I’m continuing to read about artists who looked to be on the cusp of abstraction in their work and were searching for new views of reality when looking at the landscape. The sensory experience of the landscape dominated their creative voice. My work on ‘sound’ in the landscape is leading to a greater sensory experience, culminating this week in two pieces in which the listening to the blackbird merged with the experience of feeling the heat from the sun while walking through a field full of buttercups, daisies and grasses. The physical experience provided by the natural world contributed to a feeling of calm and hope at a time when the world seemed to be being ripped apart. I felt I had to capture this sense of calm from nature to maintain a sense of stability at this time…
It’s interesting that this last image borders on the representational and I have been spending time with it to understand its significance in my work with abstraction. I go back to my recent reading in ‘The Unquiet Landscape” (see post under READING) where Neve describes Ben Nicholson’s view of the landscape: “Nicholson wanted to convey some idea of the infinite ..” it was the spirit of the landscape that he looked at…”
He further goes on to say: “Distance and lucidity: they give rise to a metaphysical frame of mind while stressing their physical presence. Would not cloisters, too, be a suitable analogy? The beauty of cloisters is in the colour of the stone, in the lively and solemn bounding of the line, the graceful carrying and disposition of weight, and most of all, in the fall of bright light on to the gloom and the slow but passionate movement of that light in regular divisions across stone surfaces… It makes the spirit breathe in. It can refer accurately to the sensations engendered by landscape…The picture is its own country. A state of mind becomes a place.”
Nicholson’s reliefs would have been an expression of this. But I’m experimenting to see in this work if this sense of the ‘infinite’ can be conveyed equally through abstraction as well as more representational image making.