Gill marked out his stone reliefs before carving with outlines that indicated the depth to which each part should be cut, by half an inch, an inch, and so on. Then he cut backwards from the front skin of the stone, removing material layer by layer, by following the outlines drawn on the stone. It was a methodical and logical procedure which produced direct yet rather heraldic images. David Kindersley, an apprentice letter-cutter who joined Gill's workshop in the mid1930s, recalled how Gill worked with sureness and clarity:
"His attention was remarkable in degree and duration . . . No tool was ever forced beyond its capacity. All stages were in process at once over various parts of the carving, the projections always being a stage ahead so that, for all the world, it appeared a simple question of removing a series of skins of differently textured stone. Strength and firmness of form were assured not only by the clarity of his vision but in no small degree through his technique. All form for Mr Gill was of a convex order. Concavities were the result of the meeting of two convexities."
Through his eager assimilation of the essence of Indian temple art, Gill was able to unite his innate aptitudes for the crafts of engraving and sculpture, in one seamless process of creativity. His engravings are flattened sculpture and his sculptures are puffed up line-engravings.
Eric Gill occupies a unique place in British sculptural life of the twentieth century. He was born on 22 February 1882 in Brighton, the eldest son of twelve children of Arthur Tidman and Rose Gill. Eric Gill described his father as 'an Anglican parson, formerly a Dissenter', and his grandfather and great-uncle were Congregationalist missionaries in the South Sea Islands. The strong sense of vocation displayed by these three close male relatives was inherited by Gill, who appeared to feel from early manhood that he had a divinely appointed task to do. This task was to communicate his vision of art as a vehicle for the splendours of spiritual life. And in order to do this, Gill began to produce figurative sculpture that was uncompromising in its sacred message.
Gill came to believe passionately that things had gone wrong with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of inhuman machine production of buildings, clothing, furniture, food and utensils. In the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was no special thing called art. Art was making in general and anyone who made anything would, if the word had existed, have been called an artist. Art was simply the ways of men with things; it was human work . In this sense, Gill was already pre-adapted to take up the cultural inheritance of Indian art, which for the most part is the product of anonymous sculptors and painters.
An entry in Gill's diary for 10 January 1908 records that he attended a lecture at the Art Workers' Guild, London, given by Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy on Indian Art. Gill added the accompanying phrase 'a most splendid paper'. This appears to be the first time that Gill became aware of Coomaraswamy, and it seems he was immediately impressed by the man and his knowledge. At the end of his life, Gill wrote in his Autobiography:
"There was one person . . . to whose influence I am deeply grateful; I mean the philosopher and theologian, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion and man's work . . . Others have understood the true significance of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the relationships of the true and the good and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding."
Coomaraswamy was born in 1877 in Sri Lanka of a Tamil father and an English mother. He studied botany and geology at London University. The Home Office in London appointed Coomaraswamy Director of the first mineralogical survey of Ceylon from 1903 to 1906, and after completing this work, he travelled for the first time to India at the end of 1906. His time in Srilanka and India stimulated an abiding interest in the arts and crafts of those countries and their spiritual basis. In 1907 Coomaraswamy moved into a medieval building, the Norman Chapel at Broad Campden, restored for him by C. R. Ashbee who lived and worked a couple of miles away, at Chipping Campden. Ashbee had formed his Guild of Handicraft, a group of workers occupied in the arts and crafts, in the East End of London in 1888. In 1902 he took his ideas and his workers to Chipping Campden, an attractive and neglected Gloucestershire village, in order to test his theory that a rural life was better for the production of art and craft work than an urban one. Ashbee looked at the position of the worker and his occupation in the arts and crafts world, such as silversmithing or printing, in terms of the social well-being of the individual and of society as a whole. Coomaraswamy allied himself to Ashbee's ideas and ideals, but substituted the spiritual for the social. Coomaraswamy purchased William Morris's press and used it to publish in 1908 the first book on the arts of his native Srilanka, 'Medieval Sinhalese Art'. This was followed by The Indian Craftsman in 1909, Indian Drawings in 1910, and several articles in the Burlington Magazine between 1910and 1916 on Indian art, later published in book form as 'Rajput Painting and The Dance of Shiva', the latter reviewed by Gill. In 1917
Coomaraswamy left Britain to take up a post as Keeper of the Indian Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a position he held until his death in 1947.
Coomaraswamy was important for Gill for two reasons: firstly because he examined the relationship between man's work and his leisure, and secondly because he examined the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Also he provided Gill with a phrase that virtually became Gill's motto, and is thought by many to have stemmed from Gill himself, so perfectly does it chime with his aesthetic -
'The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist'.
Gill was able to test his own Christian-based ideas against those of a Hindu, and thus gain a broader spiritual base, although many ideas were held in common. Coomaraswamy was looking for a new metaphysical system for man's work and life at just the same time that Gill was, but Coomaraswamy's aesthetic parameters were much wider. He offered a deep and first-hand knowledge of Indian and Srilankan arts and crafts to a British audience anxious to learn more. And Gill was in the forefront of those thirsty for this knowledge. An appreciation in Britain of Indian arts and crafts had first emerged in the late 1870s, spearheaded by the artists William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, John Everett Millais and Walter Crane. These men were only too aware of how the arts and crafts in Britain were being attacked by increasing industrialisation and they wished to focus attention on the same position occurring in India. From 1908 Coomaraswamy took up this cause with passion. Then in the Spring of 1910 the India Society was founded, with its headquarters in London. Among the founding members were Coomaraswamy, Walter Crane, W. R. Lethaby, Roger Fry and William Rothenstein, all of whom were colleagues of Gill and significant supporters of his emergent sculptural practice.
In 1908 Coomaraswamy published The Aims of Indian Art and in this book cited William Blake as a most significant example of a Western artist who worked in an imaginative rather than a naturalistic manner. This way of thinking and working allied Blake to the aesthetics of Oriental artists. Blake was for Coomaraswamy a great and original spiritual thinker and artist and assumed for him the role of a bridge between Eastern and Western art. It is not inconceivable to imagine that Gill wanted to inherit Blake's role. In 1910 Gill designed a tombstone based on one of Blake's illustrations to Robert Blair's poem 'The Grave', the dramatic composition of 'The Reunion of the Soul and the Body'. And in 1917 Gill based his wood engraving of The Last Judgement on Blake's colour print of God Judging Adam. Gill, like Blake, believed in social and spiritual reform, and sexual freedom. They both abhorred the negative power of industrial mechanisation. It has been said that Coomaraswamys complex erotic life was a feature of his personal philosophy.
Gill's belief that the ascetic and the sensual could be amalgamated stemmed from his burgeoning knowledge of Indian art and Hindu theology. In 1913 Coomaraswamy published his 'The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon' and a section of his chapter on Indian sculpture provides a most useful gloss on these two beliefs. Coomaraswamy had been describing how sculptures of spiritual figures were made more impressive if they were created in a voluptuous style:
". . . in the best of Gothic art there are traces of a conflict, a duality of soul and body. If in many works of ancient Greece there is no such conflict, this is because the body alone is presented: but in the best of the Indian sculpture flesh and spirit are inseparable . . .
In nearly all Indian art there runs a vein of deep sex-mysticism. Not merely are female forms felt to be equally appropriate with male to adumbrate the majesty of the Over-soul, but the interplay of all psychic and physical sexual forces is felt in itself to be religious. Already we find in one of the earliest Upanishads -
'For just as one who dallies with a beloved wife has no consciousness of outer and inner, so the spirit also, dallying with the Self-whose-essence-is-knowledge, has no consciousness of outer and inner'. Here is no thought that passion is degrading . . . but a frank recognition of the close analogy between amorous and religious ecstasy . . . It is thus that the imager, speaking always for the race, rather than of personal idiosyncrasies, set side by side on his cathedral walls the yogi and the apsara, the saint and the ideal courtesan'.
Hinduism
What can we learn from hinduism
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