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

6

Plate 5

Plate 6

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