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Nets and Stones
R.F. Langley 2005

A significant artist, claims Bridget Riley, citing Samuel Beckett citing Proust, will uncover a "text" within him which demands "translation". His effort to translate it will generate the essentials of his art. In 1996 Dom Theobald made his sequence of mixed media works on paper, announcing a "text". You could read him from there, with Net, Stone offering some useful terminology.

The container and the contained, tackled very directly. A network thrown across a slightly recessive ground, with "stones", abstract items, in it, on it, throughout it, all presented in wonderfully different degrees of complexity, different colours, atmospheres and moods.

In 1997 the nets filled with shapes derived from a visit to Coney Island, which gradually freed themselves until they stood as simple, flattened, amusing, bright, jigsaw-like pieces spread across nets which had melted, by the time of the big oil Coney Island (Blue), into just the vibrancy of a plain blue ground. An emergency coherently played through.
Since then the shapes can be referential or not, implying personal biography and feeling, commenting on pictures by other artists, on reactions to different places, but they are still the ‘stones’, shapes which relate to each other, asking for or denying each other. Recently they involve collage, reproductive techniques, screen printing and so on, so their interactions, and their interaction with the net-like grounds which have returned in even more than their earlier richness, are intensified by the statements the techniques make about how content is to be caught and held.

Article By Manuel Chetcuti
Curator, 2004

Dom Theobald makes paintings drawings and prints and has recently added sculpture to his practice. His recent pictures are experiments with imagery derived from plants, cartoons and documentary photography. He says that, “It seems useful to acknowledge and understand, as much as one ever could, that chance plays an important part in ones's work and intervenes at all stages- in the sense that what one makes is in some way related to what one stumbles over (often but not always) unintentionally”. At his house in Ditchingham on the Norfolk border, we talked in his large living space (where Rider Haggard wrote his novels and reputedly played billiards with Kipling and Roosevelt). Surrounded by drawings, prints and collages we talked about the “concealed narrative” and the layering of meaning in his work. Dom Theobald, by remaining alert to the many possibilities present in his work, encourages serendipity to occur, and quotes Jean Arp when he said, “The light and shade that chance sends us we should welcome with amazement and gratitude.”

More of Dom Theobald
R.F. Langley 2005

“But we see that every line and tone and division helps in the setting up of relationships across and down the face of the canvas. In front of an insistently imaginative painting this tends to convince us that an emotive or poetic whole is there expressed, since the expressiveness is transmitted by a rich language of form. Were it not so it would be a bad picture”.

So. There is an overall net of black mesh dropped over a patchwork of more or less regularly shaped, coloured, rectangular tesserae - viridian, orange, yellow, light blue, turquoise. The tesserae, muted by the net laid over them, sink down, as it were, beneath it, so that space is made between net and seabed, a shallow space. The bed becomes a permeable plane, with the yellows and soft blues sinking yet further and the greens and oranges standing steady.

Now, superimposed on the net, are positioned a quincunx of big, roughly oval, forms, outlined strongly in black. Sometimes bits of the net survive within them, as if they were transparent, but mostly not. Rather than net, they contain, all of them, like the vacuoles in a paramecium, small circles, clustered like bubbles or standing alone like little hearts. These five forms must be stones, for the picture is “Net, Stone” of 1996. The forms contained within the stones play variations with each other. Two stones have clusters of them, two have single hearts. But one of the hearts is gridded blue and radiates cilia out below it, while the other is clean and empty. Its emptiness, small and off centre as the heart is in the whole picture, keeps it bright, so that, against the odds, it becomes the eye-catcher in the overall complexity. A net, a bed, stones and events within stones. There are plenty of other things going on, but enough has been said.  

The eye gathers, matches, balances, finds rhymes and makes contrasts. One is happy to look for a long time at the picture, because it is so complex, so rich, and yet promises that it can, eventually, be held, its language discovered, if not completely, then certainly enough for a very adult conversation. It speaks, directly and revealingly, of an oceanic background and of singularities within that which talk to each other. This sort of important working, shared by consciousness and pictures, feels to be, as it is, of prime importance. It takes place again and again in Dom Theobald's work of the later 1990s, but always in different moods. Here is a darkened, close-knit one. There is a softer, duskier key in Dragonfly, where the nets are partly veins in stones which have stopped being stones and have become wings. There is a bolder, mid-day assertiveness in Rungs of the Air, a misty gentleness in Steel, Clay, Berry, a careful, conglomerated restraint in the close-packed Earthworks, and a more luscious clamour altogether in Germinal. Nets fragment, their meshes disjoint and swarm in different directions, escaping the more logical weaving, interpenetrating with and tugged about by the multiplying stones, but nets and stones remain viable designations. So there is a language, a style which provides parameters for development. “Style is a precondition of aesthetic interest”. 

Around this time the artist paid a visit to Coney Island, and the nets begin to dissolve and vanish. The stones, often disposed about the picture in a radically direct and seemingly unsubtle scatter, become hard, clear, never very complex items like pieces of a jigsaw tossed down and spaced out. Cubes, maybe, a little distorted. Others rounded, forked, bone-like, slightly roughed-up petals, wedges … many of them showing their thickness, as if cut out of board like jigsaw pieces, and raw in colour. It is as though casting off the net and emerging as unequivocal, uninvolved, simple shapes and solids, had cost so much it could afford no more than this brashness, this absolute directness, this new set up as pieces from a board game. No subtleties of colour or atmosphere. A Coney Island where the directness is often jokey. Coney Island (White) of 1997, comes late in the sequence and shows nineteen shapes, each with a simple, continuous outline, and often with sides visible, arbitrarily twisted, to show that flattened thickness, on a white background. They lie about near each other, doing not very much to involve themselves with each other. Just a few, broad similarities and plenty of obvious differences keep the talking to a minimum, showing what happens when it feels that there can be much too much muddled suggestion. Uniqueness and juxtaposition, at any cost. In Coney Island (Blue), twenty-three shapes – almost in rows across the huge (70”-69”), bright, sky blue canvas – are as bold as it gets. No place for many second thoughts. All stones.

Other things can happen, however. Homage to Motherwell of 2000, shows eight of the figures, but, for instance, the one at the top right, looking like a silver oval shield marked vertically up its centre by a black blazon, is a Robert Motherwell picture turned on its side and rounded off at its corners. Five Leaves, One Shoe of 2004, has its five leaf-like shapes disposed on a stipply blue and green and mostly thick red background, but the sixth shape, the one in the middle, is a side view, a diagram of a shoe, standing on its toe. 

After Dom Theobald's father died, Dom found, in clearing his possessions, a single shoe of a pair. Here it is. So, into the broader play enter references, sometimes public ones, sometimes ones so private only the artist can complete an account of them, though a shoe, tossed down in the middle of the more familiar vegetation, in the company of these leaves filled with cell-structures like nets, or volvoxes, descendants of the stones and wings and leaves one has seen often before, such a shoe must tweak one's feelings in new directions. How do these leaves cope with personal sadness in this red autumn weather?

So the shapes have biographies. By 2004, “Stone, Leaf, Cell” has five shapes in the basic quincunx. One could be the Motherwell shield, perhaps, pinched and faded and a little twisted. Another is a cellular leaf with two vesicles inside its veined network this time, each with a little sac at its heart. What of the something at the centre then? A red oval containing two overlapping ovoids, blue and red, or, read otherwise, a diagrammatic thing not altogether unlike what was done to the shoe. Once admitted the memories prolong themselves in the shapes. One feels they could do. And no more than the possibility is enough to deepen the issues.  Who can say what, at this point, is being structured?

At any rate the Coney Island phase is over and richness, depth, lovely colours and all sorts of intricacies are now readmitted, ranging deeper and wider. Architect‘s Garden, mixed media on paper: the background is a jungly black and white network, but not made entirely of threads, of mesh, but of fragments of all sorts, many suspiciously leaf like, as if stones and nets were swapping roles. The silhouette of a thicket against a silver sky. The picture inhales and swells its potential as, look, this is an insect's wing, but not drawn as before, it is now reproduced and collaged in. And this leaf is an actual tulip tree leaf. Now silk screen, reprographics of all kinds, actual objects in full collage pick up the tasks originating in the former nets and stones, and perform them with increased daring, provocation, power, without excluding all that has gone before.  In the climatic Star, Fish a bleached, crushed hyacinth appears above a spidery, contorted black rendition of itself, and real leaves provide the strongest of crescendos, in a picture where the complex, atmospheric scenario is fully involved once more, “across and down the face of the canvas” with ever more exciting repercussions of relationships that reveal themselves further the longer you look, and satisfy again and again. We are shown perception working, and what it can include has accumulated and gathered to reach this.

Many of the objects, the tulip-tree leaf amongst them, have an undeniable completeness and integrity because they are so obviously nothing more or less than themselves, displayed flat out, and this can insist on their importance when taken as individuals in their own right. Even accurate painting of them would have begun to assimilate them into the processing which was the painting of the rest of the picture, into the network of it all. So collage stretches the tension between the finding of a thing - the valuing of it for itself -and the assimilation of it into a more crafted system which gives significance to it. Also, to find an undoctored object echoed and included in a background which spreads the object's effectiveness around as part of the whole organisation, so that the object stimulates significance in the rest, is the other side of the fundamental felicity. This is the tension of the “stone, net” pairing, more poignant than ever. Particularity and inclusiveness strengthen each other in the tensions between the wider range of methods, the collage, screen-printing, painting and so on, and the attitudes they signify, more forcefully than they could in the earlier work. The stress on the particulars, the stones, which was dominant in the Coney Island phase, discovers new ways of insisting on its virtues, yet without belittling the nets. It simultaneously strengthens them. Collage, and the others, keep the contest startling, and extend the coherent exploration undertaken by the last ten years of Dom Theobald's  pictures.

Dom Theobald
Nicholas Usherwood 2007

Born in Surrey in 1963, Dom Theobald studied at Norwich School of Art, where his tutor Derrick Greaves was a particular influence, before going on to complete an M.A. in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1993, during which time he specialised in printmaking. Two years after graduating Dom returned to Norfolk and Ditchingham House, near Bungay, where he has lived and worked ever since, showing regularly in galleries in this country and in Europe and the USA over much of that time. Dom Theobald‘s luminously coloured and richly textured semi-abstract works derive from a wide variety of sources - cartoon forms, music, botanical drawings, documentary photographs, film and found objects among them. From these he draws out images as varied as dragonfly wings and shoes, leaves and pools, lungs and bones, moons and feathers, images which, when set against the intense colours and densely worked surfaces that form the ‘backgrounds’ of his works, become metaphors for the sifting and selection of thoughts and feelings that the memory becomes involved in during the slow process of making a painting. For Dom this is a process whereby the background becomes a kind of ‘net’ in which these forms, or ‘stones’ as he likes to call them, have been caught or dredged, each of them resonant with meaning and a vivid sense of life. Intensely poetic too, is the way in which these forms come to echo and reinforce each other, pulsating, not just across the picture surface but also from work to work, in a vibrant and impassioned statement of belief in how the magical ordinariness of things can come to embody the most profound sensations of the sacred and numinous.

Adrian Stokes, ‘Reflections on the Nude, Part Two: The Image in Form’, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, 3 vols. (Plymouth: Thames and Hudson, 1978), III, p. 334.

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