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Stone the Crows

Artist: Philipson, Robin James, Sir, PPRSA RSA · 1916-1992

Stone the Crows

"'Stone the crows' is the most innovative and descriptive of the single-panel war paintings. It is a square composed of five horizontal narrative…

"'Stone the crows' is the most innovative and descriptive of the single-panel war paintings. It is a square composed of five horizontal narrative bands, bordered by what seem to be the sprocket-holes of film footage. The overall effect at the centre is of a yellowing into no-man's land - as realistic as faded old sepia photographs. Below them is an expressionist tumult of men, horses and vehicles fighting their way through the stinking morass of Flanders mud. The painting takes its title - the slang expletive for astonishment - from the top band, in which a row of dead crows strung along a fence is reciprocated by the bodies of dead soldiers snagged in similar attitudes on barbed wire defences. The secular sermon, for as such I will always see it, is terminated at the base of the picture by the candyfloss pink glow surrounding a reclining nude, a voluptuous metaphor for all the de Maupassant whores who have plied their trade in the 'comfort stations', selling sex and solace to the survivors of battle throughout history."[W Gordon Smith; Philipson, Atelier Books, Edinburgh, 1995, pp.80-83]; "As a deliberate contrast to the lustrous glazes of his cathedral interiors and rose windows, built up over months of rotation on the easel, the war pictures were painted in bursts of furious activity, with vinyl toluene replacing linseed oil as a medium. "I tried" he [ie Philipson] said, "to get a more than usual mattness, using a lifeless, inert paint, to suggest the dullness of earth itself, the earthiness of the trenches and no-man's-land, and men in their thousands dying and becoming earth themselves." While the toluene was still tacky he increased the dullness by dusting on pure pigment. According to Colin Thomson "a surface that was shiny with varnish was protected -safe - and, for Robin, it was dead. Exactly this kind of working had become fundamental to his way of working.""[W Gordon Smith; Philipson, Atelier Books, 1995, p.83]

© The Artist's Estate