Clough, who has been particularly important for Wright: ‘there is something earthy and tangible that she manages to hold within the abstraction of the forms’, Wright tells me. In Outskirts, one need only look at the way the paint is dispersed atop the trees, as though the swirling leaves place impossible weight on the spindly trunks, and yet still manage to hold true, to see Clough’s masterly treatment of the natural world in Wright’s paintings.

When I visited Wright’s studio, above a shop on Brick Lane, just a stone’s throw from the Royal Drawing School, her paintings were on the walls but still wet. Bohemian artists don’t tend to work in studios like this anymore: this small room feels like a space that one might walk into a hundred years ago, when the experimental achievements of continental painting had recently been discovered in London. Or, perhaps a little later, in the middle of the century, when Leon Kossoff worked in a studio in St Pancras: “My studio is like a field, a field in a house. Muddy hillocks of paint-sodden newspapers cover the floor burying scraped-off images. Derelict boards stand in all the corners, remnants of recent activity… My dialogue is with these discarded images left on the floor… Drawing is a springing to life in the presence of the friend in the studio or in the sunlit summer streets of London… painting is a deepening of this process.”

In Wright’s studio, I was struck by the array of pigments laid out on the table. What strange alchemy was this? Wright mixes her own paints using techniques gleaned on grey, wet afternoons in Glasgow, and does so by mixing pigment and binder, and then beeswax with the paint. This creates a matte finish in which the heaviness and the ploughed furrows of brushstrokes are more evident. Sometimes she uses varnish with thinner paint, which can create that bejewelled and even iridescent quality in those canvases where the surface glistens like the veneer of a lake beaten down by the gaze of the sun. Even in the sky or across the water, Wright’s confident accumulation of paint can create depth by the layering of glazes: it’s often not the warmth or the coolness of underpainting that creates colour, as much as how that colour is changed by light. Painting straight from jars and pots of paint, as opposed to a palette, and often working on the floor—crouching, kneeling, and outspreading her wingspan across the canvas—Wright  makes paintings that are themselves physical and agile. It is as though Wright composes her paintings in mid-flight, hovering above the unsteady ground of the painting, collecting and depositing information, while meticulously deciding on the best patch of terrain to land. Often using the underside of knives to mould and sculpt the impasto on the surface, Wright leaves these traces of hard-won battles fought with the canvas.

Wright is influenced by the rich history of Dutch Golden Age printmaking and etchings, and especially by what she calls ‘the strange unreality of Hercules Seger’s landscapes’ which excite and scintillate Wright’s shared desire to capture the phantasmagorical quality in some landscapes, which might be ‘deeply present but just out of reach.’ In Seger’s Rocky Landscape with a Gorge (c. 1625–30), Wright describes the ‘intense detailing and rippling tones of the rocky planes which draw us into the physicality of his imagined terrains but at the same time seem to keep us at a distance, making us aware of the surface of the image.’ Segers would often construct his works by hatching a single tone into the plate, as the forms are then free to emerge through lighter and darker tones. Like Segers, Wright achieves much by restricting the basic foundations of her surface. One of her most beloved paintings is Alley of Trees by Chaïm Soutine (c. 1935), which depicts towering trees, like weeping willows bending upwards or undulating skyscrapers in a breeze, and we can see why: like Soutine, Wright paints trees that defy the laws of gravity and that seem to envelop any sense of the human within their embrace. As in Michael Armitage’s visions of paradise, which blends pockets of the world we can see, its greenery and its fields, with the intimate world of the imagination, Wright’s paintings are deep pictures that refuse to be merely observational. Wright’s paintings are worked and reworked, and fiercely textured, as the artist excavates deep to find her desired balance of lightness and form. ‘Thinking about etching helps me think about painting as a reductive process, as I carve through and sand back layers of paint’, she tells me, with the conviction of an artist who knows that the cave in the mountainside influences the grassy verge above. ‘Sometimes I even use a power tool to remove all the paint and return to the raw canvas below’, Wright reflects, knowing that raw canvas contains all the experiences that have accumulated over time, and it’s these ‘moments of hesitation and uncertainty’ that define Wright’s process. Wright dismantles her images and recreates them from the unexpected residues, palimpsests, and still tangible marks which remain. As Clough said, in one of her notebooks in the late 1940s or 1950s, and paraphrasing Boris Pasternak: Focused on a reality which feeling has displaced, art is a record… it copies from nature, but how does nature get into this state of displacement? Details attain clarity, losing independence of meaning. Each detail can be replaced by another. Any one is precious.

Like Pasternak and like Clough, Wright recognises that all details are precious. Details are precious because they could be lost. This feels particularly true when her subject is not the miniature arcs of flower petal and cobblestone, but instead that which is great: the tent of blue that we call the sky, say, or the entirety of a field. These are the subjects of Held (2024). While looking at this painting in the studio, I ask where Wright sources her references. The reason that I ask is less because I want to try and decode her elongated lines and put my finger on a map and say, ‘it is here’, but rather because I feel that I have experienced the places in these paintings, or felt some profound sense of them before. This strange familiarity of feeling expands rather than recedes in the knowledge that I am certain, for instance, to have never stepped foot in the Tangiers cemetery that inspired Held. These are paintings that recuperate what has been lost, that remember when all around you forgets. We have all sought to confine an image to memory— the face of someone in the moment that you know will be the last, the tree that stands alone in the field—and we have all failed. Wright’s paintings are what happens after that failure: to imagine, to see, and to see that memory once again being looked at.

Wright has thought hard about my question, as though if she is going to tell her secrets she must tell them right. ‘I am a walker’, she says, ‘and I walk everywhere, urban and rural, from western Scotland to Cornwall, the Thames estuary and Suffolk… I assemble images as I go.’ Wright has also recently inherited a binder of photographs from her late grandmother, snapshots of rugged walks, and draws on these in her work. By the studio window on the shelf, next to her grandmother’s binder, are books of poetry: a beaten-up copy of Virgil’s Georgics, and Nan Shepherd’s poetry collection In the Cairngorms. In this collection, comprised of lyrical evocations of walking in the Highlands, there is a poem entitled ‘The Trees’, which begins:

Forgotten temples in forgotten lands,
Half quarried stone forbidden to achieve
The form some master-thought had asked to leave
Cut on it—and reflected there it stands,
Lichened and frustrate—columns that the sands
Have long since gulfed and cities that the heave
Of earth’s cramped body carelessly did thieve
Of fame, and halls both raided and ruined by hands.

Wright’s paintings are like forgotten temples in forgotten lands but, by their very excuse for being, are called to be remembered. Wright might assemble her paintings from the debris of memories, photographs, and the arboreal landscapes of art history, but here we do not see those landscapes but a young master seeing those landscapes for us. The trees, the lake, and the world are only more real because Wright sees them for us.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman