Andrew Bick

What marks out Sutcliffe’s short career is the European quality within his work, especially at a point when his peers, such as Eduardo Paolozzi, were veering towards Pop Art. Sutcliffe’s work is usually described as ‘late abstract expressionist’, but I see it based in the smaller-scale reflective and analytical build-up that surface painters in Europe were engaged with in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The association with Nicholas De Staël is about right in these terms, but you would also have to think of Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Wols & Art Informel.

As a young artist Sutcliffe created work that projected an inner emotion, following a path of enlightened vision with explorations into far greater fields than mere paint on surface. The musicality within Sutcliffe’s work drew me to the musicality within my own paintings. This, and chance parallels intrigue me; I too sang in a church choir; played bass guitar in a band as a young man; and had a work selected for the John Moores’ Painting Prize. There the obvious links end, but I admire his commitment to abstract painting, which evidently he found so important he gave up being in a band for.

This works title, Heartworn Highway, is taken from a 1975- 76 documentary film on new country and western music emerging in Texas and Tennessee. They are also abstract, playing on the legacies of modernism through combining geometry, the grid, gesture and a complex build-up of surface. Abstraction has always had associations with music, also a tendency to draw on disparate and unlikely sources, evidenced through the works of Sutcliffe, and contemporaries that have followed.