Importance of Landscape

The Importance of Landscape

The landscape around the coastal road near to where I live in Sussex has always been one which is multi layered and has over the dawn of time been home to not just the farming communities of the 16-18th C which archaeologically left us so much evidence of how we interacted with the landscape in a way where modern humans have almost forgot, everything from belt buckles to brooches, to coins and tokens and parts of everyday life which had been lost to time and preserved in the earth or in most cases, destroyed by it. The chalk and clay surfaces, built up by compacted land during the ice ages left the hills of the Long Man a place of higher ground worship by the Regini peoples of Sussex, layered over by first the Romans, then the early Jutes, Saxons, Danes and onto the Normans, the landscape carved in by people who had come to farm the rich fertile lands we live upon, right up until the modern day where the areas around Firle, Polegate and Alfriston were all that most of the dwelling population called home.

So how do I fit in to all this and why now? Well, i thought I would write some of these ideas down as we are in the middle of a drought crisis across Sussex, a climatological crisis fuelled by man made activity maybe. As and artist, we try and respond.

Painterly wise, I have always regarded my job as a kind of field study, to take landscape painting to the next level, how I interact with some of the rich colours you do not always associate with landscape painting in the way Turner does, but somehow, Turner born us that freedom to express and maneover towards the colours and atmospheres that he was discussing visually. Using heat to temper the colours has always been a part of the practice, on a par to identifying those colours you do not always associate with the landscape, the greens ochres and blues you see in Constable replaced with Pinks, golds teals and blacks, my early work had this obsession with red, flowers and fauna that dot the fields, a culmination of powerful colours which work together in tandem to create the new landscapes.

Along the A27 where at night the sky drops and the mountains remain. Oils and Coal on a Steel plate 50-50cm

These paintings sometimes begin as sketches, they are as important to the bigger picture as they formulate ideas, Chalk, Coal, Coffee all end up in the paintings as a direct intrinsic link to the landscape, either as product, land or energy, Steel is a most wonderful canvas to use, malleable and a lover of heat, takes the lot, hefty weighty and brutally sharp. Could talk about its many wonders all day.

Beneath an Oxide Sky, 50-50cm

We have been driving the A27 for years now, not to farm or to gather crops, or to worship to the sun gods, or to bury our dead in a barrow. We have been been slowly burning fossil fuels in a car, going to boot sales in Polegate, visiting the Mcdonlads fast food place by the Asda megastore, bumping into wildlife which are too slow for us, this painting is an amalgamation of the plastics and materials we have left through our own cut into the landscape, burned into the layers of steel. The landscape is the Longman, he has withstood it all.