“To them Howards End was a house;” E. M. Forster wrote, 
“they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for
which she sought a spiritual heir.” Of course those spirits 
are around us still, and the testimony both of English art 
and English literature confirms that the house, the church,
even the smallest dwelling place, represents the eternal
transaction between man and earth. Dennis Creffield is part 
of that tradition and all of his work affirms what used to be
called genius loci, but which can be less mythologically
rendered as the spirit of place. His wonderful drawings of 
the English cathedrals, for example, displayed his veneration
for those great bodies of stone – “body” being the
appropriate word here since, as he himself explained, he was
intent upon “the reconciling of geometry with the organic”.
These vast fabrics of stone live again in his charcoal
drawings, and in so doing emphasize an important truth – 
that to have a sense of place is also to have a sense of
history. The artist stands before the great churches and, in
that moment when he reveals their instantaneous shape 
upon paper, he becomes part of a larger process; to
paraphrase the German mystic, Jacob Boehme, he disclose
time in eternity, as well as eternity in time.
   Dennis Creffield is in that sense part of a continuing
inheritance, and it is intriguing to learn that he sketched
inside Westminster Abbey when he was a young man. This
was also the site of William Blake’s apprenticeship, and we
can see in Creffield’s work the same instinct towards a
religious, almost a medieval, vision. But he is also attached 
to a more accessible English tradition; there are artists like
Cotman, Girtin, Cozens and Constable, who have been drawn
to the qualities of stone, to the textures of houses, to the
surfaces of cathedrals, to the harmonies of a building in a
landscape. Creffield can also be seen as part of the
antiquarian tradition in England, which itself leads back to 
the great Gothic builders of our race and eventually, perhaps,
to the masons of Stonehenge who made stone their god and
therefore saw God in the stone.
   But this is to stretch history into legend, when there are far
more important resemblances closer to hand. Dennis
Creffield’s paintings of Petworth and its park may be seen on
one level as a “homage” to Turner, but only in the spirit that
animates all of Ceffield’s work – that the artist’s vision is a
collaboration between past and present, between the living
and the dead painter. The great floods of colour and the
bright tonality continue Turner’s own fantastic ceremonies 
of light, but in Creffield’s painting there is always the sense 
of the house and its land as organic, breathing forms. In his
recent drawings of Brimham Rocks he demonstrates his
affinity with the very texture of the earth, and in these
paintings of Petworth he reveals the same concern for form
and for fabric – the form of the house, the form of the land,
the form of that moment when house and land meet to become
an expression of the same spirit. That is why his paintings of
Petworth Park are filled with a sense of the English landscape
– their rhythms, their gentle curves, their luminosity, express
an almost religious fervour. They are, in the proper sense, a
revelation.
   Yet this need not be a solemn or portentous undertaking,
and in Creffield’s paintings there is a great vivacity combined
with exuberance; he becomes one with the fabric of the house
or the land, and so can reveal its permanence in that moment
of celebration when he puts paint upon the canvas. Note, in
particular, how he manages to convey that light which seems
to surround the old house; it is as if time were accustomed to
it, and rested a little. So we return to Howards End and the
house as “spirit”. Dennis Creffield has himself quoted
Wittgenstein’s aphorism that architecture “expresses a
thought”. It is the triumph of these paintings that, here, the
spirit and the thought are so beautifully aligned.