I started my blog by looking at some of the artists that I admire, noting how they represent the sublime and the sense of place and time in their work. What I want to do in my work is research landscape – what is it to make a landscape and how can it engender a sense of place, time, the sublime even?
I want to explore the sublime – that sense of ‘other’ and what that means today as the concrete jungle increasingly gobbles up resources and changes the environment forever.
These are some paintings I made in response to some visits to Orford Ness and its AWRE site. Meaningless Wreckage is inspired by rusty, hectic shapes of wreckage at the AWRE site. But really it is about nothing – structures from the past making a strange, increasingly meaningless landscape.
W. G. Seabald, in his book The Rings of Saturn, described Orford Ness as giving him the feeling of being “amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe” (p. 237). I wanted to capture that atmosphere in Wasteland. I feel that the canvas is too large and that I have not achieved what I wanted. I am, however, fascinated by the humanesque shape of a piece of wire that I photographed in the shingle and used in my painting.
I will return to Orford Ness in the Spring to continue my work there.
Blown away by Kurt Jackson’s The Thames Revisited exhibition in the Redfern Gallery in London last week.
Jackson’s work is exquisite – what Will Self refers to as “the transcendental and the haptic” in his foreword to the catalogue. Jackson’s intricate perception allows him to conjure atmosphere and mood. His mark-making in painting is exquisite – not mimetic, not realistic, not precious – but capturing a sense of place and time in a different way than can be achieved photographically.
I watched his video showing how he works out of doors. He also follows routes, recording in sketches and paintings along the way. I intend to do walking in East Anglia sketching and painting. His work inspires me from the point of view of immersing myself in the landscape and capturing the sense of place and time in my own way.
It was interesting to see how Jackson’s work is successful in both small, medium and large dimensions. In fact, my personal preference went towards his small and medium works. I’ve decided to stop worrying about canvas size in my own work – I generally prefer to work in small and medium scale.
His framing works well too – pure white shallow box canvas and white backing with the rough-edged paintings-on-paper attached to the backing paper without need of a straight edged mount. The effect was to present the paintings in their entirety much better, I thought.
More information about Kurt Jackson’s paintings can be found at: http://www.kurtjackson.com/
George Shaw is an artist who paints sublime landscapes that I like. They are of ordinary, everyday scenes – for example derelict places and housing schemes. He uses Humbrol paints which allow vivid colours in his work. They seem hyperreal. Either the dark areas merge into something homogenous, impenetrable, different and possibly scary or the heightened brightness of the colours gives an unreal glow. The overall effect makes me want to question what reality is and to see as strange our human constructions that are supposed to represent safety, home and the known. At the same time, his paintings are quite beautiful and celebrate the ordinary lifestyle. His work is sublime by emphasising the extraordinary in the ordinary, the sense of otherness.
I discovered the work of the photographer Thomas Wrede whilst considering the sublime and the use or not of a horizon – perhaps the omission of a horizon could cause a disorienting effect? I came across a good example of this in the photograph House in the Mountains (2007) by Thomas Wrede. At first the photograph seems hilarious and absurd being devised using rocks and a small model house and yet it looks like a mountain landscape too! And then I started to think that this is analagous to how we live anyway, obliviously on the edge, unaware of danger as we systematically waste the planet. So it is not absurd. Even locally, there are houses falling of cliffs in East anglia.The absence of a horizon in this photo causes a destabilizing effect allowing the illusion – where is this strange place?
I looked at some other examples of Wrede’s work showing absurd human scenarios – remote, rugged landscape, danger and holiday travel. These works are sublime using absurdity and destabilisation. They show the vast, impersonal planet juxtaposed with the small absurdities of human existence and the transity of life on earth.
Thomas Wrede’s photography can be viewed at: http://www.thomas-wrede.de/
Saw Elizabeth Price’s video installation “Sunlight” at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea on 28th December 2013. She created artificial sunlight in her video via historic slides of the sun in k light, yellow nail varnish, a cymbal disc, characters from packets of ‘sun dot’ hosiery, the sounds of struck matches, finger-clicks and music. It was sublime, showing how we exist in and because of the sun, an all-encompassing force greater than us. She is right – we are all light!
There are dark notes too in displayed text “a reprise of a reprisal so bitter” – an ambiguous caution. She creates the sublime by evoking an ecstatic state not unlike what the poet P.B. Shelley was doing in 1819 in his poem Ode to the West Wind and exemplified by the following line from the poem:
Wild spirit, which are moving everywhere, Destroyer and preserver, hear, oh hear!
She has created a homage to our sublime, precarious, exquisite world.
More information about Elizabeth Price’s video installation Sunlight is available at: http://invisibledust.com/artists/elizabeth-price/
