Post on 15-May-2023
1
E n g l a n d ’ s F a v o u r i t e L a n d s c a p e : P a i n t i n g s i n S e a r c h o f T h e P i c t u r e s q u e
a n d C a u t i o n a r y T a l e s o f L a n d s c a p e .
The mundane landscape is a popular trope amongst contemporary painters and photographers today.
George Shaw’s exhibition “The Sly and Unseen Day” for the 2011 Turner Prize “offers” as one critic
put it “a humdrum vision of a sodden contemporary Britain that the nation’s tourist boards would be
wise to ignore”1. And TATE Britain’s exhibition “British Landscape: Photography after the
Picturesque” of the same year, presented a counterpoint to its adjacent Romantic exhibition a “Post-
Picturesque” as Nicholas Alfrey2 called it. In both exhibitions the content on display includes
signifiers of economic tension and decline, representations of personal psychogeography, an updating
of a traditional English sensibility (melancholy, change and nostalgia, and a formal approach of
making the so called culturally uninteresting pictorially interesting.
In promoting the art of JMW Turner, John Ruskin condemns the “hunter” of “lower picturesque”
scenes as “eminently a heartless one”, its purveyor being one who “alone delights in both [disorder
and ruin]; .... Poverty, and darkness, and guilt, bring in their several contributions to his treasury of
pleasant thoughts”’3 It is not a condemnation of the picturesque as such by Ruskin; he is really
criticising the “disinterested” artist and any “lack of comprehension of the pathos and character
hidden beneath” the subject matter being considered. This implies that the dignity and any moral
worth of the subject depicted increases with the artist’s sympathy for the subject – human or
otherwise. Writing in later Victorian times4 Ruskin recollected on the growing social conscience of
liberal humanism and the quasi-religious epiphanies of the early 19th century middle classes – the
bourgeoisie -and their guilt at the purely aesthetic and formalist enjoyment of loss and ruin in the
landscape.
So rather than go “hunting” for a contemporary picturesque, Modernity, loss and change is expressed
through the playful bubbleworlds of my own making - as diorama. The diorama is a conflation of the
experienced, histories, ideologies and fanciful arguments of the English landscape. They allow for a
stroll, at around 1/35th scale, a promenade, and a variety of views, captured through the lens of a
camera for subsequent rendering on canvas. Their making is to achieve a realness in the camera glass
that can be seen as a photographic vignette of the real out-there, and adds another layer to the process
of understanding/misunderstanding and consuming/distancing of landscape painting.
The Photo-real painting process is a point of technical default that avoids the pleasing brushmark and
any subsequent Romantic notions of the painterly landscape. It importantly removes the how to paint.
Instead, the distortions and visual curiosities of the lens’ mediation are incorporated along with the
information that we usually rely on for truth in a photographic production – the photographic print is
really the subject matter.
2
The painting Get Orff My Land (Plate 1) has an overtly political title and content. The painting is oil
on canvas 120cm x 150cm (2004). The corrugated iron and blue tarpaulin are more evocative of the
Plate 1
Plate 2
3
edgelands between rural and urban – another non space. So have we been deceived by the green
sward, and a specific accent in the title?’5 The specific accent refers to the added consonant of Orff’
that is a command specific from a landowning class member. The corrugated iron in the foreground,
and blurred timber and rubble in the background may be fly-tipping (is the dark figure the fly tipper or
is he the landowner?). The result is a landscape of entropy; the human is now part of a landscape
trying to achieve thermodynamic balance – not improvement.
A more reassuring green sward is depicted in Elysian Fields (Plate 2), oil on canvas 120cm x 180cm
(2006). The viewpoint is a more aerial perspective rather than eye level parallax. The Classical
fragments represent, as all fragments do, the perceived loss of the greater - they also acts as
emblematic structures in themselves. The fragments become topoi – triggers for a number of ideas
and fleeting memories induced in and dependant on the visitor. It is a landscape of meaning and
(arcane) knowledge to be read by the cognoscenti.. It is a pre-Picturesque landscape where symbols
and features are laden with meaning to be read as the invited and well read guest of the early 18th
century tours the private landscaped parkland. Yet this ruin, in association with the ruined car, is part
of Le Corbusier’s “new spirit”, - a return to order. The acme of architectural style is the style of
choice for posterity. The brutalised car is the obsolescent work in progress.
The title of the painting refers to the beau-idéal landscaped parkland of the Palladian-style Stowe
House in Buckinghamshire. Created in the early 1700s to express political and philosophical
ideologies as allegory, the Elysian Fields at Stowe – a shallow declivity between woodland with bits
of Neo-Classical architecture and stone scattered along the way – was meant to invoke through poetic
and mythic meaning some kind of republican Roman virtus. Apprehended intellectually as well as
viscerally the visitor would be imbued with ideals for an “imaginary Rome anew”6 - a pro Patria
whilst still maintaining the aristocratic hierarchies and privileges. At the foot of my painting the
corrugated iron sheds (allotments) of the Plebs creep in.
With the rise of the aspiring middle classes and the growth in the second generation of picturesque
tourist following in William Gilpin’s footsteps there was a move away from appreciating the
landscape of symbols and meaning, the emblematic, the formal and intellectual, towards a more
emotional and expressive one whereby Nature comes to the foreground. The tourist wanted
something native to actually look at, to appreciate aesthetically and experience in their own way and,
ultimately, to take home to their suburban villa by way of watercolour and oil painting of “simple
character”7. The roughness and irregularity of the vernacular landscape and peasantry became
appreciated more for its emotional and nostalgic impetus rather than its syntax of meaning and noble
values; the public role of virtus becoming a more private, more democratic one of the individual.
4
By 1829 John Constable had captured the act of looking and the emotions induced: his Hadleigh
Castle sketch appears in a storm of brushmarks, it being painted a year after his wife’s death – for him
Plate 3
Plate 4
5
the ruin is imbued with nostalgia and melancholy. The surface of the canvas becomes a wilderness of
brush marks, apparently chaotic, something that we recognise now as Modern (in the same year
Constable was accepted as a full member of the Royal Academy).
My own Wilderness (Plate 3) oil on canvas 122cm x 163cm (2010) is a feral first nature, an
incongruous super-nature, a mismatch of scale with the remains of man’s architecture and technology.
This brought to mind in me Robert Smithson’s essay on Frederick Law Olmsted’s making of Central
Park in New York8, the transformation of an apparent wilderness within urban 19
th century New York
into managed public parkland. In his essay Smithson points out Olmsted’s acknowledging of the
earlier generation of English picturesque landscapers and their various propositions and debates on the
picturesque landscape of the time.
The ongoing state of English parkland and the change in role, the process as a “thing for us”
(Smithson) is represented in Sculpture Park (Plate 4) oil on canvas 120cm x 180cm (2012). My
sculpture park is a non-curated space that questions the democratic nature of public art within a
publicly funded landscape, such as that at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the parkland of Bretton Hall,
Yorkshire: iconic artworks provide yet another idealogical layer to those layers already there.
Another changing landscape is my Temple of Ancient Virtue (Pegasus Snack Bar) (Plate 5), oil on
canvas 120cm x 180cm (2012). The wrecked car of the Elysian Fields has been replaced by the
roadside snack bar. Under a more Mediterranean sky of limitless vanishing point one nation’s culture
and identity is defined by the importing of another’s mythology. The shallow depth of field is still
there, as are the ruins – we get the perfect English day out – “ruins and chips”.9 England is a nation in
thrall to the cult of the ruin10
, an apparent inertia to go beyond preservation – a malaise anglaise. It is
Svetlana Boym’s “reflective” nostalgia without any corresponding “restorative” nostalgia – there is no
desire for a future, only individual and cultural memory11
. As such it depends on interpretation
through authorised agencies only– piles of stone exposed to underpin ideas of nationalism.
Another pile of stone, “The Tomb in Arcady”, is actively read, literally – LEGO. Et in Arcadia lego
(Plate 6) oil on canvas 120cm x 180cm (2013) makes use of Poussin’s picturesque elegy. Two figures
turned to stone, one apparently in a leprous condition – the ravages of time, contemplate the work of
the unseen artist. The stylised death’s head is a modern take on the usual memento mori; EGO – the
“I am” is now LEGO – “I read”. It is a broader contextual presence, one of understanding and
interpretation. The armoured vehicle atop the plinth/tomb is a reworking of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s
work on the subject of the panzer in Arcady12
. My tank appears to fend off the sale of Arcadia, its
canon points towards the signage for the usual development opportunity. The possibility of death –
the tomb and death’s head – is allied to the potential loss of Arcadia and turned into “a vision of a
paradise lost” invoking a blurred “feeling of soft, elegiac nostalgia”.13
7
Well, perhaps not.14
Gainsborough’s Plebs are certainly not today’s home owners – the view may be
perceived as the same, the power relationships certainly are – those land management systems to
sustain aesthetic and, more importantly, economic value. The picturesque figures, the “Dark side of
the landscape”15
, in Gainsborough’s Cornard Wood are appropriated for the cause of a nation’s high
culture and maintaining the favoured Georgian English landscape.
So one man’s loss may be another’s ‘exciting development opportunity’? In this case it is Constable’s
Sketch of Dedham that offers the political and economic opportunities. In Civic Trust (Plate 7) oil on
canvas 122cm x 170cm (2010) the green cowboy upon his classical plinth holds up Vitruvian Man
through the accident of parallax; the picturesque stroll providing a quaint possibility. Behind this
exchange the rus in urbis is under real threat from neighbouring blind consumer addiction and the
goddess of market forces.
In his paper “What do we mean by Sustainable Landscape?”16
of 2008 Professor Paul Selman of
Sheffield University writes that “Landscapes possess varying degrees of legibility that betray
underlying narratives, and the extent to which we appreciate or denigrate a landscape is closely
related to the way we are conditioned to ‘read’ it” – to apprehend those narratives and power
relationships beyond Euclidian perspective. The crucial point being, as Selman notes, that any
aesthetic understanding – the “reading” and appreciation of landscape - takes time to acquire and is
dynamic and cannot be other than dialectic.
Plate 7
8
As Robert Smithson said, “the true artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our
landscape”.17
P a u l C o l l i n s o n 2 0 1 3
Notes
1 Sooke (2011)
2 Alfrey (2011)
3 Ruskin (1856)
4 Ruskin (1880) 9
5 Streffen (2013)
6 Pope (1716) 108
7 Ruskin (1880) 37-38
8 Smithson (1973)
9 Stepnik (2013) 77
10 Jenkins (2011)
11 Boym (2001) 41 - 55
12 Abrioux (1985) 245 - 247
13 Panofsky (1968)
14 Gray (2013)
15 Barrell (1980)
16 Selman (2008)
17 Smithson (1973)
Bibliography
Books
Abrioux 1985 = Yves Abrioux Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer by Yves Abrioux Reaktion
Books 1985
Barrell 1980 = John Barrell The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Landscape
Painting 1730 – 1840 Cambridge University Press 1980
Boym 2001 = Svetlana Boym The Future of Nostalgia Basic Books 2001
Pope 1716 = Collected Poems: Alexander Pope Everyman’s Library for J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd 1924
“Epistle to Mr Jervas”
Ruskin 1856 = John Ruskin Modern Painters Vol. IV Chapter I: Of the Turnerian Picturesque 1856
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31623/31623-h/31623-h.htm
9
Ruskin 1880 = John Ruskin Notes by Mr Ruskin on Samuel Prout and William Hunt Fine Art
Society Ltd, London 1879- 1880
https://archive.org/stream/notesbymrruskin03socigoog#page/n63/mode/1up
Smithson 1973 = Robert Smithson “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”
(originally in Artforum 1973) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings ed. Jack Flam University of
California Press 1996
Articles
Alfrey 2011 = Nicholas Alfrey “Romanticism gets real” Tate Etc. Magazine Issue 21 Spring 2011
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/romanticism-gets-real
Gray 2013 = Louise Gray “Famous landscape threatened after campaigners lose fight to save
Gainsborough view” The Daily Telegraph 22 February 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9887962/Famous-landscapes-threatened-after-
campaigners-lose-fight-to-save-gainsborough-view.html
Jenkins 2011 = Simon Jenkins “This Cult of the ruin renders England’s landscape soulless. Better to
rebuild.” The Guardian 14 April 2011
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/14/cult-ruin-england-castles-abbeys
Panofsky 1968 = Erwin & Gerda Panofsky “The Tomb in Arcady at the Fin – de – Siècle” in “Erwin
Panofsky – die späten Jahre,(The Later Years)” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 30 (1968), pp. 287-304
http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/2011-4/panofsky-erwin-3/PDF/panofsky.pdf
Selman 2008 = Paul Selman “ What do we mean by Sustainable landscape?” http://sspp.proquest.com/static_content/vol4iss2/communityessay.selman.pdf 2008
Sooke 2011 = Alastair Sooke “George Shaw, The Sly and Unseen Day, South London Gallery,
London review” The Daily Telegraph 30 May 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/alastair-
sooke/8546109/George-Shaw-The-Sly-and-Unseen-Day-South-London-Gallery-London-review.html Stepnki 2013 = Malgorzata Stepnik “Zmierzch Okcydentu? Niepokój malarskich (mikro)kosmosów
Paula Collinsona” (“The decline of the Occident? The anxiety of the painted (micro)cosms by Paul
Collinson”) Punkt Issue 9 2013 www.punktmag.pl 70-86
Exhibition Catalogue
Streffen 2013 = Isabella Streffen “England’s Favourite Landscape: the cautionary tales of Paul
Collinson” exhibition catalogue England’s Favourite Landscape at Crossley Gallery, Dean Clough,
Halifax, England 2013