I've been meaning to continue this small project I set myself in December, to blog a series on my thoughts and experiences of (the) Cornish landscape after a trip I made there. I've had the following post in mind for over a month, and inevitably it has now changed as what seems interesting to me enough to post has changed with the subsequent delay.
The previous posts were made with the landscape still very much fresh in mind. I had been grappling with different ideas of what contemporary landscape is, and how different places present it as art. The
Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St. Ives was fantastic and felt by far the most stimulating to me personally, out of all the art I saw there.
I'll just put down the notes that I took at the time as I think trying to render it a smooth essay would fail to retain the freshness of my response at the time.
Constructionist? Of landscape - of perceptions of landscape? History of construction.
"impurities" -> localisation
reference
development
breakthrough
abstraction
How to integrate references (D. Dalwood)
Thought shapes - Ben Nicholson - psychology of perception
Danger and potential of abstraction
"to create complex weathered surfaces." Wall text 1952-1955
experience of moving through a landscape - phenomenological.
Mine as the social world, sociality, monuments
"shame" in/on the landscape
Social markers within the paintings
A [symbol]? gesture/abstracted can share meanings.
The social - death, loss, shares meaning with wind, waves.
J. of anger too.
Linking the ancient throughout.
Boundaries between painting, collage and construction.
Red signs like map route-ing on top.
Integrating objects - hosepipe.
Modern materials - melted polystyrene.
It's funny putting it in italics - such an old device to indicate a different voice, a handwritten personal voice. Anyway it's appropriate here, and helps to mark the passing of time.
Looking at the notes, I see my interest in integrating a practice of art with sociality - the lives of people, their experiences, and where that crosses into a politics and practice towards flourishing lives. Lanyon painted with these issues in mind. His use of abstraction wasn't allowed to become divorced from the landscape - the abstraction was materialist, and within that landscape he directly invoked the lives of the people who inhabited and sculpted it - most obviously by painting the old tin mines of Cornwall. The black mark of this scar on the landscape was said by Lanyon to retain some of the shame of the horrors of the tin mining industry and the lives lost underground and undersea.
I don't know if painting can be said to affect sociality but it lends itself well to a kind of tacit exploration of that experience.
(Apologies for the poor quality, I lifted the image from the internet. Source:
the arts desk)
