(Above) Self-Portrait (1959). National Portrait Gallery, London
Exhibition: John Tunnard, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until June 6 2010
The programme notes for John Tunnard's show at Pallant, which is the first major retrospective of his work for 30 years, present the painter as one of the most overlooked artists of recent decades.
If this is the case, then this nature-loving, star-gazing, bearded jazz extraordinaire's spirit doesn't seem the type to take posthumous offence.
His art is relentlessly fun, sprinkling colours across canvasses like stardust, toying with space and depth in rich, ambitious visual treats. Abstraction, Music, Surrealism, the title of the first gallery, sounds like a list of the finer things in life, bursting into kaleidoscopic vibrancy as entertaining as any dream or album.
Vane (1942). Private collection
Composition With Anchor, a pencil and black ink sketch of the sea, briefly introduces the effect Herbert Read's book, Surrealism, had on Tunnard in the 1930s, and that's as embryonic as it gets.
From there, Diablo on the Quay places a bulbous blue playing piece in the midst of a darkened shore, lines zinging around it, dragging the eye between earth-red masts and sloping black walls.
Plein Air Abstraction and Vane fuse precise lines of wire with explosive seascape blues against burgeoning horizons, as if they were dropping from the sky.
One reviewer, discussing Tunnard in 1939, spoke of his work flowing with the swing jazz he would paint to, but Tunnard himself also derided any misplaced lines as "a crime".
Holiday, from the School Prints (1947). Lithograph on paper, Pallant House Gallery (purchased with support from Miss Anne Hodgson, 2007)
The jazz influence is immediately clear. Like the individual instruments of a band in creative harmony, these are pictures dense in ideas and experimentation, yet at the same time taut and clearly realised.
He could put his brand of playful perfectionism to disparate use, from the bright, optimistic Holiday, used to introduce children to abstract art, to bleak, post-nuclear wastelands.
He portrayed the land with flair, surveying the sea for hours after enlisting as a coastguard in Cornwall during World War II. Self-Portrait must be one of the most wittily self-deprecating pieces lenders the National Portrait Gallery possess, merging half of Tunnard’s cartoonishly craggy face into a swirling sea, peering at a giant sawfly which appears to be bursting from the waves.
It reflects his passion for entomology, submitting specimens to the Natural History Museum. He also contributed an utterly magnificent labyrinth scene of mud, plants, branches, sand, sunsets and walls to the Arts Council's 60 Paintings for 1951, partially submerged under the sea in a semi-mythical vision, as if transporting a stained glass creation onto raffish oil board.
The Return was Tunnard's addition to the Arts Council's 60 Paintings for '51. St John’s College, Oxford
Metal balls and feats of stone architecture are omnipresent, betraying a further fascination for the textile student.
The last great obsession for Tunnard, though, produced his most otherworldly works, as his fervent following of the Apollo space mission inspired his space travel series.
He dives into x-ray crystallography, molten lava, snowflakes, full moons and towering satellites with technicolour tenacity, but look behind the dreamy hues and you see endless circles, semi-circles, squares, triangles and divulging lines.
This is fluidity with calculated accuracy, and the magic of Tunnard's method lies in making you forget this underpinning, mathematical rigidity.
After giving him a show without a moment's hesitation in 1939, Peggy Guggenheim called Tunnard "a marvellous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat", likening his physical appearance to Groucho Marx and his personality to an animated bandleader.
His paintings, which she lauded for their "exquisite" construction and colour, seem to be extensions of his personality. However people remember him, Tunnard's energy burns as brightly as the St Ives sun.
All images © Estate of John Tunnard / Clody E Norton
Watch Curator Simon Martin introduce two works from the show:
