The late Peter Fuller, editor and publisher of the British journal Modern Painters, arranged for the painter Roy Oxlade to visit with Marcus Reichert at his studio in Northumberland on the Scottish Border in 1990. Oxlade, who writes persuasively on the absolute need for spontaneity and intuition in drawing (from which painting derives), was to consider writing on Reichert’s work as represented in the retrospective exhibition organized by the Hatton Gallery of Newcastle University. There was a natural affinity between the two painters and friendship followed. When Peter Fuller died suddenly in an automobile accident, the project between Oxlade and Reichert was abandoned. Shortly thereafter, Reichert acquired a second studio in North Carolina, where he remained for several years, and he and Oxlade carried on corresponding by letter. The following is a distillation of that correspondence.

MR: Yesterday afternoon I lay in bed like an invalid reading and re-reading what you wrote about drawing from nature (Modern Painters, Page 112, Winter 1992, Volume 5, Number 4). It was like breathing pure oxygen and I suddenly realised that I never have drawn from nature. Oh yes, I've drawn while a naked person was positioned before me, but I don't consider rendering human anatomy drawing from nature. There are two enormous pecan trees in the garden behind this house. Without their leaves, as they are now, with their vaulting limbs made busy by countless crooked little branches, these trees exist in a kind of frozen hysteria, insane and mute. If I were to draw these two trees, to attempt to express their chaotic magnificence, I would, I think, have to enter into the atmosphere I perceive to be their hysteria. This I would do knowing that even if I were to conjure a thousand such sublimely chaotic lines I still would not have these two trees as I know them in contemplation. If one accepts that to draw or paint from nature with such perfection as to awe the guileless viewer is a tedious and unrewarding pursuit, then one might also accept that a respect for nature quite possibly informs such a seemingly cynical view. It is a respect, I believe, born of perception.

RO: Your pecan trees remind me of a long discussion I had with Hugh O'Donnell during his show in New York. Hugh said that to paint the tree he had to become the tree. Or perhaps he was saying that he wanted to feel what it was like to be a tree and his painting was an expression of that wish. I don't see the need for this kind of magic.

I can recall only a few tree images. An oak by Evert Lundquist; a larch by Durer; both straightforward and dull. Vincent did some leaning trees with falling leaves. And there's an ancient Egyptian red-ochre brush drawing of a figure reaching up to a breast outlined in black hanging from the branch of a tree. Like the van Gogh it achieves poetry through the invention of a relationship won from separation.

I agree with what you say about the tedium of naturalism. What a treadmill to be Lucian Freud. I get the same exasperation from all those meticulously laid brush-strokes of the later Cezanne. I can think of few things more boring than the painter's craft. Imagine being Caravaggio - enough to make you scream; like peeling potatoes in jail.

MR: Sometimes, frankly, I can't imagine being myself. I wonder where I find the energy to do what I do. There's all that bewildering sentiment to contend with, which finally makes the painting of a picture very like the writing of a poem - one has to work in a vacuum to succeed at all, in a kind of self-willed exile in which such fragile and deformed things can grow.

I recall Forge Cottage and your new studio. There was a blessed quiet that day in your garden. It was so deeply green there in the shade, while in the studio stood those electrifying red paintings. Encountering those paintings, the red like dried blood, dense and scarified, was like drifting over the environs of an ancient carnal rite. Your reds are nothing like Matisse's. His don't have this tendency to evoke the carnal, the cauterised. It is, perhaps, not just a coincidence that I should use a very similar red as yours to drench my paintings of the Crucifixion, but an instinctual need to identify and assess human decay.

RO: Don't you think it's a funny thing how they all go for Matisse: Wolheim, Kramer, Heron, as well as the multitude from Sevenoaks? At his best, when he's not charming, I would have thought he upsets all their theories. Was it Clive Bell or Roger Fry who said how dangerous Matisse is to cultivated taste? Accessible to the maid servant without need of connoisseurship. But democracy failed and they put their money on Leonardo.

MR: Leonardo's legacy - good title for a novel by Iris Murdoch. There must be some subversive school of thought that disdains science. It's all so unbearably mundane. Here in the Carolinas, they believe and trust that there is a logical aspect to everything. They say: God has a plan.' And they mean it. I am not reassured.

RO: Leonardo is part of God's plan.

MR: Out of the darkness, they say, comes enlightenment.

RO: Matisse confirms me in my disgust with 'art' and 'artists' and my preference for any other imagery: children's drawings, the yellow pages, cartoons, Mickey Mouse. How impossible it seems.

MR: This is why early on I took such an interest in outsider art, in the work of such so-called 'visionaries' as Antonin Artaud and Jack Bilbo, both of whom eschewed formalism. Isolation, alienation, if you will, is often essential, I believe, to pursuing such singularly personal imagery, imagery that reveals something other than what has gone on before, in every sense of what painting is about. Rose Wylie also has this ability to disarm the viewer with the singularity of her vision and imagery. And it is utterly simplistic to call such painting 'primitive', as if to dismiss its social and philosophical relevance.

RO: Rose's handwriting is like her painting, never mushy, always decisive. Yet, although probably because of that, with notable exceptions - you, Robert Natkin, Eileen Cooper - there is a tendency for our contemporaries to condescend to Rose's work. Of course, it has to be like that. If you're a proper artist, to accept what she does is to cut your own throat. It's not just a question of stylistic difference; it's more fundamental than that: it demands a realignment with the tradition.

MR: I freely admit that my own work has occasionally sunk into the mire of art-historical reference, but I continue to try not to proliferate the world with more pretentious visual matter. This may be the only dishonourable reason for painting the Crucifixion: no one too easily mocks these paintings for a lack of conviction, it is terrible enough to have struggled with the subject and the viewer is at least subliminally conscious of this.

RO: An admirable point of agreement between your work and Rose's is the uncompromising way in which you both go for the portrayal of specific things without loss of totality. She can use crayon line to precise effect within a seven foot canvas. And you too draw eyelashes. You're both very good at faces. Your El Pelado has a great face - beautifully weighted with black drawing. Something of the same touch comes into the drawing of the building in the Zagreb painting; it reminds me of the Roualt Ubu drawings, a curiously bright and uncharacteristic interlude in a dull career. They have an undercurrent of subversion and menace which is never far from your work too.

MR: But this brings me once again to your own work, which is obviously loaded with gestural presence without the intervention of process. When I smile at the presence of a yellow desk-lamp situated precariously in one of your paintings, a regal unblushing Olympia positioned nearby, I am smiling with the joy of saying 'fuck off' to convention, to what is considered to be acceptably modern, to the perimeters of painterly good taste. It is this compulsion to find wonder in the imposed awkwardness of one's own ideas and gestures that I find so sympathetic and philosophically sound in a few painters' work.

RO: Wall-to-wall painting; drawing-room painting; picture-making; the pictorial; call it what you like, my loathing for it increases. Wolheim wrote an interesting piece for Modern Painters on the New York Picasso/Braque exhibition. He contrasted the 'passage' (wall-to-wall) characteristic of French painting and Braque with the sharper, isolated imagery of Picasso. I think most of my paintings are of this mushy French kind. But as you say a painting must have some context. It's like handwriting and difficult to change without pretence.

MR: I would not have said, in all honesty, that I find anything of this 'overall' tendency - call it French or what you like - in your painting. One very startling attribute of your work, which might be construed by some as Modern, is that the paint is encouraged to remain very much alive; it exists on the canvas in a state of perpetual transformation. Such a way of painting is rare in Britain, even rarer in France. It is rare anywhere. It is difficult to know how or why such a thing occurs. Why, for instance, was Jack Yeats so intent upon finding this? My own work has evolved out of a desire to allow the paint to remain alive, alive as it is during the act of painting. It is too easy to say that you had Bomberg and I had de Kooning. Disconcerting for some is the element of recklessness that must come into the act of painting to achieve this vitality and mystery.

RO: As you would say, it is all cosily agreed upon, because through conceptually agreeable criteria like good drawing and process the professional art world hides from that necessary recklessness and seeming awkwardness in painting which are its real sources of grace.

MR: It is this very recklessness that enables me to connect with the paint. Even if this recklessness is submerged in the paint, as it is in the case of Auerbach, it is there nevertheless and pesters the psyche with its urgency. What I find most dispiriting is the relatively new tendency to process the so-called expressionistic gesture, making of painting a conceptual and consequently deadening exercise. It seems to me that the whole reason for process, intellectually inert as it may be, is intervention between the artist and his hand, or the idea/impulse and the resulting mark. The process painter cannot allow himself to be seen as unsophisticated and the best way to avoid such devastating criticism is to eliminate one's true self from the work

RO: You disparage the inauthentic machinery of process as a 'synthesis of refinement'; it's what I called 'art school professionalism' in a recent letter to Modern Painters. It's the pervading dead hand of knowingness: Ryman, Motherwell, Diebenkorn over there. And over here the legacy of the School of Paris and St. Ives. But it's everywhere, a mistaken professionalism which has destroyed everything with a sickening sophistication. I reject pretty well everything as I think about nature and the poverty of art and I'm not sure I don't see the Modern Movement as a gigantic failure - or as a just but expensive war. So many isolated and heroic units all doomed to lonely disaster and a handful of spectacular victories from Picasso, Matisse, Leger, de Kooning perhaps and Guston. Did the successes need so much cannon fodder?

MR: Perhaps this is why painting once again seems such a lonely and desperate pursuit. I recall Francis Bacon saying that he often found his way - having become lost within the familiarity of his work - when the receptiveness of the public was at its lowest. Francis quite enjoyed strolling into a gallery filled with his pictures simply to denounce the opinions, fawning as they might be, of those present - most disconcerting to witness. It seemed to me that he, in his way, was trying to make it clear that it was all much, much too tragic to be taken in.

RO: Remembering and looking at a reproduction of your Large Seated Nude, I'm attracted always to the squiggly hair line and its joyful division of the space - as playful as Miro you might think. But for all her bouncy vitality the mood of disquiet persists. This is not a complaint. You accept tragedy, you can't complain about it.

MR: Likewise, you can't complain when your intentions are misconstrued, when certain indulgences are ascribed to your work which simply never entered your realm of feeling as a painter. I remember a figure sprawled across one of your 'red studio' canvases which suggested to me an abandonment to violence, violence initiated by the hand, later to be sustained by the eye. Unlike your Olympia, this figure, more naked than the reclining odalisque, was neither piquant nor seductive. This figure struck me as purely wilful. Whether this response on my part conforms at all to your impulses upon painting that picture must necessarily be irrelevant - the picture is what it becomes, regardless of your intentions or my interpretation. Perhaps this is what we now recognise as chaos, the antithesis of the Modern Movement.

RO: As Clive Bell thought, the Modern Movement should have democratised art. Bomberg hit on a great slogan, 'Drawing is democracy's visual sign, but I'm not sure that he would have pursued the thought as far as I do. But the public, as always sheep-like, put its money on Leonardo and a conceptual theory of painting and fails to see the poetry in Picasso, Matisse, occasionally Miro, Schnabel sometimes, and also innocently in children, amateurs, and city graffiti. The public goes 'to see' - but surely they can't really see or we wouldn't have the chaos we've got.

MR: You mention Schnabel. There is an undeniable immediacy to much of Schnabel's drawing, but this is what drawing is for, and he knows it. So did Rembrandt. However this is too often not the concern of the academically-minded critic, who dismisses considerations of immediacy, and intimacy, in favour of easily identifiable values, like so-called 'good drawing'. No, unlike Robert Hughes, I don't think that Schnabel needs to draw from nature. Maybe Schnabel thinks, as some do, that we, once having perceived nature in a state of innocence as children, and having lost that innocence, can now only render the residue of that perception. To put it somewhat cynically, we mix three parts willed incoherence with one part exquisite regret. In this way, we try once again to connect (with nature) and hopefully, inadvertently express the gorgeous strangeness of connecting. As you so succinctly put it in your letter to Modern Painters on William Boyd on Robert Hughes: ' ... the artist's relationship to nature is a complicated one. To set up the principle of art at a specific historical time as the principle of art itself, is, to say the least, short-sighted. Drawing did not begin in the sixteenth century.' Surely what Leonardo saw from his window and how he saw it bears very little resemblance to what you and I perceive - what we see, beyond the comforting forms and colours of nature, might very well have driven him insane.

Copyright 1994
Roy Oxlade & Marcus Reichert