Robin Tanner
A Tithe Barn (Wiltshire Barn), 1926, Etching, 170 x 127 mm (plate), The Asmolean Museum, Oxford; Presented by Robin Tanner, the artist, 1981, WA1981.55, ©️ Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, courtesy Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Plain Light
Commentary by Marie Sophie Giraud
Robin Tanner’s etchings are ambitious examples of what can be achieved with light and dark. The Tithe Barn captures the gloomy cavernous interior of a humble Wiltshire outbuilding reminiscent of the underbelly of an inverted ship’s hull. Soaring and encasing, the barn also has a cathedral-like quality. Its robust structure acts as a frame through which our gaze is directed towards a luminous place in the distance.
The subtle tonal contrast between light and dark, achieved by a latticework of ink-filled incisions juxtaposed with void spaces on the surface of the page, results in a dense composition enclosing this light-bathed opening. In the space beyond the opening, a fuzzy vignette of Wiltshire’s agricultural landscape emerges in which nature and humankind are in harmony.
Tanner’s values were profoundly shaped by his Quaker spirituality. Early ‘Friends’, as Quakers are commonly known, often speak of the inward light. The idea is that God is a light whose source is beyond our physical boundaries. In the words of Ben Pink Dandelion, the light comes to us from a different place ‘as if through a keyhole’ (Dandelion 2007: 132). If we entertain the notion of experiencing God as light, as Quakers have done since the seventeenth century, then Tanner’s etching takes on resonances with the Epistle of John’s simple yet powerful message. As in the vista beyond the barn, ‘God is light and in Him, there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5 NRSV).
References:
Dandelion, Ben Pink. 2007. An Introduction to Quakerism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Tanner, Robin, and Tim Fenn (eds). 1991. From Old Chapel Field: Selected Letters of Robin Tanner, 1920–1988 (Glasgow: Impact)
