Yeoman's Yemen

MARTIN YEOMAN
Yeoman's Yemen
The British Council Exhibition & Sana'a, Yemen

Catalogue Entry 1 - Yeoman's Yemen by Francis Russell l997

'Martin Yeoman is a natural observer. He has that rare gift of being able to record what he sees, to seize upon its form and define its character. A benign star took Yeoman in l987 to Yemen, which astonishingly was still almost virgin soil for the western artist, a country apart in a world otherwise rather comprehensively explored by artists of previous generations. While we think still, consciously or not, of other countries through the medium of the great topographical draftsmen of the past - Lear for Greece and the Levant, Roberts for Spain and Egypt or Daniell for India - our mental picture of Yemen must depend on the atmospheric photographs of Freya Stark, so inseparably fused with her writings.

Yeoman draws not as a sight-seer, intent on pursuing every monument the map can offer, but as one whose time is his own. The half-dozen note books he used in Yemen offer a kaleidoscopic account of a country and its people, drawn with a zealous curiosity and that touch of humility without which no Englishman can ever hope to comprehend the nature of a civilization as ancient as his own. Many of the etchings are direct developments from the pencil studies in these sketch books: thirty-three of the zinc plates were in fact executed while the artist was in Yemen, but this alone does not explain their immediacy and fascination.

There are views of hill-top villages, bristling with towers; there is a smouldering lime kiln near Tarim; there are dragon's blood trees on the island of Suqutra, oddly reminiscent of Roman pines and, remarkably, etched from a photograph; there is a delicate minaret at Ta'izz and a disintegrating tower in Wadi Dahr; there are studies of buildings at Sana'a and impressions of the suq. The suq is inevitably central to Yemeni life. From the vantage of a first-floor window in Sana'a Yeoman captures tribesmen on their way, his small sheets of scattered studies somehow conveying the colour and movement and, yes, something of the noise of the ever-changing scene beneath his eye. The Yemeni addiction to qat has also allowed Yeoman to study individuals at close quarters. His etched portraits have a particular power. Ali is fixed in relentless profile as he chews, Arab cousin of a banditto of Salvator Rosa; and other men are described with equal force. Portraiture is of course one of the artist's interests, so it should come as no surprise that these energetic etchings are complemented by less assertive, yet equally penetrating drypoints that have a haunting, introspective quality, as that of Abdulwahhab ibn Muhammad al-Sayrafi exemplifies so well.

Varying in scale and character, Yeoman's Yemeni etchings do not constitute a rigid sequence. They stand on their individual merits. Each tells something of a once remote land that is now in rather easy reach. Their full import can, however, only be sensed in the context of this exhibition or in conjunction with Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, in which a selection is reproduced.

The illustration of modern travel books is a question of taste. For few writers are photographers of so determined an order as Freya Stark or Wilfred Thesiger. Some of the most compelling eschew all illustrations, trusting to the visual power of the pen. Mackintosh-Smith writes with effect, raising visual pictures in his reader's imagination, but there is no doubt that Yeoman's images do add to the impact of the printed page. Writer and draughtsman have together caught the spirit of the Yemen as it emerges from the enforced isolation that had protected its buildings and people from the destructive forces of modernity. His etchings tell us that the world would be the poorer were the brass kettle Yeoman drew to be discarded or the Yemeni to be denied his long hours of qat-chewing content.

One can only hope that 'progress' will spare something of the subtly-balanced civilization which Yeoman records in such affectionate terms.'

Francis Russell 9 April l997

Catalogue Entry II - by Tim Macintosh-Smith

'In l986, Martin Yeoman was on a tour of the glitzier spots of the Arabian Gulf when a fellow traveller remarked to him, 'If you want to see the real Arabia, go to Yemen.' So Martin came to Sana'a and, in no time, Yemen had cast its spell, bewitched yet another admirer; and I had gained a friend.

From the start, I was impressed by the way Martin reacted to Yemen. I took him to Ali Lahib's saltah restaurant in the Sana'a suq, and in the tiny upstairs room where tribesmen squatted on the tables and cats leapt through the windows in a cacophony of shouting and gas burners, he calmly produced a cut-down Cornelissen sketch book and started drawing our fellow diners. Wherever we went and however novel the surroundings, he simply got down to work. The only place Martin didn't draw, it seemed, was in the subterranean volcanic bath at Damt - and, given waterproof materials, he probably would have done. On Martin's second visit to Yemen, we walked the great spiky massif of Jabal Raymah, where the highlands disappear suddenly into the Red Sea plain. Here, again, Martin drew and painted ceaselessly: on rocky outcrops and among banana groves; in the chiarascuro of a lamplit fortress-house and in the harsh neon of a corrugated iron teashop, where we spent the night while a storm ranted around the mountain flanks; on a sun drenched terrace above a rising mist. Martin gathered his painting water from clefts in the rocks, braved fleas and blisters, and fell even further under Yemen's spell.

When I came to write Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, therefore, there was no question as to who should provide the visual material. But I did not want Martin to illustrate my text; rather, I trusted his eye and knew that his vision of Yemen would complement mine. I was to find my vision not only complemented, but also enriched.

From Martin's visit of l996 I remember a sense of great excitement - particularly at the realization that zinc and copper plates could be used as fluently as the Cornelissen sketchbooks; and a sense of frustration - that there was so much to draw, and so little time (is this an alternative meaning for Ars longa vita brevis?). Over the couple of months Martin stayed, my diwan filled up with plates, drawings, pastels and soils from Sana'a itself, Haraz, Raymah again, Aden, the Red Sea, Ta'izz and many other places (a sheep's head, drawn on the plastered wall of a café in Bayt al-Faqih, remained in situ), Of all the regions of Yemen which we visited, Hadramawt was the most exciting, and frustrating: here, Martin chased the sun as it ebbed away from the cliffs beyond Tarim; at Bir Ali I stood on the extinct volcano above him and looked down at a tiny figure with an easel in a vast landscape of sky and sea, trying to capture the fickle light. And capture it he did. Look, too, at his oil of Bab al-Yaman: not only does the sun fall on the gate and on the crown beneath - it seems to illuminate the air itself.

No Arabist or South Arabian expert, Martin is a greater rarity: he has been able to translate Yemen visually, so to speak, and to say things - especially with his portraits - more elegantly and lucidly than I could have written them. Yemen is famously photogenic; but, while the camera records an exotic surface, Martin has looked beneath the superficial strangeness and seen the shared humanity. Put another way, Yeoman's Yemen is not a costume drama but a series of meetings with real people, a succession of pauses on real journeys.'

Tim Mackintosh-Smith 23 April l997