KRAJOBRAZ – THE NEW LANDSCAPE
Well, if I was to be honest then I’d have to say that what started off as a simple mission to knock out a few pot-boilers is proving to be anything but, and the whole venture has taken a surprising turn for the better! I suppose you find your stream of expansion often in the places you least expect, and I don’t know, perhaps I simply don’t have it in me to simply knock them out for a meal or two in return anyway..? So, the off/on toying with landscape painting since my first visits to Pojezierze Augustowsko-Suwalskie is beginning to gather pace in ways I least expected - propelling me into a completely new relationship with painting that I’ve only been able to dream about since I began painting again back in March! With a couple of canvases completed (as below), and four or five on the go which are truly beginning to look intriguing, for the first time in years, I feel as if I don’t have to compete with my previous output or to demonstrate what amounts to a safe repertoire of quality control – craftsmanship, skill and all that rubbish as an end in itself… I’m once again working as much for myself as I am for others. In production anyway, gone is the worry of selling, and the excitement of not knowing what’s going to happen from one brush stroke to the next – of testing yourself – pushing what you have in the way of talent as hard as you can - simply to do better, this’s what’s proving to be relevant – this is what matters to both you, as an artist, and those who are interested enough to want to share in what you do!
Still not counting chickens just yet however - It’s early days, and in the wee hours of the morning, when the demons are having a wail of a time, there still remains an almost inbred prejudice (as a painter of people for twenty odd years) in even considering touching Landscape Painting, let alone regarding it as serious… Stupid I know, and as Daniel so rightly pointed out the other night - making good paintings is what counts and lasts regardless of subject! Aye, he’s a clever lad for a translator!
Still, representing the landscape for a painter these days’ is undoubtedly a great deal more problematic than simply employing the skills involved in applying paint to canvas. Any certainty in the fact that the land, but particularly nature along with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes as the old Romantics used to view it, has anything to offer the artist in the way of exploration and experimentation seems to have long gone, leaving little more than a view of the landscape based on that left behind by the greats of the past, when it irrefutably did mean something beyond ‘nice’.
Seen through the eyes of Constable then - his England, through Corot and Monet, to Kiefer's Deutschland, perhaps more than any other genre, any inkling of a new perspective we may happen to be lucky enough to glimpse when approaching 'nature' today is almost always lost under the weight of its own tradition, with landscape painting more or less being shunned completely by serious painters to become the preserve of the amateur dauber. All in all, a place in which it is nigh on impossible then from which to view anything anew. And the perspective is no easier from here in Poland either.., but..?
Although I've certainly been drawn to the landscape often in the past, without much success in the way of producing anything more worthy than ‘home decoration’, then there is something immensely intriguing about the way this troubled land continues to sit within its own borders at the very centre of Central Europe and is engaged with by its people on a daily basis as a basic matter of course and inescapable need. The place could be described as Cambridgeshire without the chocolate box cottages or anything else Cambridgeshire has to offer bar its flatness. Beautiful without question, the Pojezierze Augustowsko-Suwalskie region of Poland is incalculable – its pine forests run deep, its numerous lakes unfathomable, its people clearly forever drunk on the vastness of its skies, (not to mention the vodka)! I think it was Paul Auster who described the skies of Kansas as being the only friend you’ve got in that colossal, flat, desolate place; well, I’m sure Pojezierze Augustowsko-Suwalskie is nothing like Kansas, but I’ve sometimes felt like this about its skies!
Who knows then..? I’m certainly drawn to the place, and for reasons I’m only just beginning to fathom, whether the results are significant or not - who cares – it’s got me painting in its ‘proper’ sense again at last..!
Still not counting chickens just yet however - It’s early days, and in the wee hours of the morning, when the demons are having a wail of a time, there still remains an almost inbred prejudice (as a painter of people for twenty odd years) in even considering touching Landscape Painting, let alone regarding it as serious… Stupid I know, and as Daniel so rightly pointed out the other night - making good paintings is what counts and lasts regardless of subject! Aye, he’s a clever lad for a translator!
Still, representing the landscape for a painter these days’ is undoubtedly a great deal more problematic than simply employing the skills involved in applying paint to canvas. Any certainty in the fact that the land, but particularly nature along with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes as the old Romantics used to view it, has anything to offer the artist in the way of exploration and experimentation seems to have long gone, leaving little more than a view of the landscape based on that left behind by the greats of the past, when it irrefutably did mean something beyond ‘nice’.
Seen through the eyes of Constable then - his England, through Corot and Monet, to Kiefer's Deutschland, perhaps more than any other genre, any inkling of a new perspective we may happen to be lucky enough to glimpse when approaching 'nature' today is almost always lost under the weight of its own tradition, with landscape painting more or less being shunned completely by serious painters to become the preserve of the amateur dauber. All in all, a place in which it is nigh on impossible then from which to view anything anew. And the perspective is no easier from here in Poland either.., but..?
Although I've certainly been drawn to the landscape often in the past, without much success in the way of producing anything more worthy than ‘home decoration’, then there is something immensely intriguing about the way this troubled land continues to sit within its own borders at the very centre of Central Europe and is engaged with by its people on a daily basis as a basic matter of course and inescapable need. The place could be described as Cambridgeshire without the chocolate box cottages or anything else Cambridgeshire has to offer bar its flatness. Beautiful without question, the Pojezierze Augustowsko-Suwalskie region of Poland is incalculable – its pine forests run deep, its numerous lakes unfathomable, its people clearly forever drunk on the vastness of its skies, (not to mention the vodka)! I think it was Paul Auster who described the skies of Kansas as being the only friend you’ve got in that colossal, flat, desolate place; well, I’m sure Pojezierze Augustowsko-Suwalskie is nothing like Kansas, but I’ve sometimes felt like this about its skies!
Who knows then..? I’m certainly drawn to the place, and for reasons I’m only just beginning to fathom, whether the results are significant or not - who cares – it’s got me painting in its ‘proper’ sense again at last..!
posted by The Slide at 9:50 am
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