Because almost all of today has been passed restoring furniture to the recently-decorated living room I have had the opportunity to allow my mind to do a bit of “free-range” thinking. I can’t get away from reflection on the nature and purpose of “landscape” painting, and where (if at all) my own work relates to this project. I realise that it is not a good idea to try to reinvent the wheel, and that better minds than mine have written quite a bit on the subject. For that reason I’ve tried to confine my thinking to making sense of my own work. Quite a few of my pictures do not fit easily into the normally accepted ideas of what is meant by “landscape”.
It think that one difficulty in this respect has to do with the almost taken-for-granted idea that landscape involves “looking at nature”. The human observer is somehow not a part of nature, which provides the object of attention, looking at it through a kind of implied window in the picture-plane. It does not have to be the case the “nature” is approached from the romantic point of view characteristic of the major tradition of European landscape painting. Neither do we need to adopt the kind of aesthetic objectivity that Cezanne introduced. In either case, the “I” who paints stands outside and apart from the portion of nature that is viewed. Is this necessarily the case?
I’ve featured with today’s post a picture I did several years ago, entitled The Tree of Life. It was one of the pieces which emerged from one of my periodic “artistic retreats”–on this occasion just outside the small Cumbrian town of Appleby. I rather like the Graham Sutherlandish feel about it. Another very deliberate reference here is the single leaf suspended from the topmost branch, which I have always seen as a reference to the stage directions in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Although there was a specific tree which I sketched in preparation for this piece, what you have in front of you is not simply a (somewhat abstract and stylised) piece of “nature” being observed by me (and, of course in turn, by you.) It is important to realise that I identify strongly with the tree, so that the picture is not just a natural object (a piece of “nature”) being observed and recorded by me (who stand apart from it). It is at least in part a record of an experience of introspection, in which I am observing myself, through the device of an element in the landscape.
Does this disqualify it as an essay in “landscape”? I don’t think so. Why would anybody need to know? What do you think?
This is a really interesting picture, John. Are the red splashes blood? It looks like two bodies joining together. I’d be interested to see it “in the flesh”.
Both of those ideas are certainly possibilities. I’m always ready to welcome insights and interpretations by people who look at my pictures. Even if they are not the same as my own original ideas it is an essential part of the work of a picture that it stimulates the imagination of the person who looks at it.