Graham Ovenden Not Guilty of Indecency Involving Witness JB

Most people (other than those who read this blog closely) falsely believe that Graham Ovenden has been found guilty of a "string of sex offences against children" that supposedly included dressing up his models in Victorian nighties, then blindfolding, disrobing and subjecting them to fellatio. None of that ever happened and Mr. Ovenden wasn't convicted on those charges or anything even remotely similar. Absurdly, he was convicted of five counts under the Indecency with Children Act 1960 for the "indecent act" of taking photographs -- not taking "indecent photographs." The two should not be confused, because in Mr. Ovenden's case, the supposed results of the "indecent acts" -- i.e., photographs -- were never shown to the jury. Indeed, in the case of Model X, the photographs that were alleged to have been taken "indecently" didn't even exist.

To be sure, in the case of both Model X and Maud Hewes (the only two former models involved in the indecent photographing counts), there existed photographs that, although not shown to the jury, could have been found to be "indecent" were the jurors to apply the lowest common denominator of current opinion regarding photographs of nude minors. However, convicting Mr. Ovenden for "indecent photographs" was not the objective of the prosecution: that is, the Crown Prosecution Service did not want to open the door to criticism from artists, photographers and indeed, the entire art establishment for condemning works of art. So instead the CPS based its case on phony sex charges (prompted for the most part by the police), and the novel theory that merely photographing nude minors could, in and of itself, and without any visual evidence, be an act of child molestation. Think about it: Model X testified that she "remembered" being photographed while nude and blindfolded, and on another occasion, while lying back, splayed out on some rocks. The fact that those photographs never existed (because the incidents never occurred) was irrelevant to the charge. The mere allegation that photographs were taken was sufficient to secure a conviction. Photographers should be very frightened by this expansion of the Indecency with Children Act 1960 and the mischief it is sure to bring to others besides Mr. Ovenden.

That brings us to the two remaining charges involving a third model, JB. At the outset, JB alleged three incidents. First, she claimed that when she was six she had a bath with Mr. Ovenden and another girl. Allegedly, Mr. Ovenden asked her to wash his "John Thomas." (The alleged incident involved no touching, just an invitation.) Second, JB claimed that when she was 7, Mr. Ovenden blindfolded her and played a "tasting game," culminating in his putting his penis in her mouth. Third, JB claimed that when she was ten Mr. Ovenden came up behind her, grabbed her breasts through her clothing and said "come on, let's have a feel."

Allegation number two, the tasting game, was disbelieved by the jury, while Mr. Ovenden was convicted on the first and third allegations. The discussion of these charges should be prefaced by a few facts that were not fully explored at trial, but which are salient nonetheless. Within a year of the alleged "let's have a feel" incident, JB asked Mr. Ovenden to photograph her naked, which he did. She was very proud of her breasts and a photo of her naked from head to toe appears in Graham Ovenden's monograph States of Grace. When she was asked about the photography session at trial, JB said she didn't remember it, and the photograph was never introduced because Mr. Ovenden's legal team were determined to keep States of Grace out of view of the jury. But her insouciant facial expression and open pose are not those of a girl who had to fight off an attack by the photographer not long before the photo session.(One can argue that it was a mistake not to introduce the book into evidence, but hindsight is always golden.) There is also evidence of a motive by JB to give false testimony. Long before the trial, JB and her mother took sides with Mr. Ovenden's ex-wife, Annie, in a bitter dispute over the Ovendens' collapsing marriage, Edmund Ovenden's misappropriation of equity in Barley Splatt and the removal of valuable photographs and other documents from Mr. Ovenden's possession. In fact, JB worked for Annie Ovenden: in 2010, she registered the domain for Annie Ovenden's website and thereafter remained the registrant and technical contact. (This fact was discovered after trial.) A friend of the Ovendens also witnessed a conversation between Annie and JB's mother regarding how they would "get" Graham. Mr. Ovenden's legal counsel must have felt strongly enough about how fraught the charges were that they didn't wish to air this dirty laundry.

In any event, there are ample grounds on which to appeal the convictions on these charges. Let's begin with the bath allegation, which JB said happened when she was six years old. There are three possibilities: 1) JB was willfully lying, 2) JB had a memory of an event that never occurred, or 3) JB remembered a real event. Facts already mentioned above suggest that JB was lying, but assuming, for sake of argument, that she actually had a memory of such an event, the task is then to determine whether the memory is true or false. This is not simply a matter of listening to JB's testimony and deciding whether her story is convincing. As memory expert Daniel L. Schacter has observed, "[p]eople incorrectly claim -- often with great confidence -- having experienced events that have not happened." (See, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.) This is especially the case when witnesses rehearse their testimony with police officers, prosecutors and others (e.g., their mothers) and become "extremely confident about what they say -- even when they are incorrect." (Schacter, Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind and the Past, Basic Books 1996). A great deal has been learned since the early 1990s about how memory works and much of this knowledge flies in the face of the common understanding of the man on the Clapham omnibus that a memory is like a tape recording of what happened. For this reason, the British Psychological Society (BPS) produced its Guidelines on Memory and the Law: A Report from the Research Board of the British Psychological Society, written expressly for consideration by the CPS, police and defence solicitors. The following principles, designated as "Key points" in the Report, rather speak for themselves:

• Remembering is a constructive process. Memories are mental constructions that bring together different types of knowledge in an act of remembering. As a consequence, memory is prone to error and is easily influenced by the recall environment, including police interviews and cross-examination in court.
• Recall of a single or several highly specific details does not guarantee that a memory is accurate or even that it actually occurred. In general, the only way to establish the truth of a memory is with independent corroborating evidence.
• People can remember events that they have not in reality experienced. This does not necessarily entail deliberate deception. For example, an event that was imagined, was a blend of a number of different events, or that makes personal sense for some other reason, can come to be genuinely experienced as a memory, (these are often referred to as ‘confabulations’).

These points are particularly salient with respect to adult memories of early childhood, which is why the Report warns: "Detailed and well-organized memories dating to events that occurred between seven to five years of age should be viewed with caution." JB's alleged memories of the (non-existent) event were nothing if not detailed and well-organized. Her memory was sequential and complete, told from beginning to end. It included where she sat in the bathtub, how Mr. Ovenden got in with an erect penis, how the other girl was asking to wash Mr. Ovenden's beard, how Mr. Ovenden repeatedly said to them "No, no, wash John Thomas. Go on, Go on," how she felt "uncomfortable," how the other girl washed said John Thomas a couple of times, how Mr. Ovenden then got out of the bath and came back with a camera, and how he took photographs of JB and the other girl in a green towel. (If you thought perhaps that there were photos of JB and other girl in a green towel, you would be wrong.) If the highly detailed nature of JB's "memory" didn't give the CPS pause about proceeding with that charge, then the age at which the event was alleged to have occurred should have. As the Report plainly states:

In general the accuracy of memories dating to below the age of about seven years cannot be established in the absence of independent corroborating evidence.

There was no independent corroborating evidence in JB's case. The "fact" of JB and her mother agreeing that JB disclosed the alleged incident when she was fifteen or sixteen (assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true), does no more than corroborate the existence of a memory, not whether the memory is true. Independent corroborating evidence means evidence that is adduced or discovered contemporaneously with the alleged event and that directly supports one or more aspects of it. It does not mean a supposed conversation ten years later. Simply put, the CPS should never have prosecuted Mr. Ovenden on this charge.

What else is wrong with the two JB-related convictions? They are inconsistent with the acquittal on the third allegation, the so-called "tasting game" incident. The standard on voiding a conviction due to inconsistent verdicts is an exacting one. The burden is on the defendant to prove that the verdict is "unsafe," that is, that there is both "a logical inconsistency between the verdicts" and "no explanation" for the inconsistency. Dhillon [2010] EWCA Crim 1577, par. 33. There is no universal test for determining whether a verdict is "unsafe." However, in R v. Cross [2009] EWCA Crim 1533, the court found that verdicts would be inconsistent where:

They cannot possibly be explained by any line of reasoning which the jury could have adopted looking at the evidence as fair-minded ordinary people. The appellate court has to apply this test in the context of the issues which were presented to the jury, but that does not of course mean that a jury had to view the evidence bearing on those issues in the way that was argued for either by the prosecution or the defence.

Here, one needs to view the allegations by JB in the overall context of the case. First, the counts of conviction (the bath and "let's have a feel" incidents) were completely different from any other allegation in the case. Second, the only allegation by JB that was supported by a similar allegation -- the tasting game -- was thrown out by the jury. These two facts alone make out a prima facie case for "inconsistency."

Another factor to consider is that JB's credibility was at issue, since Mr. Ovenden denied that the three alleged events ever occurred. It might be argued that the testimony of JB's mother swayed the jury as to the bath incident, but it could not possibly explain the conviction on the "let's have a feel" count. Moreover, the convictions on these two counts came only after the jury had been deadlocked for four days and Judge Cottle instructed the jurors that they could convict by a majority. Consequently, the jury's decision has the hallmarks of a "compromise" where the jurors split the difference -- acquitting Mr. Ovenden on the more serious charge (one that was potentially corroborated by a similar allegation by LD), but convicting him on the two minor ones.

The closer one looks at the case against Graham Ovenden, the more one sees its vindictive heart. The case is replete with official corruption, from the coercion and coaching of witnesses, to novel applications of law, to bringing charges that should never have been brought. It is a rich irony, indeed, that in his petition to the Court of Appeal to put Mr. Ovenden behind bars, H.M. Attorney General cites as a consequence of Mr. Ovenden's supposed "abuse," the turmoil that the police and prosecution caused Model X and Maud Hewes -- turmoil, it must be said, that these witnesses never felt either when they modeled for Mr. Ovenden or when they looked back on their experiences in their twenties.

It is now up to the Court of Appeal to see that justice is done by reversing Mr. Ovenden's convictions.

What Her Majesty's Attorney General Doesn't Want You to Know (Part 2)

When Graham Ovenden was convicted in April 2013 on two counts of “indecency with a child” with respect to photographing the witness identified here as “Model X,” the charges, which the police filed on her behalf, did not relate to any existing photographs. Rather, they related to imaginary photographs that exist only in Model X’s false memories – false memories that were created by the police during their interviews with her. This is no mere speculation.

Model X did not come forward years later when she figured out what had happened to her. This was a lie that the prosecution fed the press and which the press dutifully reported. In reality, the police paid Model X an unsolicited visit in 2009 and attempted to get her to say she was blindfolded and molested. (The source for these allegations was Minty Challis, a/k/a Donna Berry.) Although the police never got Model X to allege molestation of any kind, they preyed on the inaccuracies of her memory and the clinical depression she developed in later adulthood to convince her that Mr. Ovenden had done something wrong. So how did the police find Model X in the first place? Mr. Ovenden gave them her address. He was obviously naïve to think that the police wouldn’t have their way with her.

The contrast between Model X’s written statement for the introduction to States of Grace at age 27 and her statement in 2009, at age 46, testifies to the power and will of the police to invent crimes where none exist. Here is what Model X wrote in her own hand in 1990, when she knew that several of her images would be reproduced in Graham Ovenden’s States of Grace:

There was a freedom about it -- not just being myself, but it showed other possibilities, different from everyday situations. It was nice to be accepted on the level that I was myself and he didn't used to say “this is so-and-so and she is 10 years old.” In this sense, it was very adult....

Graham didn't pose me that much. He used to just let me do things and he used to say “that's OK.” It was quite spontaneous. Sometimes he might have said “pick up your chin” or he might have said something emotive, like “look far away” or things like that. I never felt that he took away “me” as a person.

One of the things that's very important, I feel, is that the work is very honest. However erotic the pictures are, however they are provocative, they are honest pictures. We were there. We did those things. It's not like someone's faked it. I know that Graham's an artist, and not to take anything away from him, of course, but the thing is, the people are there. So, it exists and you can't pretend it doesn't exist and that sexuality doesn't exist. So the honesty, I think, is really important and I think people are just stuffy and have a lot of fears about what's okay and get confused about what's okay.... It was a very safe environment.

Now compare this resolute declaration with paragraphs 36 and 37 of the prosecution’s opening statement about what Model X would say when called to the witness box. (These paragraphs were simply regurgitated, complete with typographical error, by the Attorney General in his “Reference Under Section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988,” recently submitted to the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division. Evidently the Attorney General couldn’t be bothered to find out what Model X actually said at trial.) The reader should keep in mind that these paragraphs are supposed to make out two separate “offences” of “indecency with a child:”

"[Model X] was about 10 years old when the defendant took photographs of her at a time he was still living in London. This took place in a studio in an empty bedroom of the house. [Model X] remembers the defendant telling her that he wanted to recreate a ‘Little Blind Girl’ and he told her a story about a blind girl. Susannah was sitting on the floor. She was naked. The defendant put white sticky tape on her eyes. She couldn’t see. The defendant pushed the tape down. [Model X] didn’t know what the defendant was doing through she could hear him breathing as if he was holding his breath and then exhaling.

"When the defendant moved to Cornwall, [Model X] would visit the Offender’s home address with her family. The defendant photographed her outdoors. [Model X] remembered there being rocks up the hill from the house where the defendant photographed her naked. She remembers the rocks digging into her back as she lay across them. She can recall be [sic] stretched out in certain poses and feeling vulnerable."

As mentioned above in this posting and elsewhere on this blog, the prosecution did not introduce into evidence any photographs showing Model X fully naked with tape over her eyes or lying down on rocks. The authorities had dozens of photographs of Model X, but none of them fit the descriptions of these two alleged events. However, they did have photographs by Mr. Ovenden which plainly demonstrated that Model X’s memories were confabulated – that is, her recollections were based on true events, but contained crucial details that never occurred.

Model X testified that her eyes were taped, that she was totally naked, and that she was blindfolded only when she was alone with Mr. Ovenden. However, photographs in the possession of the authorities, reveal those details as false. Reproduced here are three photographs of Model X posing with another model on the day the “blindfold” photographs were taken. The blindfold is cloth, not tape, and Model X is wearing a white dress, open at the top. (One of the photographs served as the source image for a drawing about blind Justice that Mr. Ovenden made for a patron.*)

And if Mr. Ovenden told Model X a story about a blind girl, it would hardly be sinister: blind and blindfolded figures are not uncommon in the history of art. (See paintings above.) Still other photographs in the possession of the police show Model X seated, never lying, on rocks at Barley Splatt. When one of those images (shown above right) was introduced by the defense, Model X commented under oath that it was “lovely.” The implication that someone stretched Model X out over rocks is pure invention.

This is not to call Model X a liar. She undoubtedly believed that what she testified to was the truth. (The defense failed to confront her with her statement in States of Grace for reasons unknown to this writer.) But her memories – so graphically in conflict with both her recollections at age 27 and the photographs that Graham Ovenden actually took of her – are clearly false.

The phenomenon of the confabulation of memory is well known, as attested to in the following précis by Dr. Ian Anderson, a Chartered Psychologist. Although Dr. Anderson did not consult in the Ovenden case, he clearly should have, as his observations would have helped the jury to understand how someone could have one set of memories of certain childhood experiences at age 27 but a drastically different set at age 46:

A lay view of memory function might well be characterized as a belief that memories are recorded and stored rather like an archive of video recordings to be retrieved and replayed at will. Research over decades has demonstrated that this is not accurate. The general view that psychologists hold of memory is that memories are stored not as whole narratives, but as fragments. Fragments of memory are reconstituted into narratives at the time of their retrieval. I would note that functions of memory are clearly much more complex than the description I have just given; but I believe my description represents a simple overview that accurately contrasts with the lay version of memory noted above.

Whatever the mechanisms of memory, most of us believe that our memories are more or less accurate. We also believe that we are better at remembering important events than trivial events. Research has consistently shown, however, that our memories are probably far less accurate than we believe them to be. Our memories are sufficient for most practical purposes as demonstrated by the fact that we can function in our day-to-day lives. But there are occasions when normal people in normal situations ‘remember’ things that have not occurred.

This ‘remembering’ of events that have not occurred is known in psychology as confabulation. Confabulation is also referred to in more general contexts as ‘False Memory Syndrome’ and sometimes ‘Recovered Memory Syndrome’. Confabulation of memory is one example of our brains/minds filling in the gaps of missing information in order to make sense of the world. Both our visual system and our auditory system also routinely perform this task, and indeed sometimes get it wrong.

I want to be clear that confabulation is a normal artifact of memory that happens to the healthily functioning brains/minds of most people at some time or another.

Some people are more prone to confabulation than others…. [T]here is a plethora of publications devoted to this phenomenon. I would draw attention to an article published as recently as 5 August 2010 (Mazzoni et al., 2010). In this study as many as one in five of the 1,600 participants reported clear recollections of incidents that they knew had never taken place. Most of the false memories reported by the now-adults in the study related to events between the ages of four and eight years old.

If a memory is confabulated a person who experiences that memory has in a sense invented the memory, although that person will not in any way be aware that it is an invention. In other words, confabulated memories are experienced as if they are the truth. Indeed, one of the ways that researchers are able on some occasions to identify clearly confabulated memories is by the certainty with which those who report those memories maintain them in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Once a memory has been confabulated it is impossible to separate it from a real memory. Therefore, if a person can create a confabulated memory he or she can certainly maintain it consistently even though in a sense the memory is fabricated. Not only can the individual who experiences the memory not distinguish between a real memory and a confabulated memory, but research has also demonstrated that without external reference psychologists are no better at distinguishing confabulated memories from real memories than are others. However, there are some contextual factors and features that properly raise doubts in relation to the veracity of a memory when it is considered.

The research above also demonstrates that there are specific circumstances that are likely to increase the possibility of the creation of confabulated memories. “One set of circumstances that has been associated with the creation of confabulated memories is when a person has been the subject of certain types of psychological counselling or other interventions of psychological therapy.

There are many types of psychological interventions, sometimes known as ‘talking therapies’. It is by no means inevitable that a competently delivered form of psychological therapy will necessarily create confabulated memories. However, in order to comment as to whether a particular therapeutic intervention has the potential to create confabulated memories, it is necessary to consider both the style of therapy and the details of the ways in which the individual therapist delivered that therapy. “As I imply above in relation to potential for any therapeutic intervention to create a confabulated memory, the devil is in the details.

For completeness, I will add that the potential for confabulation as a result of therapeutic intervention probably arises for no better reason than the fact that talking therapy typically involves an intense interpersonal relationship between therapist and client focused upon specific problems in the client’s life and sometimes the reasons for those problems. In other words, although therapeutic interventions have a high potential to create confabulated memories, the fact of the matter is that any such conversation, interview, or discussion has this potential, and ‘talking therapy’ is merely a special case of this type of interaction.

Another set of circumstances that has been associated with the creation of confabulated memories is the investigating process itself, particularly the methods of interviewing used by, for example, the police. Such issues as interviewer expectations, specific types of questions (particularly leading questions), summaries that confirm interviewer expectations and omit or deny contrary information provided by witnesses, etc. are all things that have the potential to pollute memory.

I am not suggesting by the above that interviewers would necessarily intend to distort accurate recall; in fact, it may be the very intention to elicit accurate recall that sometimes creates the circumstances for confabulation. A lay person considering such interviews would not necessarily be able to point to specific interactions that have the potential to create confabulation: this requires an expert analysis.

In light of the fact that Model X has suffered from depression in adulthood and given the interventions by the police, who swooped down on Model X with a fury to “get” Graham Ovenden, it is clear that Model X’s testimony consisted not of accurate memories, but confabulations.

One can also sense just how deeply Model X was manipulated by the police. The Attorney General notes that in her victim impact statement, taken in 2013, Model X said that “giving evidence had been the worst experience of her life” and that “she had struggled with vague feeling [sic] throughout her life that she had been taken advantage of; throughout her life she had felt loneliness and isolation and felt very alone in her relationships.” These claims (quoted here from the Attorney General’s brief, not the victim impact statement), were, like Model X’s testimony, embroidered by the police. Applied to real child abuse, they might be believable, but here they are just tropes.

It’s no wonder that giving evidence was the worst experience of Model X’s life. She had her memory irreparably damaged and then discovered on cross-examination, when she was confronted with the photographic evidence, that something was truly amiss. This is something for which the police should be punished, not something for which Graham Ovenden should be held responsible.


*The title of the drawing is “Justice conducts the choir of innocents in her new anthem” and is reproduced here.

The Art of Graham Ovenden: Anatomies of Innocence, Part 3

Anatomies of Innocence (Part 3 - Final).
by Jerrold Northrop Moore.

Copyright © 2009 by Graham Ovenden. Reprinted with permission.

From 1975 the Ruralists had shared their holidays. They took two or three Landmark Trust cottages in the remote hamlet of Coombe, fifty miles north of the Ovendens' extending house, and close to the Cornish coast at Morwenstow. This new place showed Ovenden a new luminosity. The softer brightness of sea air extended his painted lights again. A watercolour, Tree near Coombe (1977) evokes a rain-washed tree stem rooted amid rocks whose wetness reduces them (with a few middle-ground bushes and distant hills) to soft near-planes of colour.

He also began making camera studies of sea and land at Sharpnose point off Morwenstow. Most of his photographs there show the sea at flat calm: that affords greatest contrast with the headland's rocky profile. Flat calm water also offers a maximum reflection of light.

This formula was soon enriching Ovenden's oil paintings. A rough sea, like a thick impasto of paint, would break up and disperse the light which it is always Ovenden's goal to preserve. His only pure seascape without any land shows its flat calm water with shapes, confined to the clouds above. (Painted for a 1984 exhibition devoted to Elgar, it is called The Enigma.)

Painting land directly at the flat sea's edge, he often faced a strand equally flat. That would need something further to make a picture. And here came an unusual case of Ovenden's landscapes touched by his reading. In 1982-83 he found himself enthralled by Walter de la Mare's The Connoisseur and other Stories. One story was called “All Hallows” after a lonely cathedral rising beside a western sea. Its landward side is guarded by nearly impenetrable hills, through which a solitary walker makes his way in late afternoon. Descending, he enters to find the vast interior haunted by a single verger. In the gathering darkness the verger shows him secret places in the fane - where ruinous masonry seems to be under repair by forces not at all divine.

Ovenden painted a large All Hallows (The Sea Cathedral). Sharp angles define dead­white surfaces with slits for windows - all deeply shadowed in blue back-light from the western sea and sky. The building's hardness elicits by its contrast some softness in the surrounding horizontal planes of nearly treeless ground at the coast. So it shows man's monstrosity imposed on nature.

A series of seaside monoliths followed. For a London show the Ruralists were to paint Biblical subjects, Ovenden chose The Tower of Babel: on a canvas four feet by six and a half, a blank windowless shaft rises on a green but barren coast (1984-85). A Sea Tower on a purple strand (1985) sharpens the building's intrusive profile to a brutal point (left). A second Tower of Babel (1986) halves the canvas dimensions of the first, but doubles its tower bulk in a shaft of stark blue and stark white. The monstrous point finds faint enlarging echo in clouds above it – hinting perhaps that the artist feels himself amid mirrors.

A better answer had already suggested itself in another de Ia Mare story from the same book. In 1984 Ovenden had painted The Residence of the Philosopher Kempe. Kempe has spent his hermit's life seeking to prove the existence of the soul. He is sought out, in his all-­but-inaccessible tower behind high coastal hills, by another solitary traveller through the evening. Ovenden's painting shows Kempe's tower house not on the sea strand but amid hills above. It is thus set between the earth and sky, day and night – almost lost amid darkening hills whose far sides hold last sunset rays from an ocean sky. The painting technique is as broad as in the seaside monoliths. But now that the land has regained hegemony, dark shadowy blues and greens hold touches of red below the pale sky.

And thus the colours of light, near the centre of Ovenden's art almost from its beginning, are re-enthroned. It is the true way for this painter to integrate the sea into his landscape, because it is the true counterpoint: nature's erections, more than man's, illuminated by the flat calm sea. These years had also seen Ovenden's development of a land-theme which rooted back to his student expeditions about Dartmoor: more than one tree stem sharing a common crown. In The Communion of Trees (1980) two tree stems lean towards each other – a virtually supernatural sight. He would return to it again and again. In The Druid's Grove (1983) several trees support a single pyramid of foliage (left). The co-operative stems grow again from a single area of colour.

Was there, in all this merging, a subconscious attempt to reconcile and repair the integrity of the Ruralist group? It had partly fragmented in 1981, when Peter Blake's wife Jann Haworth had suddenly left him. Blake was so devastated that, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, he felt himself forced to return to his own roots in London. Now David lnshaw wanted to follow Blake. It left the Ovendens and Arnolds to fly the Ruralist flag.

The next years saw Ovenden's rich colours explored through later and later lights. Dartmoor, Evening (1983) travels back again over his old painting grounds to explore last panoplies in a rich red field held between foreground and middle-ground. It emerges grandly from surrounding areas of mauve, orange-browns, and greens ranging from light to dark: all but the red field seemingly back-lit from the pale sky.

And so to an exploration of darkness and moonlight. A nocturne of 1982, Sentinels of Silbury, showed its moonlight behind clouds. The next year brought a direct confrontation in Full Moon, superbly luminous below a canopy of trees. Finely painted though it is, several distant fields and the top of the foreground tree canopy remain too highly coloured for nature in the fullest moonlight.

A dozen years later, the problem was memorably solved - by applying the formula seen in many of Ovenden daylight pictures. Orchard Moon – now recognised as an iconic image of Ruralist painting – keeps its distances in softest blues, gradually increasing colour intensities and contrasts as we come forwards. Foreground colours may still exceed what the eye would see in actual moonlight. But the formula is true, and therefore powerful.

Ovenden's moonlight reached farther, to touch the surreal. A small Red Moon (1999) shines supernaturally just above seaside hills. This moon's harvest red illuminates a distant solitary tree in gold which also touches another hill top farther off. Here is no hint of Pop art (which this picture could so easily have projected) but the lights of earth momentarily transcending diurnal experience.

The Philosopher Kempe landscape led Ovenden to another superb series, painted over many years, of distant sea lights illuminating coastal headlands. Gloaming towards the Cornish Coast (2000) recomposes his late evening, Morwenstow photograph of 1997 with colours of astonishing subtlety. It was dubbed by one too-casual observer 'The Black Picture'- until Ovenden pointed out that there is not a stroke of black anywhere. Close examination reveals minutely variegated glazes of shadowy blues, deep greens fringed with light as the eye moves back and back to pursue the light's source. It comes from a low sun hidden behind the nearest hill, yet still enriching the visible sea as it bathes a distant headland opposite and the sky in glazes of ivory, lemon yellow and faintest orange, pink and purple.

Soon after of The Red Moon and Gloaming towards the Cornish Coast were finished, the writer was lucky enough to witness the kindling moment of another vision. In April 2001 the Ovenden's visited me at Broadway, on the edge of the Cotswolds. Late one afternoon our car emerged on a short stretch of road crossing a high hill. To our right, between trees, opened a vast prospect westwards over the Vale of Evesham. Yet our attention was taken by a colour of sky I had never seen (and have not seen since): an unbroken sheet of grey cloud turned pink by a sinking sun behind – whose lower edge just emerged in dull gold.

We stopped to look, and I said to Graham: “There is an Ovenden vision if ever I saw one. What a pity we haven't a camera with us.” He answered: “Let's just look at it for a couple of minutes.” After perhaps ninety or a hundred seconds he said: “That's all right. We can go on. I have it here,” pointing to his forehead.

I saw none of the painting's progress. The finished picture appeared in a Ruralist exhibition that September as The Evening Fall. The foreground trees and distant hills are of Cornwall. But the grey-pink sky with its lower edge of sun are exactly as we saw them above Broadway. The artist's memory had held that unique colour – to recreate it perfectly for us to enjoy again and again - and to share with those who never saw the sight in nature.

Later years have brought excursions less physical than spiritual. One is seen in broad strokes of rain against rain-soaked moorland and sky in Receding Rain: Bodmin Moor (2002), refining a small oil study of forty years earlier. Another lies in plenary developments of deliberately limited colours. Barley Splatt Pond, Early Morning (2006) reveals a breathtaking range of blues through morning mist backing crisp trees of gold (actually orange-yellow-green) in image and reflection (below).

*     *     *

It is not for an observer to sum up a career still evolving. Final thoughts are best left to the artist himself. In a recently recorded conversation he speaks of the kinship of vision to technique:

I'm an old-fashioned craftsman, and I believe that the doing is all-important: doing as well as it's humanly possible to do it. In a beautiful piece of cabinet-making this is an immense pleasure. When you reach the levels of Rembrandt and Michelangelo, there you meet a very very potent alchemy of technical virtuosity with human communication.

It's no coincidence that the great works of the world are also consummate works of technical virtuosity. If we were able to listen to Mozart playing his own music, or Chopin playing his, I'm certain we would feel the same thing.

Music of all the arts has the greatest perspective. I'm talking not only about Claudean visual perspectives in landscape, but spiritual perspectives. People sometimes talk about playing music to death: but I think you play it to life.

So Graham Ovenden has played and continues to play on his perceptions and experiences, and his memories of them, to create the visions which infuse his landscape painting.

(End.)

Jerrold Northrop Moore is the author of Green Fuse: The Pastoral Vision in English Art,1820-2000 (Antique Collectors' Club Ltd, 2006). The book analyzes the lineage of English pastoral art from Samuel Palmer to the Brotherhood of Ruralists.

Available at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, among other places.

The Fabrication of Charges Against Graham Ovenden

Graham Ovenden was acquitted by the jury of blindfolding his models and subjecting them to a “taste test” during which he was alleged to have indecently assaulted them. These accusations were laid on behalf of all four witnesses, but only two, JB and LD, chose to repeat the lie at trial. Their stories were disbelieved by the jury, most likely because they were contradicted by circumstantial evidence and mirrored each other so closely, that they smacked of collusion. One of these witnesses, JB, also accused Mr. Ovenden of two other isolated acts, for which the jury convicted Mr. Ovenden by a vote of 10-2. These “assaults” were completely unconnected with modelling, photo sessions or blindfolding and nowhere near the gravity of what one imagines when one hears the term “indecent assault.” These single incidents are worth repeating, even though they were also lies: First, that Mr. Ovenden allegedly got into a bathtub with her (when she was under the age of 6) and another girl, and asked her to wash his “John Thomas” with a washcloth. (The crime was in the asking; whether she actually did was not established.) Second, that Mr. Ovenden came up behind her (age 10) while she was clothed, reached around her and put his hands on her chest, saying “let me feel your tits.”

As to the two witnesses who refused to tell the “taste test” story and firmly stated, even under withering questioning by prosecutor Quaife, that they were never assaulted or abused by Mr. Ovenden in any way. Mr. Ovenden was also convicted of taking “indecent” photographs. The jury found 3 photographs to be indecent and convicted Mr. Ovenden on two “specimen” counts, each related to the act of taking the 3 photographs, as well as other photographs that the jury never saw. That these acts of photography were not “assaults” in any honest sense of the word can be readily understood from the fact that both of these witnesses, now age 50 and 39, respectively, supported Mr. Ovenden’s photographs of them when they were still in their 20s. This alone would seem newsworthy, but it was not reported anywhere in the British media.

Instead, when reporting Mr. Ovenden’s conviction on April 2, 2013, major newspapers (with the sole exception of The Telegraph), described as the counts of conviction precisely those charges of which Mr. Ovenden was acquitted:

The Times: “[Mr. Ovenden] abused children while they modeled for him.”¹

The Daily Mail: “Witnesses described how the artist would take his victims into his studio and make them wear Victorian-style clothing, before it was removed. He would also cover their eyes before abusing them, they told the court.”²

The Guardian: “They told how he would blindfold them and force them to take part in a "tasting game" that ended up in tricking them into taking part in oral abuse. ... [T]he jury clearly believed the testimony of some of the women who described abuse at Barley Splatt.”³

The Independent: “Witnesses described how Ovenden would take his victims into his studio and make them wear Victorian-style clothing, before it was removed. He would also cover their eyes before abusing them, they told the court.”⁴

Although The Telegraph did not report these particular lies about Mr. Ovenden’s conviction, it did repeat another lie that had been perpetrated by the prosecution and reported almost universally in the press: “The charges relate to four claimants, who contacted police long after the abuse is alleged to have taken place, and only when they realised exactly what had happened to them as girls, the court heard.”⁵ (This exact statement was also reported in The Times (the same article cited above), The Mirror⁶, The Guardian⁷, Western Morning News⁸ and BBC News⁹, among other places.

In fact, none of the witnesses at Graham Ovenden’s trial contacted the police “when they realised exactly what had happened to them as girls.”

The two witnesses whose photographs were ruled as “indecent” didn’t suddenly wake up one day to realise that Mr. Ovenden had taken “indecent” photographs of them. As already stated in greater detail in the previous post, one of them, in 1990 when she was 27, wrote in a statement for the introduction of Mr. Ovenden’s monograph, States of Grace, that “I never felt that [Graham] took away ‘me’ as a person… One of the things that’s very important, I feel, is that the work is very honest…” Yet, at trial, she testified that the single photograph of her introduced into evidence was “not me,” which is to say that she changed her mind, at least about that particular image. The other witness, Maud Hewes, did a near about-face to the statements she made in the 1990s, declaring that young girls should not be photographed as she once was by Mr. Ovenden. Obviously, when these former models, as younger adults, were supporting Mr. Ovenden’s photographs of them, they were well aware that they had been photographed, what those photographs depicted and what their experiences were.

Maud Hewes' 1993 Inscription to Graham Ovenden in his copy of States of Grace

So how did they end up as witnesses in the case?

The woman who wrote a statement for the introduction to States of Grace was contacted by the police, not vice versa, after Mr. Ovenden naively handed them a list of names and addresses of about twenty of his former models whose whereabouts he still knew. There was a discussion at the trial, out of hearing of the jury, of this witness suffering from some form of clinical depression (not related to being photographed). One can well imagine how vulnerable this woman must have been to repeated visits and contact by the police, pressuring her to accuse Mr. Ovenden of abusing her and to denounce the images he had taken of her. That she was able to stand up to the pressure and testify that she had never been abused is remarkable enough. But the pressure on her to identify her image – so that Mr. Ovenden could be convicted for “assaulting” her by clicking the camera shutter – was enormous and should not be underestimated. In January 1996, Mr. Ovenden’s daughter, Emily, told The Guardian what Mr. Ovenden’s former models faced:

Emily refuses to be interviewed by the police. They have asked her on several occasions. But she doesn't see the point and, adult now, is in the position to refuse. She has heard what it would be like from her father's other models. She knows how her friend Maud was reduced to tears, not by the recall of actual events but by the questioning about sexual acts that never took place. She knows how Maud's father felt threatened and bullied. She knows how traumatised they all were by their contact with the police – so traumatised that she's certain none of them want to talk about it.¹⁰

Ms. Ovenden also told The Guardian that

All of her friends kept copies of the work that featured them. She never felt self-conscious and none of the girls ever felt shamed by their nudity. … Emily laughs about the police displaying a print of her friend, "masked to highlight the offensive areas," and asking if she was ashamed. The girl pointed out that the original hung above her bed.¹¹

Maud Hewes, more than a decade after she defended Mr. Ovenden’s work in the 1996 Channel 4 documentary, “For the Sake of the Children,” probably decided to be a witness in the case for a number of reasons, including the poisonous atmosphere surrounding photographs of nude children that now pervades Britain. But whatever her personal reasons, the catalyst for her testimony was Mr. Ovenden’s son, Edmund Dante (“Ned”) Ovenden. Ned Ovenden was in contact with Hewes, JB and LD, as well as JB’s mother, well before any charges were laid – indeed, before any of those witnesses had any charges to lay.

Taking Sides

In 2000, Graham Ovenden and his wife, Annie, granted Ned a one-third interest in their land and house at Barley Splatt. The building is a unique and important piece of architecture, a large portion of which was physically built by Mr. Ovenden over a period of thirty years. In return for his share, Ned was to complete the building to Mr. Ovenden’s specification. At the time, the indebtedness on the property was £45,000. As Mr. Ovenden would eventually discover, the grant to Ned had been a mistake. Unbeknownst to Mr. Ovenden, Ned began taking loans against the estate in order to finance a lifestyle to which he believed he was entitled, and his purchases included numerous high value cars, a half-share in a Cessna aircraft and full ownership of another. In addition, in the mid-2000s, the Ovenden family was splitting apart, undoubtedly precipitated to some degree by the 2006 police raid on Barley Splatt and a new round of police persecution. Shortly after the 2006 raid, with tensions running high between Mr. Ovenden, on the one hand, and his wife and Ned Ovenden, on the other, Mr. Ovenden moved himself and his studio first, to an out-building on Barley Splatt, called “The Studio,” and later, when Barley Splatt was sold, to another out-building called “the Garage.” About the same time, Ned and Annie secretly obtained over £500,000 in cash from a joint mortgage against Barley Splatt and used it to purchase property in Bodmin and Lostwhithiel in their own names.

By 2008 the mortgage on Barley Splatt was a staggering £840,000. Although Ned did some work on the property, the building itself was substantially the same as it had been prior to his one-third grant. When The Telegraph reported on December 24, 2008, that Barley Splatt was on offer for £925,000, Ned stated, “If someone had £100,000 to spend on it, they could make it into a fabulous house.”¹²

In June of 2008, Mr. Ovenden fell seriously ill. He was lucky in a way: a friend and student discovered him in a disoriented and fragile state and immediately called for assistance. While the friend was helping Graham into the ambulance, Ned Ovenden stood by, completely uninterested in accompanying his father. Mr. Ovenden lay in hospital for five weeks, at least part of the time in a coma.

Shortly after Mr. Ovenden was taken into hospital, Mr. Ovenden’s sister, Elizabeth, came to Barley Splatt to stay with Annie while she visited her brother. Elizabeth was on good terms with Annie, having not yet learned of the financial dealings that had occurred. After visiting Mr. Ovenden and reporting to Annie and Ned that there was a possibility that Mr. Ovenden might not recover, Annie and Ned discussed their plans to dispose of large parts of Mr. Ovenden’s rare photographic and ephemera collections, including taking the material to New York, where Ned believed he could sell it without its original ownership being obvious. Annie and Ned had a similar conversation with a friend of Mr. Ovenden and they subsequently sent some of the purloined photographs to one of Mr. Ovenden’s acquaintances in the photographic world for an assessment of their value and sale. (That acquaintance scanned or photocopied all the images and, because Ned represented that he was acting on the authority of Mr. Ovenden, sold photographs worth approximately £4,500. He subsequently furnished Mr. Ovenden with a record of which images were brought to him by Ned and invoices of what had been sold, but by that time Ned had already taken back the unsold photographs.)

Annie and Ned did, in fact, briefly visit Mr. Ovenden in the hospital, but not to wish him well. Upon their return, they announced to a friend of Mr. Ovenden that Mr. Ovenden “should be dead.” A few days later, they left for France on vacation, hoping that upon their return Mr. Ovenden would have met his demise. Friends of Mr. Ovenden have noted that there were already intimations that steps were being taken to bring Mr. Ovenden down. At an art exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery the previous April, JB’s mother told a friend of Mr. Ovenden that “we’re going to get him.” Also around this time, Annie Ovenden told the same friend that she was going to “put [Mr. Ovenden] in the gutter.”

Mr. Ovenden returned home from hospital in fragile health and no longer on speaking terms with Annie or Ned. When Ned submitted papers to Mr. Ovenden to authorize the sale of Barley Splatt – Mr. Ovenden was not yet aware of the full extent of the indebtedness – he refused to sign them. When Mr. Ovenden responded angrily, Ned reacted violently, throwing an encaustic tile through the reinforced double-glass panel of Mr. Ovenden’s front door. (A few months later, Mr. Ovenden discovered that Barley Splatt had been put up for sale after he read about it in The Telegraph. By then, Mr. Ovenden realised that he could do nothing to save it. The debt simply could not be serviced on the modest income Mr. Ovenden earned from his art.) During this period Ned also began telling Mr. Ovenden’s friends who would come to visit that they should stay away from Mr. Ovenden lest their careers and reputations be ruined by their association with Mr. Ovenden, advice that they took as not-so-veiled threats of defamation. In the case of at least one friend, the threat was direct. But that’s not even the half of what Ned did. In 2009, Ned went to Aberdeen to visit the homes of both JB, whose husband is a lifelong friend of Ned, and Maud Hewes, whom Ned had long known, as she was a frequent visitor to Barley Splatt throughout the 1980s. It was only after Ned’s visit to Aberdeen that Ms. Hewes and JB made any statements to the police, who came to visit them at Ned’s behest. (One of the investigating officers in the case, Maddox, is a friend of Ned.) Exactly what Ned told these former models is unknown, but the connections between Hewes, JB, JB’s mother, Ned and Annie Ovenden are undeniable, as suggested by circumstantial evidence.

Although both JB and Ms. Hewes had been living in Aberdeen for over a decade, they had little or no contact with each other. JB joined Facebook sometime during 2007 and Ms. Hewes joined Facebook on December 24, 2007, yet they didn’t “friend” each other until after Ned put them together in 2009. Also after Ned’s visit, in August 2009, JB “friended” Annie Ovenden. (By contrast, JB “friended” Emily Ovenden in 2007.) Was there a bit of a quid pro quo for JB’s delivery of testimony against Mr. Ovenden? Perhaps. On September 30, 2010, JB registered the domain name for Annie Ovenden’s website and became the site’s administrative and technical contact. (She did the same for her mother’s website.)

Through another friend who happens to be married to yet another former Ovenden model (one not involved in any accusation), Ned also contacted LD who, in turn, as with JB and Ms. Hewes, was visited by the police. As mentioned above, Ms. Hewes allowed the police to lodge sexual abuse charges on her behalf but evidently thought better of perjuring herself once she got in the witness box.¹³ JB and LD, however, followed their scripts. After all, each of the four witnesses stood to earn as much as £40,000 in victim compensation if the jury bought their stories.

Between 1964 and 1989, Graham Ovenden photographed approximately 70 young girls, some of them on multiple occasions. Yet, in the twenty years that Mr. Ovenden has been publicly “under suspicion” by the police, with his cases being discussed in nearly every British newspaper and media outlet between 1993 and 1997 and again in 2009 and 2010, not a single former model came forward of her own accord to accuse Mr. Ovenden of sexually abusing her. While researching for this article, however, this writer came across another statement in Mr. Ovenden’s support, one more typical of his former models who spoke in his defense during the 1990s. As she used her real name, Mr. Ovenden was able to recall photographing her in 1973, not long after moving to Barley Splatt, when she was ten years of age:

I was one of Graham Ovendens’ ‘models’. This beautiful man, was a perfect photographer. He was kind and patient, while I sat wearing clothes that I chose. At no time did he touch me in any way. This man is a wonderful artist and human being…. I was never asked to take my clothes off, I was able to wear what I wanted and how I wanted to wear it. If I was ever naked and a photograph was taken, I knew what was happening and was free; not sexuallised in any way. I wish Graham a happy, healthy, carefree life.¹⁴

Over the years, British police had accused Mr. Ovenden of a variety of trumped up crimes, arresting him on such transparently thin charges as “suspicion of conspiracy to indecently assault children”¹⁵ or the creation of “pseudo-photographs,” but they could never find anyone to make an actual allegation of sexual abuse. By April 2010, just as the third case against Mr. Ovenden and his images was being dismissed for police abuse, the Child Investigation Team of the Metropolitan Police announced that it was “investigating” allegations of child sexual abuse and that the Crown Prosecution Service would soon decide if charges were to be laid.¹⁶ Although the police must have spent a lot of money, it didn’t bear much fruit. Ned Ovenden and the police visited other former Ovenden models, but could not prevail upon them to make an accusation. However, thanks to Mr. Ovenden’s naïve trust that the truth would prevail when he handed over a list of names and addresses of former models, and especially thanks to machinations of Ned Ovenden, Annie Ovenden and her best friend, JB’s mother, the British police finally got what they wanted.

Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, recently wrote about the behavior of the Metropolitan Police in their investigations of Jimmy Savile. Although Mr. Ovenden’s case is hardly comparable and involved Mr. Ovenden’s son as agent provocateur, the so-called “investigative” methods of the police were the same. Instead of “solving reported crimes” they were “searching for crimes that have not been reported.”¹⁷ The danger, Mr. Furedi explained, is that

[t]his trawling for victims and search for retrospective allegations could have a disturbing impact on the way the criminal justice system works. Instead of solving crimes, the police attempt to uncover them, in order to reinforce and strengthen evidence against the targets of their investigation. A trawling operation is not a response to an allegation of abuse voluntarily made by an individual; it is an invitation to people to reinterpret their past experiences in terms of victimisation and abuse.¹⁸

What Mr. Furedi didn’t say, but will be said here, is that such overzealous behavior on the part of the police is also an invitation to people to lay false charges for any variety of motivations, including interfamily squabbles, personal animosities and jealousies, and the prospect of victim compensation.


Endnotes 

¹Artist Graham Ovenden found guilty on sex charges, The Times, April 2 2013; http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article3729068.ece.

²Cooper, Rob, Artist Graham Ovenden found guilty of indecency against young girls after usingnude children in his paintings, The Daily Mail, April 2, 2013; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2302849/Artist-Graham-Ovenden-guilty-indecency-young-girls-using-nude-children-paintings.html.

³Morris, Steven, Graham Ovenden lived in rambling rural idyll with a dark side, The Guardian, April 2, 2013;http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/02/graham-ovenden-idyll-dark-side.

⁴Minchin, Rod, Artist Graham Ovenden found guilty on four counts of indecency with a child, The Independent, 02 April 2013; http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/artist-graham-ovenden-found-guilty-on-four-counts-of-indecency-with-a-child-8556873.html.

⁵Artist convicted of sex offences against children, The Telegraph, 02 April 2013; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9966939/Artist-convicted-of-sex-offences-against-children.html.

⁶Artist Graham Ovenden convicted ofsex offences against kids, The Mirror, 02 April 2013; http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/artist-graham-ovenden-convicted-sex-1798044.

⁷Graham Ovenden convicted of child sex offences, The Guardian, 02 April 2013; http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/02/graham-ovenden-convicted-child-sex-offences.

⁸Jury still out in West artist's indecency trial, Western Morning News (This is Cornwall), Thursday, March 28, 2013; http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/Jury-West-artist-s-indecency-trial/story-18541598-detail/story.html.

⁹Artist Graham Ovenden's indecency case jury retires, BBC News, March 29, 2013; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-21943329.

¹⁰"Pictures of Innocence," David Newnham & Chris Townsend, The Guardian Weekend, January 13, 1996, pp. 12-15.

¹¹Id.

¹²Wilson, Mary. "Property in Cornwall: Drawn to an artists' work in progress," The Telegraph, 24 December 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/westcountryproperty/3902558/Property-in-Cornwall-Drawn-to-an-artists-work-in-progress.html . The final sale price for Barley Splatt was £600,000, far below market value.

¹³It probably would have been easier for her to tell the tale of woe that had been prepared for her. She was the final witness, testified behind a screen (i.e., out of view of Mr. Ovenden) and helped along, as were the other witnesses, by a bevy of policewomen and victim advocates. When she refused to follow the script, however, prosecutor Quaife turned on her.

¹⁴Statement of GH, dated of 31 October 2009, posted at at "Graham Ovenden On Trial," the Baby Art blog of Trevor Brown, http://www.pileup.com/babyart/blog/?p=379#comments. The page also features a comment from someone posting as "got away" who complains she was abused at age 4. Investigation has revealed that "got away" is none other than "Donna El Berry" a/k/a Minty Challis, who faked the a similar post in April 2013, when The Guardian ran its poll, "Should the Tate have removed Graham Ovenden's prints?" Her comment was removed by The Guardian after the fraud was exposed. For information on Minty Challis, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2051282/Dale-Farm-The-truth-Minty-crucifix-waving-rebel-cause-like.html; and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052079/The-fantasist-Dale-Farm-Why-does-mother-gipsy-camp-activist-Minty-say-shes-deluded-self-publicist.html

¹⁵Sex case artist to face new inquiry, Western Morning News (This is Cornwall), 19 April 2010; http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/Sex-case-artist-face-new-inquiry/story-11465531-detail/story.html.

¹⁶Id.

¹⁷Furedi, Frank, After Savile: policing as entertainment, Spiked, 29 April 2013, http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13580.

¹⁸Id.