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Landscape painting may look like a dying
art, but experience tells me this is wrong. Not only do children
draw and paint what's around them, amateur painting flourishes and
there is an international market for landscape in the private
sector.
Most of this activity is not described as
public art, but I think that paintings of place used in the private
sphere have a continuing role in the construction of meaningful
places in the public realm.
Places in the home
Walk down any street in the evening, when lights are on and
blinds not yet drawn, and you will see images on walls : family
reference points that say who, and where, we are. Images of
landscape hung in the living space are a daily reminder of places
outside the home and can be an imaginative measure of how far away
they are. Such pictures help us to feel connected, though personal,
family or group experience, with the places represented. Some of
these places might be fictitious or very distant, but others will
be much closer to home.
This imaginative connection takes place across generations.
Asked recently what his most precious possession was the writer
William Boyd answered "There's a small amateurish oil painting
my father did of his family home in Cupar, Fife, shortly before he
died that is unique and irreplaceable." The novelist Philip
Hensher describes for a magazine what is on his walls "not
much...but I do have a painting by my dad of Topsham, the town in
Devon where I live". My grandfather was a brewery clerk, in
Smethwick in the West Midlands, who painted at weekends. His
picture of an almost pre-industrial valley where his own father
lived one hundred years ago now hangs on my cousin's wall. It will
be passed on to children not yet born.
Remembering places works well with photographs, but few photos
express the effort and attention of pictures made with pencil or
paint. This physical intimacy reinforces the sense of something
"unique and irreplaceable" and seems particularly direct
if a member of the family has made the picture. If a friend makes
the image the circle is wider and if made by an artist - in this
context a relatively public figure - the connections between
spectator and place will be less direct, but more widely
distributed.
What strikes me about the landscape of place in the home is its
sanity. Rather in the way pictures of family confirm important
relationships, pictures of places in the home suggest that what is
outside means something to us. Almost all of us use images like
this. Without them, disorientation and anxiety are a step closer. I
saw a Romanian woman recollect for television her forced eviction
from home under Ceausescu. She could not put into words what she'd
lost. After a long silence all she could manage was "we had to
leave our pictures."
Private to public and public to
private
Placemaking in this visual culture includes makers and users,
and within it meaningful places tend to be personal and could be
anywhere. But this doesn't mean that paintings of place in the home
have no public dimension. There are many connections.
Exchange between private and public art is underwritten by
continuity between amateur and professional work. Although artists
generally cross from one status to the other in a piecemeal process
of market and cultural validation, the forces that present
professional art as different in kind naturally tend to suppress
the connections. But I think a theory of interdependence is waiting
to be written.
Anyone who has ever tried to draw or paint can see in
professional work at least some expression of their own activity.
Confronted with very good work this can elicit a feeling that's the
opposite of arrogance or envy: Well done! Not just for you, but for
us. This often unconscious fellow feeling is supported by
familiarity with production, not just consumption, helped along by
being able to see the trace of work in the image itself. Even in
The National Gallery, affect has this private dimension.
Picture hanging is another link between private and public art.
Interior design history has been a poor relation of art history,
but an anthropologist would pay serious attention to how images
were organised around the home. Curators alive to this can tap into
a readymade sympathy for the public display of paintings.
My own work converts private experience of nature into sharable
objects, which then move between private and public realms. What
comes out of my house may go to a gallery, be seen on a website or
in print, then typically goes back into private homes into rooms
used by individuals, family and friends. If a painting is sold to a
company it might be hung in a private office or a public foyer. I
conclude that, outside of permanent display in a public collection,
and perhaps not even then, there is no exclusively public dimension
to movable pictures. Yet the images do have a public
life.
Where are we?
It is the business of a painter not to
contend with nature & put this scene (a valley filled with
imagery 50 miles long) on a canvas of a few inches, but to make
something out of nothing...
Letter from John Constable to Archdeacon Fisher, Friday
August 6th, 1824.
We see the world around us but may not notice it. Our sense of
place varies in density and meaning because meaning comes through
experience, attention and feeling, and we cannot bring these things
to everything.
In my case personal loss of family and loved ones made me
rethink my work mid career and concentrate on observing a single
field in North Essex, near where I live. I made paintings of it for
seven years. Through farmers, local naturalists and even a glider
pilot I came to know more about the field, but what I brought to it
was the emotional and visual attention of painting. As a result the
field has become a place in painting.
Mutuality between the private and public display of paintings
points to something about our private and public sense of place. In
a gallery or living room 'my' field is not recognised as a
particular field on a map. But, depending on your starting point,
it is recognisable as somewhere in a temperate zone, Europe,
England, Essex. So a private experience, as a work of art, becomes
a small contribution to a public sense of place, subject to
interpretation and the private experience of others. Its an idea of
public place that is particular in reference but general in reach
and, crucially, is supported by the affective potential of
painting.
In this way landscape painting not only helps to show us where
we are, it helps us to feel it too. Of course quality matters, but
the function of landscape painting in this sense is independent of
ranking. It's sympathy with the activity that counts.
Renewal
We can send video clips of where we are by phone
to the other side of the world. Google Earth is a visual world
where anyone can see almost anywhere. But people still have
paintings of place on the wall. Why?
Because of the wall. We've been sheltering from nature since
Lascaux, and images on the wall are the background to daily life in
a protected space. Because of its familiarity, its easy to overlook
the almost existential aspect of this set up. But it seems to me
that rigid shelter and stable images of what's out side are a part
of life. Perhaps it's the same familiarity, set against the newness
of new media, that suggests landscape painting is incapable of
renewal.
But there are many ways our environment can be seen and painted
afresh. Science, for one thing, has given us new things to notice.
And we have a new motivation: as the contemporary nature writer
Robert MacFarlane puts it, "a factually based but imaginative
restructuring of our relationship with nature is crucial for the
future of human civilization". That such an idea could be even
slightly expressed by a picture you see every day is surely, as I
say, sane.
This is not to dismiss the invention of new forms of public art,
but I am asking art professionals to reconsider and freshly connect
with the way people imagine places through what is, after all,
their own art. Their activity has a history that dynamically
involves individuals and families with the world around them, and
this is part of its valuable, public meaning.
notes
1. For an art historical view of the importance of popular
responses to realist art see David Greenberg. The Power of
Images, studies in the history and theory of response.
University of Chicago Press, 1989. Chapter 15 summarises his
views.
2. For a technical discussion of distributed objects and the
extended mind see the last chapter of anthropologist David Gell.
Art and Agency, an anthropological theory. OUP. 1998.
3. Julian Stallabras. Art Incorporated. OUP 2004, is a
broadly Marxist account of contemporary patronage, including public
art. Concluding, he says it may be that "the local liberation
offered in the production of art, and its enjoyment, are
genuine." Though he has not to my knowledge followed up the
implications of his own insight.
4. American artist Chuck Close said "I always thought that
one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other
painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having
pushed paint around" (www.artknowledgenews.com). This idea
crosses the boundaries of amateur and professional.
5. Jules Pretty. The Earth Only Endures. Earthscan,
2007, is an ecological, economic and cultural analysis of our
global connections to land. Each chapter is headed with a landscape
painting by his father. The title of this article owes a special
debt to Jules, who took time out to help me when I was trying work
out what I was doing in my field. One thing I took from our
discussion was a much richer concept of place making. www.julespretty.com
6. William Boyd interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, Guardian
Weekend, 3 February, 2007.
7. Philip Hensher interview with Tim Burrows, Telegraph Magazine
, 21 March 2009.
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