By Lisa Rogers

& Photography by Mervyn Clingan

Mister Denham is a politely-spoken man in his mid-fifties, with forthright views on the state of contemporary art, and the market place in which it operates. Since his discovery by fine art photographer Mervyn Clingan, he has quickly become established as one of the foremost Contemporary Naïve artists working in the UK today. With a style and subject matter uniquely his own, his paintings are eagerly sought by a growing international following.

He began painting twenty five years ago whilst living in a high-rise apartment in the Far East. Lacking the benefits of a formal art training, and severely hampered by colour blindness, he nevertheless felt driven to paint his life’s story, as a pictorial legacy for his two young sons.

"I wanted them to see what I used to get up to when I was growing up in England," he said with a smile. "I was a bit of a tearaway in those days".

Working under bright spotlights when the children were asleep, Mister Denham painstakingly produced his first small pieces on scraps of cardboard, using cheap Chinese oil paints bought from the local market.

"At the time I hadn’t got a clue how to set about things properly, still don’t actually. I simply mixed up the paint with some fresh cooking oil until it was nice and runny, and then started to paint." he recalls. "Mind you, they took a long while to dry in the rainy season out there!"

Yet in spite of their technical naivety, his early paintings have lost none of their original vitality, colour or freshness of vision. They could have been painted yesterday, and several are soon to be launched as print and card editions.

Subsequent moves to Germany and New Zealand didn’t seem to interrupt the passion for painting and over the years the collection quietly grew into a substantial body of work, which is now attracting serious interest on both sides of the Atlantic.

His self-taught style is charmingly straightforward, very accessible and follows a different set of rules based, Mister Denham admits, on not knowing any rules in the first place. Vivid colours are applied in flat planes across the surface, usually three layers thick. No attempt is made at blending and yet there is a whimsical control over tone and balance in each piece.

The idiosyncratic organization of his subject matter (see ‘Landscape with Distractions’ and ‘Mappa Mundi’), dispenses with the formalities of perspective, scale and proportion in a beguiling way. We are presented with enigmatic stories of intense detail and hypnotic interest, where Pointillism sits happily alongside, and on top of, fine line work and block colour. This is evident even in one of the earliest A4 oils,"Easy on the Ring Matey" .

The obsessive attention to detail and an apparent inability to deal with painterly formalities are distinctive features of the Naïve artist, and perhaps two of the reasons why Naïve art has rarely found itself a position within the Establishment in this country. Undaunted, however, Naïves from all four corners of the globe continue to paint away in their isolation, driven it seems, by an irrepressible urge to create images from their often extraordinary lives.

But what exactly is Naïve Art? Although sometimes difficult to define, it must be accepted that a clear set of rules defining subject matter and technique do not exist for Naïve art in the way they do for Impressionism, for example.

Naïve art is often confused with Art Brut and Outsider art and although they all have the common factor of being produced by self-taught artists, Art Brut comes from those who are institutionalised whilst Outsider artists tend to be very isolated in their personal lives as well as in their paintings. They sometimes have minimal contact with the world around them.

Naïve artists are only naïve because they have developed their own set of rules for painting with little outside influence and they are naïve only when compared with trained artists. They are not mentally challenged, they simply strive to tell a story through paint and canvas in ways that can be understood and their language is universal.

Naïve artists come from all walks of life and all ethnicities and they draw their subject matter from personal incidents and memories. Since painting can be a very strong communication tool they sometimes exploit the canvas to express a personal opinion on the human condition (see "Landscape with Distractions"), or give an insight into their private world. In most cases, however, Naïve artists shy away from exposure because they are usually embarrassed about their inability to produce work to an academic standard.

Yet herein lies a fundamental quality. They do not pretend to be anything other than what they are (ordinary people painting the truth honestly), because that’s how they see the world.

Some years ago Mister Denham had the idea of establishing a National Museum of Naïve Art in England to house a national collection and provide a high-profile exhibition venue for local and international exchanges of Naïve work. He gathered around him a small group of similar self-taught artists and founded the New British Naives. Their manifesto is dedicated to bringing Naïve art firmly into the public arena and has generated significant interest.

Documentary film work has already begun on their activities and a series of exhibitions is planned for London later this year. A recent exhibition in Dorset resulted in a feature in a colour magazine and since then the MisterDenham.com website has been extremely busy.

Built by Mervyn Clingan to present a sample of Mister Denham’s work, the response was so great that he expanded it to meet the growing demand.

Within a year www.MisterDenham.com has become the leading Naïve artist’s site in the world and is set to launch a sister site in the near future (which will be the global port of call for all things Naïve in the art world).

It has been through the Internet that Mister Denham has made contact with fellow Naives throughout the world, and many are to become involved in the film documentary. The common obsession they share with the naïve genre has bonded them in friendship. They exchange signed prints, for example, and Mister Denham has been given the important foundations of a Naïve print archive for the National Museum project.

Mister Denham is currently working on a large-scale series of paintings based on the life of Solomon Grundy (Born on Monday, Christened on Tuesday…). He has taught himself to use acrylics and finds them much easier to use for the scale of the paintings, especially since he continues to give everything three coats!

He works on MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) and prepares the surfaces carefully with three or four coats of acrylic primer, rubbing down between coats. He routes the edges of the boards before priming and then ‘wraps’ the painting around them onto the back.  

The Solomon Grundy series will be exhibited in London later this year, together with a themed collection of work from fellow New British Naïve, Frank Smith. Frank’s story is equally fascinating and can be found on the website, together with work from the rest of the group.

With a bright future in front of them, the New British Naives are finally reaping the fruits of their labour. A following of loyal admirers (growing by the day) demonstrates the demand and admiration for Naive work and with the level of exposure expected to follow the opening of the exhibition in Chelsea, the doors will open for the public to view work that has been hidden for decades.

'Mappa Mundi'

The fear of not being accepted as a serious artist often plagues Naives but in the current scheme of things, we can only hope that a different view will be taken by the art community and that they will come to the sudden realisation that Naives have something very important to say in their work.

We all lead pretty normal lives by comparison and it is our experiences that shape us into what we become. It is unknown just how many Naive artists are out there, but with a National Gallery to represent Naive artists maybe we are about to find out just how many talented artists we really do have in the UK, or will we just remain Naive?

You can view Mister Denham’s work at www.misterdenham.com