“Art is not and never was a mirror reflection of nature. All efforts at imitation of nature are foredoomed to failure. Art is an understanding and interpretation of nature in various media.” Stuart Davis p 415 Art in Theory
“Nature does not make any distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial. Artifice is fully a part of nature, since each thing, on the immanent plane of nature, is defined by the arrangements of motions and affects into which it enters, whether these arrangements are artificial or natural.”
G Deleuze. Spinoza: practical philosophy, p 124
“Now, however, it is widely recognized that wilderness – and its’ big sister “nature” – are cultural constructs, states of mind”.
Charles Warren p 141 Patterned Ground, Reaktion Books
The quarry in the 2 large Quarry Edge paintings is a large disused one near where I live in the Scottish Borders, just off the A7. I visited it one day in winter (with Louis) and was struck by the way plants and trees had begun reclaiming it. Around the top is planted mixed woodland, mostly larch.
I am interested in quarries because they are spaces/voids in the landscape created by man for the purpose of construction. As a by-product of their function, they become artificially created cliff-landscapes (reminding me of Durer or Breugel drawings). Some are small, and older ones were directly connected with the local area.
Over the top of these paintings I made abstracted line drawings of modernist buildings, which, although the perspective is carefully worked out and corresponds with the landscape, do not make sense in terms of the layer beneath. These drawings contrast and hover like some kind of imagined future. The pink line is based on the colour of construction twine (used for laying out foundations).
The paintings appear to represent (in part) the natural landscape, but the title draws attention to the fact that this place is man-made. The stone, gravel and wood depicted here are all potential building materials.
I have been interested for some time in the common landscaping practice of placing screens of trees around “unpleasant” locations, such as carparks, water treatment facilities, or industrial sites. I want to connect “real” landscape and “real” land-use, with notions of aesthetics, landscape-history and art-history, underpinned by a nagging sense of dislocation. I want to trace the root of underlying attitudes, juxtaposing the construction of the built environment with the construct of the idea of “landscape” itself, through an exploration of these everyday and banal sites.
They subvert many peoples idea of what “landscape” is, or can be – especially in the light of the romantic Scottish landscape tradition. I photographed this particular anonymous shopping centre car park in winter 2009, early on a Sunday morning when it was empty. Distanced from it’s function (through absence of people and transport), I could see it as a real place. It is in some ways a non-place, through it’s similarity to almost any carpark in the western world, purely functional. I like the fact that carpark contains the word “park”. How much land in Britain is covered in tarmac?
I wanted to explore reservoir sites in and around urban populations, making a piece of work responding to each site serving a particular city, focusing initially on Edinburgh. Reservoirs are always man-made in some respect, but are often adapted to present a “natural” appearance. Again, it is the relationship between the function, the form and the aesthetic histories which attracts me to make work. There are 13 reservoirs in the Pentland Hills above Edinburgh, and these are the first 2 from this series. The titles are general rather than specific, because I want them to be about the idea of reservoirs rather than portraits of individual ones.
The use of trees so much in my work relates I think (at least in part) to my northern rural Scottish background. They are also a device used by most landscape artists of the past. Reservoir 1, for example, is a deliberate reference to classical landscape painting, but the tree framing “the view” actually just frames the surface. Trees have many meanings and are significant to different people in different ways, but I think my trees stand in for some notion about nature, and the human act of landscaping. In Scotland, if there is a woodland in existence, it is there because it has been reserved for aesthetic or leisure purposes, or for commerce.
From a formal perspective, I also love contrasting the sinuous lines of branches with harder straight lines. They look good together, and trees offer me the scope to endlessly reinvent.
The trees I paint certainly look like trees, are very detailed, but generally the colours and the careful placement defy the illusion. Trees float over other trees in a space defying way...
Suggesting the north, the cold, allows an exploration of pattern, intertwining branches, creates negative space, gaps between, reveals the architecture of the tree, creates a mood – emotionally I connect with this more than warm summer pastorals - must be my Presbyterian background.
The structures I use are always simplified, often abstracted adaptations of utilitarian everyday places. Sometimes, as in “Building, trees 6” the building is reduced to a layered diagrammatic linear transparent drawing of the most basic western building – the essence, a cube.
All my work refers to modernism is some way, whether modernist architecture (volume not mass, regularity but not necessarily symmetry, no applied ornament, etc) or modernist painting – an acknowledgement of industrial reality, and painting as object, form, materials, process and so on. However, they reject illusionistic depth, while simultaneously suggesting it. They depict non-romantic functional sites, while including (and enjoying) romantic elements.
The surfaces have developed over a long period, since the mid-90s, through a long phase of making purely abstract minimalist paintings (which typically also simultaneously suggested landscape). Gradually the hidden landscape drawing came to the fore, but the surface was retained and developed.
They show the history of the piece through the layering, but I’m not trying to create some fake nostalgia, and they’re not intended to be literal in any way eg. They’re not depictions of decaying walls. They are about the physicality of the painting, and making an interesting surface stand for itself.
I start with a smooth gesso surface. I mask off the area (first step of defining a composition), then paint flat colour with vertical brush strokes in oil paint.. When this is dry I apply more paint, then remove it with a piece of strong card. I repeat this many times, using a rag later on to remove the paint. Much paint goes in the bin, but I reuse as much as I can. The colours I use are often contrasting, and there are often many layers hidden with strong colour beneath.
I then paint the subject straight onto the surface with no guide lines or preparation. This means I need to go with, and respond to, everything that happens. The final painting shows many of these experiments. When the first layer is finished, I leave it to dry, then work over the entire surface with another colour, usually a light colour, like lemon yellow or titanium white.
When dry I paint a new subject drawing over the first one, slightly displaced – a slight shift.
And so on.
The final coloured drawing is sometimes a light colour over a dark ground. This takes 2 or 3 coats to achieve the desired luminosity. Sometimes I do this (often at least a day per layer) and realize that it’s not right, and have to cover the painting again.