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Jake Attree opens part two of A Northern Sensibility exhibition at School House Gallery, inspired by Bruegel’s eloquence

Jake Attree, after Bruegel, in A Northern Sensibility

JAKE Attree, the York-born artist with the Dean Clough studio in Halifax, poses the question “What is a northern sensibility” in his series of two exhibitions at the School House Gallery, York.

Part II opens today in Jake’s exploration of the abiding influence on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s masterpieces on his work and his continuing fascination with Bruegel’s North European aesthetic. 

“For me, it began in the library of Danesmead Secondary Modern School in York,” says Jake. “I must have been about 14 at the time; one particular Bruegel reproduction in the book of European painting I found there, The Gloomy Day, had a particular resonance for me as it reminded me of Baile Hill, a site in York that I visit frequently to draw from.

“So, I became, I suppose, rather obsessed with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish painter from the 16th century. Perhaps having been born and brought up in a medieval city had some influence on how I responded, and continue to respond, to Bruegel’s work, who knows? 

“What I do know is that I continued looking very hard at Bruegel, initially the sequence of five paintings which make up the Season series.”

Some years ago, Jake began to make a series of drawings and paintings of figures in extensive landscapes. “As I became more and more involved in this series, I began to look at Bruegel’s The Procession To Calvary and have been making work influenced by this great painting ever since,” he says.

York artist Jake Attree

Lately, he was introduced to The Mill And The Cross, Polish director Lech Majewski’s 2011 film that focused on 12 of the 500 characters depicted in Bruegel’s 1564 painting, starring Rutger Hauer, Michael York and Charlotte Rampling.

It was to become another prompt to push the as-yet-unformed project further. “As I pushed myself towards a contemporary take on Bruegel’s painting – which is, on many levels, deeply pertinent to the time in which it was painted – I at last began to use a more diverse range of imagery, as well as a direct response to the painting,” says Jake.

“Vast crowds making their way through an extensive landscape, inspired by some momentous event, are bound to have some resonance with our own time, whether it is intentional or not.” 

The exhibition title of A Northern Sensibility is a nod to Jake coming from the north. “That is just a fact,” he says, as he recalls with wry amusement that his first exhibition with Messum’s in Cork Street, London, was entitled The Elemental North.

While a London gallerist’s perception of Attree as a northern painter is water off a duck’s back to him, he has cemented a sense of northernness through the lens of his great artistic mentor, Bruegel.  

Jake has lived and breathed Bruegel since childhood. “I remember watching the drovers driving their sheep past my classroom window and how it reminded me of The Return Of The Herd,” he says.

“When Jake’s compositions include figures, often – as in Bruegel – they are depicted intent on their own private journey,” says School House Gallery co-curator Robert Teed

School House gallery co-director Robert Teed says: “When Jake’s compositions include figures, often – as in Bruegel – they are depicted intent on their own private journey, indifferent to the vast landscape around them, or the importance of events happening just outside their field of vision, utterly absorbed by their own tragedies or triumphs. 

“Bruegel famously celebrated the details of existence, revelling in people fighting, eating and drinking, and the consequences of that.

“This forms part of what Jake calls Bruegel’s ‘Northern sensibility’: the Flemish painter might have been regarded as vulgar by his Venetian counterpart, but behind the apparent chaos of his huge canvases depicting the rawness and messiness of human life there lies a cast-iron formal discipline.”

In The Procession To Calvary, Christ is a tiny figure almost lost in the melee. “But he is deliberately placed dead centre, and the diagonals of the composition lead to the exquisitely eloquent depiction of Mary’s grief in the right foreground,” says Robert. “This is what Jake believes epitomises Bruegel’s elegance, eloquence and intelligence.”

A Northern Sensibility presents Jake’s art in the context of Bruegel’s abiding influence on his aesthetic. “The figures in Jake’s landscapes are both timeless and contemporary, suggesting themes of rootlessness, displacement and migration; and in his figureless compositions we sense the tenacity and persistence of nature in spite of humans,” says Robert.

“A Northern Sensibility aims to prove that Jake Attree’s art also embodies elegance, eloquence and intelligence.”  

Red Mourner, by Jake Attree
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‘We don’t make music for an audience; we make music with the audience,” says Ryedale Festival director Christopher Glynn

South African cellist Abel Selaocoe: Playing Ryedale Festival on two days

HOW does a festival reinvent itself for the Covid-confused summer of 2021? 

At Ryedale, celebrating its 40th year, although not in the way it had planned, the answer is a one-off, late-announced, open-ended, can-do-spirited programme of summer events that brings inspiring performers to play together in beautiful Ryedale places from this weekend to July 31 .

Presenting 40 live concerts to celebrate its 40 years, Ryedale Festival welcomes performers such as Jess Gillam, Abel Selaocoe, Carolyn Sampson, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Lara Melda, Milos, the Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment, BBC Big Band, Kathryn Tickell and Tenebrae, as well as Poet Laureate Simon Armitage – and many more besides.

The Festival will be popping up in Pickering Parish Church; All Saints’, Kirkbymoorside; Hovingham Hall; St Olave’s Church, York; Birdsall House and Church; St Peter’s Church, Norton; Duncombe Park; the Milton Rooms, Malton, and Ampleforth Abbey.

Events will be around one hour long, with no intervals and reduced capacity to prioritise audience safety, but multiple performances to enable as many people as possible to attend.

Ryedale Festival artistic director Christopher Glynn. Picture: Gerard Collett

Artistic director Christopher Glynn says: “We’ve brought together a wonderful programme of British-based artists that is both vibrant and diverse. The formats of our concerts have changed but the core elements are what they have always been: great music, beautiful Ryedale locations, and audiences.

“Because, for performers like me, after the experience of the past year, one thing seems clearer than ever before: we don’t make music for an audience; we make music with the audience.” 

The festival’s two weeks of summer music opened last night (17/7/2021) with the Albion String Quartet’s programme of Haydn and Shostakovich at St Mary’s Priory Church, Old Malton, and soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton’s all-Schubert recital, themed around Elysium, the ancient Greek concept of afterlife, in St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Pickering.

Today, cellist Hannah Roberts joined the Albion String Quartet for Schubert’s String Quintet at All Saints’ Church, Kirkbymoorside, at 5pm and St Michael’s Church, Malton, at 9pm, followed by a third performance tomorrow at 11am at St Olave’s Church, York.

Birdsall House and Church is the scene for a double concert tomorrow from 5pm. Fresh from her Proms debut, British/Turkish pianist Lara Melda plays Rachmaninov and Chopin’s epic third sonata in the house, while classical guitarist Miloš plays Villa Lobos, Bach and Albeniz, among others, at the church.

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage: Marsden poems

The format of the double concert encompasses a two-hour interval, when the audience is invited to picnic in the grounds of Birdsall House between the two performances.

Poet Simon Armitage grew up among the hills of West Yorkshire and always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window. Now Poet Laureate, he visits the Milton Rooms, Malton, on Tuesday to read from Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems, his compendium of poems about the village where he grew up. The 40-minute 11am and 3pm readings and question-and-answer sessions each will be followed by a book signing.

On Wednesday, in Cubaroque at 11am and 9pm at All Saints’ Church, Hovingham, tenor Nicolas Mulroy and guitarist and theorbo player Toby Carr perform a rare combination of music from two golden ages, as songs of love, sorrow and faith by baroque composers Purcell, Monteverdi and Strozzi speak across the oceans and centuries to modern Latin-American standards by Silvio Rodríguez, Caetano Veloso, Pablo Milanés and Victor Jara, who gave voice to a continent emerging from years of suppression.

At the Palladian-style Hovingham Hall on Wednesday at 3pm and 6pm, Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment violin soloists present music written for violins alone, highlighting the contrasts, textures and colours of an instrument that is usually on top of the sound-world of string instruments.

The programme takes in solos by master composer-performers, programmatic duets, profoundly beautiful trios, concertos for four violins and new arrangements.

Tina May: Singing with the BBC Big Band

On Thursday at 3pm and 6pm, trailblazing Jess Gillam leads her ensemble in an electrifying programme at St Peter’s Church, Norton, designed to inspire you to reflect, dance and smile with the aid of compositions by Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Björk, Thom Yorke, Will Gregory, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Piazzolla.

South African cellist Abel Selaocoe is joined by pianist Benjamin Powell on Thursday at 11am and 9pm at Birdsall House, Birdsall, as he highlights the links between Western and non-Western musical traditions in a programme that complements his own work Nagula with compositions by Debussy, James Macmillan, Ravel and Schedrin.  

Selaocoe returns on Friday at 3pm and 6pm with Sirocco, his energetic, joyful collaboration with Manchester Collective and Chesaba, at the Milton Rooms, Malton. Their great storm of music celebrates the warmth and diversity of folk traditions from across the globe, from Purcell to Stravinsky, original African folk to Danish folk songs.

The BBC Big Band and jazz chanteuse Tina May perform timeless feel-good numbers from the classic era of swing, all arranged and curated by leader Barry Forgie, on Saturday at 5pm and 8pm at the Scarborough Spa Grand Hall. Expect Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman works, plus a few surprises along the way.

On Sunday, July 25, pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason performs a wide-ranging programme of contrasting sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Gubaidulina at Duncombe Park at 3pm and 5.30pm.

Amy Thatcher and Kathryn Tickell: Playing the Milton Rooms, Malton

The festival’s second week opens with speaker Lucy Beckett discussing Rievaulx and Mount Grace: Contrasting Histories on July 27 at 11am and 3pm at St Michael’s Church, Malton. Twelve miles apart, both mediaeval monasteries were abolished by Henry VIII, but their glory days were nearly four centuries apart, and the difference in their histories makes for a gripping tale.

Fresh sounds merge with ancient influences when Kathryn Tickell, British folk scene luminary and Northumbrian piper, and her close collaborator, accordionist and clog dancer Amy Thatcher, of The Monster Ceilidh Band, perform at the Milton Rooms, Malton, on July 27 at 5pm and 8pm.

Coco Tomita, winner of the strings category in this year’s BBC Young Musician competition, joins pianist Simon Callaghan to play Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Poulenc’s Violin Sonata at Duncombe Park on July 28 at 11am and 3pm.

Directed by Nigel Short, Tenebrae sing Renaissance Glories, music from the Golden Age of Spanish art, on July 29 at the Benedictine monastery of Ampleforth Abbey at 7.30pm. The closing piece will be Tomás Luis de Victoria’s luminous Requiem Mass of 1605, full of humanity and beauty.

All Saints’ Church, in Hovingham, plays host to two Young Artist Day concerts on July 30.  The first, at 11am and 6pm, promises a wide-ranging programme from pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen, who journeys from Bach to Ligeti to Schubert’s most virtuosic work for solo piano, Wanderer-Fantasy.

York artist Jake Attree: Ryedale Festival exhibition at Helmsley Arts Centre

In the second, two fast-rising artists, violinist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux and pianist Ljubica Stojanovic, present works by Biber, Schubert and Brahms (“Rain” Sonata) at 3pm and 9pm.

The final concert, by Solem Quartet and Friends at Hovingham Hall on July 31 at 3pm and 6pm, is filled with music of optimism and friendship, led off by Florence Price’s tribute to her extraordinary friend, the jazz musician and singer Memry Midgett, Summer Moon, and her arrangement of the folk song Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes. Schubert’s Octet, a work of dazzling invention and uplifting lyricism, is the finale.

Throughout July and August at Helmsley Arts Centre, York-born artist Jake Attree presents The Spirit Of The North, an exhibition inspired by time spent in and around Ryedale, dedicated to the memory of Dr Richard Shephard, York composer and headmaster.

“I want the paintings, oil pastels and drawings to have a sense of the places that inspired them, whether York, the landscape around Welburn, the River Derwent at Malton, or a view across the Howardian Hills from Pickering Castle,” says Jake, whose studio is at Dean Clough, Halifax.

“Completely dependent on the subject while simultaneously independent of it, these works are a celebration of Paul Cézanne’s idea that art is ‘a harmony that runs parallel to nature’ and full of a sense of what it feels like to spend time in North Yorkshire.” 

The full programme and ticket details can be found at ryedalefestival.com.

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Jake Attree’s new York works to go online in Messum’s virtual show from February 3

Red Roofs, York, From The Bar Walls, oil on panel, by Jake Attree

LOCKDOWN 3 may have a multitude of restrictive minuses, but it means you will not miss York-born artist Jake Attree’s new exhibition.

Forty-four new works should have been going on display at David Messum Fine Art, in Bury Street, St James’s, London. Instead, the show is moving to a virtual platform online at messums.com from February 3 to 26, bringing art “from our home to yours”.

This will be accompanied by a £15 fully illustrated catalogue with a foreword by author, art critic and curator David Boyd Haycock; a short film with commentary from David Messum as he explores and discusses the paintings, and a virtual gallery that allows “visitors” to experience the complete exhibition.

Landscape By Water (The Red Hill), oil pastel, by Jake Attree

“Picture fuses with place, and place with picture, in a cyclical relationship that serves to produce something entirely new and very personal,” says Boyd Haycock of Attree’s new works.

On show online will be a combination of Attree’s monumental depictions of the streets of York, verging on abstraction, and a group of oil pastels inspired by the Flemish Old Master Pieter Brueghel.

“Many of the works have advanced upon stylistic developments that were seen in Attree’s earlier exhibitions with Messum’s,” says Katie Newman, Messum’s managing director at The Studio, Lord’s Wood, Marlow Common, Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

Jake Attree sketching in his home city of York

“The small blocks of colour that characterised many of the works from the Ancient City series exhibited in 2013 have moved in an ever-increasing abstract direction, hovering at times on the cusp of complete abstraction.” 

Attree, 71, was born and grew up in Grange Garth, in York, where his first art teacher was John Langton, another northern painter fascinated by how light falls on buildings and landscapes.

“York is a majestic city with a long, extraordinary history – from the Roman metropolitan centre to the Viking port of Jorvik, to the great medieval walls and Minster. Here is layer upon layer of history and those seams of history are like the layers in Attree’s drawings and, in particular, his paintings,” says Katie.

FaCade 2, York, oil on panel, by Jake Attree

“Thus, recent works such as the Red Roofs, York From The Bar Walls series are both a vision of York and a vision of history, a place that is at once both ancient and modern, here and everywhere.” 

Drawing is the way that the deeply thoughtful Attree explains the world to himself wordlessly. “So I do it all the time,” he says, outlining how the foundation of his work is predicated on careful and endless observation.

He sees this need to draw as lying deep within our being. “We have been drawing – or something very like it – since the time of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira,” says Jake, pointing to human art works that date back almost 40,000 years.

Triptych Of Trees, oil on board, by Jake Attree

“Drawing, like all truly creative activity, is not an entertainment or pastime, but rather something fundamental to our psychic health as a species.”

Hence Attree not only draws, but he does so daily, working out of a long, narrow studio at Dean Clough, Halifax. “I do believe that it is not until we have drawn something that we have truly looked at it. This is what artists realise, and it is amazing to think that drawing was once ‘out of fashion’ in art schools,” says Jake, who studied at York College of Art, Liverpool Art College from 18, and then the Royal Academy of Arts in London in his 20s.

He lives in Saltaire, in West Yorkshire, but returns regularly to his home city, where he makes initial sketches in the open air before transforming them into paintings thick with oil paints.

“York has always been emotionally very important to me,” he says, as his latest works will testify online from February 3.

The Hunters In The Snow after Brueghel, oil pastel, by Jake Attree