Ron Dutton's Medallions (A Ceolfrith Gallery Torung Exhibition, 1980)

RON DUTTON’S MF,DAI,I .TONS An Introduction by Mark Jones of the Coin and Medal Department British Museum. Many people may wonder what on earth medals are doing in an Art Gallery. If asked what a medal was, they would say that it is something you get for being in a war, or perhaps for being brave; and even if pushed to describe other kinds of medal they could probably only think of the very wonderful sure fire investment silver sets produced by big commercial mints to commemorate Silver Jubilees or Moon Landings. Ron Dutton’s medals are almost as different from either of these kinds as it is possible to imagine, but like them they are contemporary examples of an art form that has roots going back over five hundred years. The first true medallist was Pisanello, a great late gothic fresco painter who was inspired to make his first medal by the second to last Byzantine emperor’s visit to Italy in 1438. This piece had a por­trait of the emperor, John VIII Palaeologus, on one side and a landscape with two horsemen on the other. In this medal, and in the medals of Italian princes and humanists which Pisanello produced in the 1440’s much of the potential of medallic art became im­mediately apparent. The advantages to the artist were first that medals lie somewhere between painting and sculp­ture, uniting the pictorial qualities of the one with the three-dimensional qualities of the other. Second that they unite visual and verbal communication — the inscription, which formed a vital part of the composition, could reinforce or counterpoint the message conveyed by the picture. Thirdly that they allowed the artist to present both sides of his subject. The portrait or outward appearance of his sitter with a verbal description of his name and status could appear on the front of the medal and some indication of his inner personality on the back. Finally even the circular format, though in some ways restrictive had its own unique potential. For the person who commissioned medals they had yet other advantages. Medals were durable and portable, they were fairly easy to reproduce, so that a single portrait could be presented to more than one person, and a collection of portraits of contemporaries or of famous men could easily be stored in a cabinet. More than this, they were reminiscent of the coins of Roman Emperors, in fact the same word — medal — was used for ancient coins and contemporary medals, and so made Princes feel that their features and achievements would be preserved for posterity as those of the Roman Em­perors had been. In the centuries that followed the tradition of medal making continued to develop as great artists in different countries — Albrecht Durer in Germany, Quentin Metsys in the Low Countries, Nicholas Hilliard in England — brought their own contributions to its history. The uses to which medals were put also increased in variety. During the Civil War for example both King and Parlia­ment distributed medals to those who had fought for them — and so the idea of the campaign medal was established. Then again monarchs increasingly de­manded that their portrait be related to events which they wanted to be remem­bered — a victory, a coronation or the foundation of an institution. Medallists working at official mints were allowed to sell their work privately and this led to the practice of striking commemora­tive medals for sale to the public which was so well established by the end of the seventeenth century that Christian Wermuth in Gotha, for example, was operating a mail order business offering hundreds of medals for sale. Ron Dutton’s work, however, is in many ways closer to the origins of the medal than to the medallic art of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The medals made during this later period, like most of the commem­orative pieces produced in England today, were struck. This means that the design is impressed by bringing one die (a roughly cylindrical piece of steel into one end of which the design has been engraved) forcibly down onto a disc of metal which rests on a second die. Originally the dies were engraved by hand, a highly skilled, minute and lengthy business which most medallists were happy to abandon when a machine (the reducing machine) became available which made it possible to engrave, say a one inch die, mechanically from a much larger model (about a foot in diameter). The result has been that most nine­teenth and twentieth century medals were and are struck on a scale distant from the original model and by a pro­cess in which the medallist plays no part. Most of Dutton’s works by contrast, like those of the Renaissance, are cast rather than stmck. This is an altogether simpler and more direct way of making medals. Techniques vary, but basically the artist makes a model and from the model a mould. Then he, or a bronze caster, pours metal into the mould. The resulting cast, when finished and patin­­ated by the artist, is the medal. Some of Ron Dutton’s medals are also close to the Renaissance in their form and idea. That of Sir Thomas Beecham (19 79), for example, has a portrait and inscription on the obverse, and a land­scape expressing some of the preoccupa­tion and rhythms of Delius’ music, with which Beecham was particularly associated, on the reverse. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Dutton’s work is either derivative or revivalist. When he left the University of Newcastle in 1960, he was using abstract forms to express rhythms present in nature and in dance. This interest in rhythm led, in the late 60s and early 70s, to an involvement in play and performance art, and to the use of sculpture, not to produce a novel ex­terior stimulus to the observer, but to lead people to a greater awareness of their own physical presence and sensa­tions. Then, in 1972, he was commis­sioned to do a sports trophy. While working out how to tackle this job Dutton came across both Renaissance medals, and also a medal issued by the church in Nantwich, the place where he was born and brought up. The one suggested the possibilities of the medium to the artist, and the other a way in which he could tie his work to events, individuals and places which have real, concrete significance for ordinary people. Dutton’s earliest medals, dating from 1972-3, Tree Line’ (the first to be exhibited — at the Royal Academy in 1974), Tree Rain’, ‘Moon Tree’, Tree Cleft’ etc., are still strongly influenced by the abstract aesthetic that had dom­inated the younger generation of British artists in the 50s and 60s. Elements of landscape are simplified into geometric forms that are used as elements in compositions, that rely as much on their abstract and formal qualities as on any direct evocation of the subject. In working on these medals, Dutton ex­perienced a renewal of creative energy unleashed by the change from public and ephemeral to private and concrete work. By 1973T he had begun to break with the dogma that demands that the artist’s intellect subordinate and trans­form direct and emotional reactions to nature and move toward an approach more in sympathy with that of Oriental landscapists’ concern to convey, not so much the exact appearance of the land­scape, as the effect which it produced upon the artist. Working directly from nature Dutton began to produce more delicate and informal works — ‘Beehive’, ‘Little Rowan’ or ‘Apple Tree Ladder’. Then in 1974 he began to experiment with the tactile qualities of the medium, leaving traces of the process of modelling — like the thumbprints that make up the texture of the sky in ‘Wave Brakes’. 1974 also saw Ron Dutton’s first major exhibition of medals, at the Wolver­hampton Art Gallery, and the beginning of a series of commissions -- for organ­isations ranging from local churches and political parties to Toye, Kenning and Spencer and the British Museum, which enabled him to tackle the problem of producing struck medals, and make his work available to the public in much larger editions than are possible with individually cast and finished pieces. The late 70s saw a further series of developments in Duttons work. He began to experiment with the limita­tions of the circular format, giving works like ‘Llyn Mair’, ‘Furze’, ‘Cleft’ and ‘Glade’ ragged edges that suggest that the scene represented is a fragment tom out of the continuum of reality. He worked on the bathroom suite, developing the idea of the medallic series, experimenting with the use of different scales, and in pieces like Toilet Tangle’, ‘Cycle’ and ‘Sheep Hill’ with the potential of the two sided medal. The results were exhibited in 1978, with watercolours that showed that, as medal making has provided an entry to sculpture for so many painters, so, for Dutton, it has proved a way from sculpture to painting. In 1978 a wild life series, commissioned by the Royal Mint, provided a further opportunity to develop the two sided medal, in this case by making the habitat represented on the reverse a visual echo of the form of the creature on the obverse. More recently still Dutton, inspired by the landscape around Ullapool, Loch Broom and the Summer Isles, has been working on a grander scale than ever before. Vigorous high relief and massive forms are counterpointed by the most delicate indications of the presence of life in landscape — a tree clinging to gigantic cliff or tiny figures dwarfed by the scale of their surroundings. Through such pieces the artist is able to communicate on two quite distinct levels. These medals are objects, pieces of metal, which record in the marks made by fingers and thumbs — the prints, the hollows, the nail marks — a physical process. This can be seen, and more important it can be felt — so that there is direct tactile communication between the artist and the person holding the medal. The pieces are also representa­tions, not just of a particular landscape or collection of objects bur also of the artists experience of that landscape or those objects. The medal may thus serve not only to'inform the viewer what the scene looked like, but also to trigger memories, to provoke new feelings about visual experiences in the past and to make possible different ways of ex­periencing landscape in the future. This process is assisted by the fact that medals are genuinely accessible works. Accessible in the sense that they come in editions so that more than one person can have an example of any particular work, accessible because, unlike almost any other kinds of sculpture they can be afforded by the general public, and accessible because they can be used and displayed in so many ways. There are few works of art that can equally be hung on the wall and carried in the pocket, exhibited on a mantelpiece, a shelf or in a glass case, or used as a paper weight on a desk. In the 1960s and 1970s there has been a great revival in medallic art through­out the world. Powerful personal state­ments by artists breaking through the restrictions on self expression in Hungary, Poland or Czechoslovakia, fine commemorative pieces from Finland and the rest of Scandanavia, and an enormous range of work from some of the most distinguished French painters and sculptors have been seen alongside exciting work from some thirty countries at recent international ex­hibitions. Britain has not always been well represented, but Ron Dutton’s work at least, provides a personal and distinctly English approach to the problems and potential of medallic art that can stand comparison with any of his contemporaries’ elsewhere. Tree Cleft 1974 Beehive 1974 Glade 1977 Sheep Hill 1977 Gairloch 1979 A Ceolfrith Gallery Touring Exhibition, Sunderland Arts Centre.

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