An autumnal wooded landscape smoulders with flashes of bright effervescing pigment, and a distant fog of charcoal black smoke dissipates through the trees. Two spectral figures hover on the eponymous ‘cinder’ of the forest floor, their silhouettes carved out by a vacuous absence of paint. With a wand in hand, the primary figure casts dashes of light into the leaves, the sparks flying in a hot fan out towards the viewer. A figure beyond crouches impishly on a rock, overlooking the supernatural occurrence. Tomlin instils Cinder with a mystical folklore, creating a geography and iconography of the distant past that amalgamates themes of spirits, spell-casting and rural lore. The viewer is impressed with the uncanny magic of the scene, interrupting some spectacular ritual  which enacts an ambiguous mythology, transfiguring the canvas into a spectacle of light and flaming texture.

The work formerly belonged to the permanent collection of the Saatchi Gallery, London, in the years before Saatchi relocated to the now-iconic gallery at the Duke of York’s Headquarters, Chelsea. It comes recently from the private collection of a leading British collector of contemporary art.

A remarkable quality of Cinder is the illusory depth achieved by Tomlin with only a relative shallowness of paint, accentuated by the considerably large support of unprimed linen canvas. The uncanny landscape is conjured through the lightest smudges of sparse pigment directly onto the linen, layered with more energetic marks which expand the foreground and produce the distinctive effect of singed debris. The earthy tonality of the canvas heightens the drama of the scene, seemingly subsuming the entire composition in the magical flames. The scintillating stylisation of Cinder is not unlike the brooding wood of Claude Debussy’s sultry Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a beautifully fluctuating landscape charged with fantasy and illusion.

Joel Tomlin was born in Sheffield in 1969, working as a blacksmith before later training as a painter. He moved to London to attend the Chelsea School of Art in 1994, followed by the University of Houston, Texas. Though Tomlin’s recently preferred medium is sculpture, the present work is characteristic of his earlier practice as a large-scale painter. He is particularly interested in ideas of Arcadia; animals, the natural world, legend and story often emerge as central themes of his work, and Cinder makes no exception. Tomlin has exhibited widely in London and Germany, with solo exhibitions at Belmacz (2015, 2019), and Max Wigram (2005). Tomlin divides his time between his studios in London and Bavaria.