Immortal Sea

By: Sister Wendy Beckett

May 2007

A few years ago, a friend asked me to help her choose a contemporary painting at an art fair. She

“Looking down Llanberis Pass from Pen-y-Pass. Saturday 18th February 2006,” mixed media, 42" x 72".

wanted something that would take her out of herself and into the wideness and strength of the artist’s vision. We had no sooner made our way in when we were startled by the first picture to meet our eyes: a small watercolor by Len Tabner (b. 1946) at his purest, a white dazzle of sea spume blown high by a gusting wind, the gray-green sea roiling beneath. He is, I am more and more convinced, the greatest painter of the sea we have today. But, said my friend, it seemed foolish to buy the very first thing we saw, so we pressed on through the large and high-quality fair. At the far end we realized we had seen nothing to equal its luminous power. She ran back, me panting in her wake, and found, as she feared, a gaggle of admirers, though none yet brandishing credit cards or checkbooks. We got there in time, and the Tabner now adorns her collection.

What had so drawn us—two very different women, alike perhaps only in a tendency to seasickness and a love for the spiritual—to the Tabner? Certainly an openness to our need for some interior silence was a factor. Tabner paints scenes of elemental force, but always from a center that is still. He does not so much depict a scene as immerse himself, and us with him, in its total reality. He says he is “trying to express the whole feeling of being present in a place as well as the presence of the place itself.” This place is not always watery. Heavy industry is another theme that fascinates him—men at work in mines, dockyards or ironworks. He wanted to say something about movement, noise and clamor—“… about the power of what was happening rather than describing the appearance of what was in front of me.” The connecting link is power. Tabner responds to that power with an instinctive reverence, understanding it as an aspect of our human vulnerability and our need to enter into struggle with the material world—not to dominate it, but to collaborate.

Tabner, who had his first major show in eight years at Messum’s in London in 2006, paints

“Dark-heaving, boundless, endless and sublime 2005,” mixed media, 42.5" x 80".

landscapes depicting mainly snow and storm. One glorious landscape from the Isle of Skye in Scotland is “The Quirang. Heavy wet mist all day. Tuesday 21st February 2006—sun going down.” The nearest he comes to brightness is in the work he did for the Japanese government, and yet even there, the most beautiful is “Fuji-San. 10.45 a.m. July 14th 2005,” where all is a swirl of blue mist with only an unmistakable cone of a distant Fuji distinct.

The wild power of Tabner’s work is always exhilarating. He paints with exhilaration, too, excited, profoundly challenged, working with an incredible speed in the most unforgiving of media—watercolor. The cover reproduction of his latest catalogue has as a title four adjectives long: “Dark-heaving, boundless, endless and sublime, 2005.” It is, of course, a sea painting, where spray and cloud battle it out with a heaving surge of wave. Merely to look at it is to feel alive, more alive, more aware of the majesty of the world. Tabner, acknowledged as one of the greatest living sea painters, with works in institutions worldwide like the British Museum and the Gifu Memorial Museum in Japan, is often compared to J.M.W. Turner, who tied himself to a mast so as to catch the full drama of the sea. But Tabner is less concerned with the drama, with understanding what he sees, and more surrendered to the encounter in its extremity. There is little narrative in Tabner’s works, as there usually is in those by his great predecessor; all is lyric, pure and strong. He is an exceptional artist, and we are lucky to be living when he is at his prime.

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Art historian Sister Wendy Beckett is the author of more than 15 books and was the host
of several television series on art, including “Sister Wendy’s Odyssey” and “Sister Wendy’s Grand Tour.”