Aspects of Place in Art History

(an on-going musing about landscape...)

Graham Sutherland, an Unfinished World at Modern Art Oxford (until 18 March 2012), is a beautiful exhibition demonstrating how one of the 20^th-century’s greatest British painters worked with the language of landscape.  Sutherland’s post-war thorn cross and head paintings are well-known, as is his giant tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, but in this exhibition we discovered a more private aspect to his practice and through careful curation learned about his working methods.

On view are around 80 rarely seen works on paper, borrowed from private collections and mostly regional museums (no doubt where much of it generally resides in storage).  The various pen & ink drawings, watercolours and gouaches show Sutherland’s almost obsessive drive to paint his subject – the English and Welsh landscape, over and over again.  Each time he captures something new, a subtle change in form, or light or colour.  Of particular note in this respect was Four studies for entrance to a lane, 1939 (collection of Pallant House) small ink and watercolours on what look like pages torn from a sketch or notebook.  Here we can see his repetitive workings of the subject produced on the spot, and gain a glimpse of the inner world of his mind in action.

 Graham Sutherland, Dark Hill - Landscape with Hedges and Fields, 1940. Swindon Museum and Art Gallery © Estate of Graham Sutherland. (From the Modern Art Oxford website)

The exhibition was selected and hung by George Shaw a contemporary painter whose own work centres on depictions of Tile Hill, a post-war council housing estate on the south side of Coventry where he grew up (and in my opinion, the artist who should have won the 2011 Turner Prize).  By reconsidering Sutherland through this painter’s eyes we also understand more about where Shaw is coming from in his own work, which uses ‘hobby’ Humbrol paints to talk about his sense of memory and loss within decaying suburbia – a place with nothing but recent history. 

Shaw says, “It is not about place – it is quite abstract.  The painting is of how far away you are from there.  It is a tethering so you know how far you’ve come.” [quote from Daily Telegraph Review, 3/12/11, p.7]

George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion: The Fall, 1999, copyright George Shaw, courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London (From the Herbert Gallery website)

This raises interesting and timely debates around notions of a sense of place. According to Shaw, Sutherland was an artist “as much rooted in the past as in the world before him – a world forever unfinished.” Shaw’s world is also unfinished (he is now nearing his 180^th painting of Tile Hill). He uses his place - Tile Hill as his device on which to hang timeless painterly concerns, and in so doing he tells us something of the anxieties of 21^st-century life.

David Hockney Returns to Landscape

Interviewed on BBC’s Front Row late last year David Hockney declared, “I’m very busy painting England.”  For the past several years Hockney has been making a study of the Yorkshire Wolds, (the low hills in the counties of East Riding).  He says he’s “painting my childhood” as it was in this part of the county that he spent a summer working as a farm labourer when young.  The results, a series of landscape paintings currently on view at the Royal Academy have been the most productive and sustained of his entire career.  As was noted in the Daily Telegraph, “They are about particular times, seasons, places.”

With this latest series Hockney is interested in capturing the fleeting effects of weather and light of the land around his home in Bridlington.  (In the late 1950s, he escaped provincial Bradford for the Royal College of Art, now he’s back so has come full circle in his maturity.)  The area he frequents is a thirty mile radius of his house/studio which he tends to think of as his garden. “Our job is just looking at this, and what a fantastic job it is! ... We’re in what we think of as beautiful nature.” His enthusiasm for the area is obvious, as he says that he wants to “make it as exciting as the Grand Canyon.  It’s the way you look at things that counts.”

David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 2 January 2011, No. 2 (one of a 52 part work), 2011.  iPad drawing printed on paper, 144.4 x 108.3 cm.  Courtesy of the artist © David Hockney

He finds interest in the variety of seasons here, which is wider than in California.  When he returned to Yorkshire he decided to build-up a visual ‘vocabulary’ through studies of trees and by “really looking at things.”  This led to sketchbooks filled with drawings of different kinds of grass, hedgerow plants, and so on and through this process for him “seeing becomes clearer... you realise that there is a fabulous lot to look at.”  Closely observing the seasons and changes therein and repeatedly painting the same view, makes him acutely aware of the power of nature and man’s small place within it.

Hockney has never been one to shy away from the use of new technology.  Whilst a student at the Royal College of Art he embraced acrylic paints when they were still quite new in the 1960s and has used the photocopying machine and a Polaroid camera to create collages, exploiting the unique characteristics of each of these mediums.  In 2008 he turned to the iPhone and then the iPad to make drawings.  It was the qualities of the backlit LED screens of these gadgets that first captured his attention.  Using an app. called Brushes (a virtual paint box) he is able to create colourful digital drawings to email to his friends on a daily basis.  He found this to be a “luminous medium and very good for luminous subjects.  I began to draw the sunrise seen from my bed on the east coast of England...“  The immediacy also proved an inspiration: “[it is an] incredible little thing, really, because it was like a sketchbook with a paint box all in one, and no cleaning up.  No mess.”

The iPad is his electronic equivalent of a sketchbook and he carries it everywhere.  For an artist who has held a long interest in drawing, the use of a drawing program is a natural extension.  Of his practice he says “Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still.  The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory – where it stays – it’s transmitted by your hands.”  In fact he has called for a return to studying the discipline of drawing in art schools, as he believes it teaches artists how to look.

The paintings themselves are as much about the act of painting as what he is actually picturing.  As viewers we witness the culmination of a life-long process of seeing and learning to look.  The final result is a record of the fact that somebody looked at it, and now we’re looking at it.  The works demonstrate what has become his trademark bright, cheerful, clean colour, infused with a clear light.  Sometimes sombre, bare trees portray a darkness present in nature.  They are also on a very large scale, making it possible to lose yourself in the landscape as the space spreads out before you.

Working en plein air in all weathers is something he has not done before (previously he painted in the studio from memory and notes.)  Again, the speed of the iPad technology impressed him, as there is no need to wait for previous paint layers to dry.  “The more I got into the iPad, the more I realised what a fantastic medium it is for landscape.  There are certain things that you can do very, very quickly using it.”  For example, he can rapidly fix the essential elements including basic colour and tone of a sky.  This is vital under constantly changing environmental conditions.  The iPad drawings are printed out on paper, as seen here.

Hockney thinks we are losing our sense of place and wishes to inspire interest in the countryside in general.  He thinks England is a beautiful country and we should all get out and see more of it.  He hopes the exhibition will inspire people to “watch the spring, enjoy the world, go outside, have a cigarette while you’re doing it.”

If one of the marks of a great artist is the capacity to constantly and consistently renew one’s art, then Hockney’s place in history is undoubtedly assured.

References:

Peter Osborne, “What Hockney’s return tells us about the mood in Britain”, The Telegraph Thursday 19 Jan 2012

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, 2011

RA Magazine Winter 2011

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, DVD, directed by Bruno Wollheim 2009 

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131854461/in-paris-a-display-from-hockney-s-pixelated-period

STANLEY SPENCER AND SENSE OF PLACE

Artists themselves have the power to make a ‘sense of place’.  Who (apart from its own residents) would remember the little village of Cookham without Stanley Spencer?  Spencer will be forever associated with the Berkshire village he used for inspiration - the ordinary streets and places became immortalised in his paintings.

The cemetery became the setting for a series of resurrection paintings which have proved to be some of the most powerful pictures in Britain to come out of the First World War.  This was an attempt by Spencer to bring the sublime down to earth, to make real the unknowable by placing it within the familiar.  Spencer wished to make Cookham “a heaven on earth”.  This is especially poignant in the wake of War – the fact that people are re-born into that specific, recognisable village (their village) is of vital importance to the meaning and interpretation of the work; yet at the same time Spencer transcends the locality and creates something we can all identify with.  Spencer’s pictures are full of detail and what he called “little personal happenings” (quoted in British Masters BBC documentary, 2011) which gives his pictures a sense of believability and roots them firmly in their place of origin.

Find a reading list here