READING
“Unquiet Landscape” Christopher Neve
Thames & Hudson 2020
What immediately drew me into this book were a few sentences in the preface: “…this book is about other things rather than falling into the old art-historical trap of attempting to say what the pictures mean…. I strongly believe that if you have to say anything at all about pictures this is the best way to do it, though the best way of all is of course to remain silent…”
The book is based on conversations, wherever possible, which the author had with the artists themselves. Christopher Neve is an artist himself and he brings a very unique style of writing to the genre. The focus is on 20th century painting and broadly speaking, gives the reader the experience of delving into each painter’s obsession with the landscape. The book has had particular relevance for me because it deals with artists and their struggles to see differently, to look beyond the physical space into the essence of the experience of the land. This is what I’m trying to find in my own work.
Another point which had significance for me in the book was the connection which Christopher Neve made between Ben Nicholson’s abstract work and music. The abstract system of music, he writes, is largely the result of “three resources working on our sensibilities – harmony, melody and rhythm.” He felt that in Nicholson’s work it is line, form and light which provide the equivalent resources. On page 167, he writes the most delightful description of ‘line’ in painting. In part, ” Line always seemed to him to be a mystery. It has a life of its own. It is the record of a journey of a point on paper or board, the trajectory of a ball, the contour of a hill. It can start by being one thing and, without leaving the page, change to another. It can go over, under or behind, break off without warning or wind itself into a spring. It is playful and deceptive. It hardly exists in the real world…”
Thinking about the resources which music has at its disposal and linking that into painting resonates strongly with my present body of work.
Notes
Page 161 Ben Nicholson
“The sensation of being in a particular landscape can best be conveyed, not by imitating in paint the appearance of its parts, but by summoning up its essential nature, things like its light, space, stoniness or blueness. To do this, it is necessary first of all to relinquish the idea of a single viewpoint…”
“…letting the pictures begin to work on your sensibilities…”
“In the landscape, under the stars or in front of a mountain, it is the experience of them at first hand that has its effect on us if we could but understand how. To stand correctly and to exercise its effect, a painting must be an experience in the same way. It is not an inert object which apes the appearance of something else, but it must have a life of its own as intense and as readily communicable as the life we recognise in natural phenomena, and it should be as surprising and as difficult to pin down as they are.”
Page 166
“The picture is its own country. A state of mind becomes a place…”
Page 170
…Nicholson made his work appear to have grown from within…”
…it is true that what he had to go on of the natural world was the poetry of it…”
Page 175
“Stand in front of a painting by Ivon Hitchens. It is wide and fresh. You scan it from side to side as you would look from side to side at the view itself. You must let its sentiment wash over you: its colour and spaces, its broad gestures which the eye follows as though the pigment is being brushed on as you watch. It is clear that this is a kind of writing, but there is no need (yet) to read it or to make out exactly what it means. Instead you feel its resonance and breathe its air. It seems to shift in front of you as light shifts on water or leaves turn over in the wind. It has the first requirement of a work of art: it is alive.”
Page 199
…the unquiet country is you…”