More than a week ago I aired in this blog a question that was intriguing me, namely, the difference between thinking about the situation of people in the world in terms of either “Nature”, “creation” or “the environment”. The subject has been swirling around in my head intermittently since then–including a reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.* The trouble is that I have been able to make no clear or useful connections between these ideas and visual images.
I have been criticised sometimes in the past for giving too much room to ideas without paying adequate attention to the specifically visual dimension which is essential to art, and I have to recognise that perhaps there is truth in this. Sometimes I ask myself whether ideas are always a help in relation to art, or whether, indeed, there are occasions when they actually get in the way of the development of clear visual images. I do wonder whether I might be suffering still from the professional deformation of the academic, without having made a proper transition to art. Anyway, for better or worse the ideas will not go away.
Fortunately I do have a minor project in mind (a relatively simple landscape of my favourite subject …. Almscliff Crag) into which I can emerge myself in the immediate future, so that I shouldn’t become bogged down in overly intellectual problems. No doubt a larger and more coherent sense of where I might be heading will emerge eventually. Meanwhile I need to get back to the task of looking, and allow the thinking to take care of itself.
*This is fascinating stuff, of which perhaps more anon.