An Unfinished World

First thoughts on Graham Sutherland, 'An Unfinished World.' Modern Art Oxford

Graham Sutherland, Dark Hill - Landscape with Hedges and Fields, 1940. Swindon Museum and Art Gallery © Estate of Graham Sutherland

 In his excellent book, 'A History of Ancient Britain,' historian Neil Oliver writes:

"All of Britain was a work in progress as nature set about reclaiming the land. The period of hundreds of thousands of years known to archaeologists as the Palaeolithic – Lower, Middle and Upper – was over. The remote world of the mammoth-hunters of Paviland, even the lives and times of the Creswell artists and the butchers of Cheddar Gorge belonged to the past. The ice of the Big Freeze had drawn a line that separates them from us, then from now."

This line in our history, this schism carved through time in much the same way as valleys were carved and gouged by ice from rock, is a place I find myself observing when I look at some of Sutherland’s haunted landscapes. They are silent spaces, from which it seems humankind is quite estranged; banished even. In some, it's as if Man has yet to appear, as if the world is part of a parallel universe, similar in some respects, but altogether different. There are, as well as those landscapes which seem divorced from knowable time (from history), landscapes from the recent past; ruined prospects of towns wracked by war. And while the source of this ruination is Man himself, the sense which Sutherland creates is one in which Man again ceases to exist. It's almost as if through both types of landscape (those we might - very loosley- describe as rural on the one hand, urban/industrial on the other), Sutherland is reminding us that for the unimaginably greater part of its existence, the world did not know us; that for the equally 'impossible' span of time that stretches ahead, the world will have no need of us either.

This sense of oblivion haunts Sutherland's landscapes; Earth’s indifference towards us - in the grand scheme of things - permeates almost every canvas and drawing, no matter how small. They each seem to echo the wonderful words of the 17th century writer Sir Thomas Browne, when he writes in 'Urn Burial.'

"We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment."

On some of Sutherland's drawings, the artist has drawn a grid of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. Grids like these would often be used when scaling drawings up to full-size works, and perhaps that is what the artist intended them for. When I see them however, I see them not as something detached from the work itself - a mere tool for reproduction - but rather an integral part of the work. It's as if the artist is trying either to order the chaos which he's rendered on the page (and which he's no doubt observed in the real world), or do battle with Man's certain oblivion and relative obscurity, imposing his mark on the landscape; his dominion over the world.

A Farmhouse in Wales 1940. Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales

If the Farmhouse in Wales above is slowly dissolving back into the landscape, then perhaps it can be seen as a metaphor for man's own ineveitable fate. The grid therefore, this means for scaling up, for seeing more clearly and in greater detail (the bigger picture as it were) is perhaps then a means for trying to understand that fate, for comprehending those 'pillars of snow,' so beautifully described by Browne in 1658.

Welsh Landscape with Yellow Lane 1939-40. Private Collection, London

In a video to accompany the exhibition, curator (and artist) George Shaw, describes how the use of yellow gives the appearance of a landscape which is jaundiced; perhaps sick. I however see this sickness not as a part of the landscape, but a part of our own vision of ourselves; our place in the 'grand scheme of things.' Even where Sutherland has painted machines (which by their very existence would seem to point towards the existence – and therefore relevance - of mankind), there is still the sense of Man's complete absence from the world. It's as if, as I’ve said, these paintings depict those two great and awful spans of time, between which Man's existence is pressed, like rocks beneath the vast sheets of ice, which once crawled and covered this place we call home. (Even those gargantuan glaciers - in places almost a mile thick - which smothered the country for so many thousands of years, would seem like Browne's 'pillars of snow' when considered against the backdrop of eternity.)

In the exhibition's first few paintings, we find these same desolate landscapes, replete with standing stones (for example, in 'Sun Setting Between Hills' below) such as those found at ancient sites throughout the country.

Sun Setting Between Hills 1937. Private Collection

At once these landscapes become charged with mystery, and like those paintings which show, for example, cranes gorging themselves on the landscape, we are presented with evidence of Man's existence. The standing stone and the ruined urban landscape, mirror one another. Poles apart, they seem to delineate this landscape in which we, for a short time, have strutted the stage of our existence. No-one is likely to walk the yellow roads which cut through the world above - yet someone must have been there.

Interlocking Tree Form 1943. The Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester

Despite this apparent absence of Man, the trees in some of Sutherland's landscapes seem almost human, at least in their gestures. Some such gestures echo the agonies of Picasso's 'Guernica', (for example, in 'Interlocking Tree Form’ above) while 'Study for a Blasted Tree,' calls to mind Goya's 'Disasters of War.'

Fallen Lift Shaft 1941. Junior Common Room Art Collection, New College.

It was whilst looking at the painting above, that I found myself thinking of William Blake. In this work, 'Fallen Lift Shaft,' there is a small patch of red which is reminiscent of some of the poet's own paintings. The lift is on the one hand a casualty of war, a victim of Man's aggression. On the other it's a symbol of his descent. It is perhaps the Fallen Angel.

The exhibition is titled 'An Unfinished World' and whilst reading Richard Dawkins' book 'The Ancestor's Tale,' I found a quote, which for me encapulsates what that title means. The world, with or without Man, is always unfinished. Dawkins writes:

"The second connected temptation is the vanity of the present: of seeing the past as aimed at our own time, as though the characters in history’s play had nothing better to do with their lives than fore-shadow us."

In other words, we are not the end, just as we weren't the beginning. And it's this conceit which Browne cautions against in his meditation on death discussed above. Sutherland's landscapes are for me, the equivalent of trying to imagine one's own non-existence in a world which is always, as Neil Oliver writes, ‘a work in progress,’ one in which nature will one day set about reclaiming from Man.

One might think it's possible therefore to view Sutherland's paintings as a warning against this conceit. But to do this is in itself a kind of conceit. The fact is, we are just another part of the landscape. The yellow road was there before us, and after us the yellow road rolls on. Sutherland's paintings are not warnings, but statements of fact.

And while this might sound somewhat depressing, another quote from Dawkins (again from 'The Ancestor's Tale') might just lift our spirits:

"As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars."

Landscape 1969. Harry Moore-Gwyn (Moore-Gwyn Fine Art)

In many of Sutherland's works, our very own star, the sun, is present such as in the work above. In one of the first paintings within the exhibition, to the last (painted just four years before his death- see below) the same sun is in view.  

Twisting Roads 1976. Private Collection.

And we - like Sutherland - can only see it, we only know it, because we exist. 

Perhaps therefore, in Sutherland's work, humankind is in evidence after all.

The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris by Walter Sickert

The photograph below is a rather poor reproduction of a painting hanging in The Ashmolean museum, Oxford. It is perhaps, my favourite painting in the museum. Painted by Walter Sickert (1860-1942), it's one which I have stood before for some considerable time, not least quite recently in order to write the following.

In my previous entry, regarding Cy Twombly's Panorama, I discussed, albeit briefly, how it was quite impossible to fully appreciate a painting through a reproduction. Of course that much is obvious, but I wanted to write about this particular work to see just how differently I perceived it compared with the work by Cy Twombly, which, as I say, I've only ever seen in a book.

As can be seen from the photograph, one of the things I noticed straight away about this painting was the light reflecting off its surface. Not really anything to do with the painting perhaps, but, nonetheless it forced me to move, to find an angle where I wouldn't be dazzled, and by doing so, I discovered something about the painting itself. What's important here, is the fact that a painting isn't just a surface on which paint is applied (although the appreciation of surface and texture can only be attained when faced with the real thing). Instead, a painting is as much about the space around it. Of course, Walter Sickert would have no idea that his painting would one day grace a wall in the Ashmolean museum, dazzled by the lights. But he would have walked whilst painting it, or rather moved before the easel. He would have stood in front, to the left, to the right, and this movement in the act of painting is, I believe, important in the act of viewing and appreciating the result.

So what do we see in this work? Well, it's a road in Paris (the rue Notre-Dame des Champs), one on which the painter John Singer Sargent had a studio. Given the muted palette and bruised sky, the picture shows a scene from about that time of day when the night begins removing all the colours from the world, when the last light in the sky, makes all manner of colours that seem to last for just a few seconds. It's a wet end to a day that's more than likely seen nothing but rain. The concertinaed facades of the shops with their heavy paint dragged down the surface, the downward strokes of the windows in the buildings opposite and the vague forms from which the scene's almost entirely comprised, all suggest the fading light and drenched air of an autumn or winter evening.

There are puddles in the street which soak up the sickly light of the cafe like a man with a sponge mopping up blood after a brawl. The road is somewhat sickly and the light of the cafe offers us a refuge from whatever is coming just around the corner. Two or three figures stand just ahead. Are they moving? Are they walking towards us? Away? It's hard to tell. But a feeling of isolation, pervading the picture, is I believe augmented by their presence.

As I moved before the painting, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, the colours seemed to shift. The bluey-violet sky shimmered above the drowned buildings, and the reflections in the road revealed new colours the more I looked. Looking at the painting in the flesh, I felt - compared with looking at the reproduction above - that my eyes had to move in order to cross from one side to the other. In a reproduction, the spaces are of course greatly reduced and everything can be seen or grabbed in an instant. In the flesh (and this painting is very much about the physicality of the world) you look as you might when standing somewhere in town.  You look with more than just your eyes; you experience the painting with your body; one that stands alone before the canvas.

Returning for the moment to the glare of the lights, I found that when I looked at the painting from the right hand side, the glare subsided, and that all that remained were just a few specs where the paint was raised above the rest of the surface. Furthermore, from this position, the painting seemed to open up, as if the concertinaed lines of the shop facades were being pulled, expanding like bellows. Here, the street seemed to pull me on. Standing directly in front, it almost seems about to collapse upon itself.

I'm not trying to suggest that this is all deliberate on the part of the artist, but to emphasise the fact that the act of looking at a painting is a physical experience. Sickert would have known this street, he would have recalled what it was like to stand there. He would have moved before the canvas as he painted, and, as a viewer, the way I stand and move before the canvas reflects that. It is, in the end, the only way to get to know art.

www.nicholashedges.co.uk

Panorama by Cy Twombly - Part 1

The first painting I have chosen is Cy Twombly's 1955 painting Panorama.

The first thing to say about discussing a work of art which one has only seen in a book, is that any view is going to be extremely restricted. To be fully appreciated, art (whether paintings, installations, sculpture and so on) needs to be experienced. The impact of a painting can be felt as much with the body as the eyes, and a reproduction found in a book will only reveal a fraction of its 'story'. (I never cease to be amazed  - and indeed, depressed - at how people when standing before a painting in a gallery will choose to view it through the screen of their camera, rather than look directly). This difference between experiencing a painting and seeing it in a book is itself an interesting area to research, and one I'll be looking at over the coming months. Nevertheless, reproductions can still tell us a great deal, so with this in mind I shall begin with the painting shown above.    

I have always been drawn to a certain kind of aesthetic, one which you’ll often find in places of decay, where time has taken hold of a building and chewed upon it like a dog with a bone. The aesthetic of time or the passage of time is beautiful in its relentlessness; from crumbling walls and cracked plaster, to buckled paint layers and the weary look of old books and photographs. It’s something which, for whatever reason, captivates me, whether I’m there amongst the glorious ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum; walking down a hot and dusty street in Siracusa; looking at a long abandoned tomb in Montparnasse or standing in my old school, just before its scheduled demolition. Indeed, it was in my old school that I photographed the window sills, scratched with the names of bored pupils from the 1970s, and it wasn’t so much the names that interested me, rather, the look of those names; an aesthetic which we find in Cy Twombly’s Panorama, painted in 1955.

I can anticipate what many might say when confronted with a painting such as this. ‘I could do that’ is a usual retort, or even worse, ‘a child could do better.’ Which is of course not the point. Whenever someone says ‘I could do that,’ I always point out that they haven’t, and that, in all likelihood, they’d have no reason to try. 'I could' in this instance, is just another way of saying 'I haven't'. And while I’m not going to extol its virtues as a great work of art, a work of art this painting is and one which, for whatever reason I’m particularly drawn to.

But why? What is it about this piece that I find so engaging?

Without wishing to sound too shallow, first and foremost it’s the look of the painting which appeals. Looks matter for me in art, but that’s not to say art should be beautiful (nothing could be further from the truth); but it needs to be engaging. In order to hold the attention of the viewer, in order to attract them in the first place, you need to trigger something within them. To use a rather crude analogy, it’s rather like the cover of a book and the subsequent opening line. Get it right and your story with its deep themes and intricate plots may well get the chance to be revealed. Get it wrong and no matter how perfect the rest of the book, the potential reader will never get to know. As I’ve said, this is a crude analogy, and I don’t wish to dwell on the idea of a painting being analogous to a book; but nonetheless artists have something to say and how they say it matters. Of course there are no rules governing taste, and what one person likes another will dislike, or even hate.

In the case of Panorama, it’s a painting I’ve come to love.

Looking at this painting (a detail is shown above) is like looking at a wall upon which people have scratched words and names, which then over time have lost their shape and meaning. The scratches are words or signifiers reduced to a new kind of text yet to be deciphered. Not that as a viewer I’m trying to make sense of all the lines or even groups of lines. This isn’t a game of ‘pick-up-sticks,’ where individual elements are teased out from the apparent chaos.

Something which in a moment was possessed with meaning, means nothing now, and all those moments, layered one on top of the other, create as a result, a palimpsest of ambiguous symbols signifying a strange kind of nothingness; a presence which at the same time is also an absence. People come and people go, and in some respects, this painting is for me a work about time – about the simultaneity of what I've just described: presence and absence.

Of course we know that this is the work of one man, but even so, there is a sense of a multitude of meanings. If it’s not a collection of thoughts, then it’s a mass of independent actions; a multitude of presents, wrapped up in a simultaneous slab of the past.

The shades of grey, smudges and rapid scrawls, also call to mind a blackboard, on which someone has poured out their thoughts in the hope of distilling them down into an equation – a simple truth. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the blackboard (as well as mathematics); the half revealed texts and mathematical symbols, the swirling smudges of rubbings out, the dust and the physicality of thought. (I’m only glad we didn’t have whiteboards or even worse, smartboards when I was at school). This could be a painting about obfuscation, of concealment, where something has been scratched out and hidden from view. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, a painting that is looking, searching for that something which remains elusive?

We can follow lines, from one to the next in our own search, but we’re always held on the surface; we cannot penetrate the painting’s depth. And depth there must be, for the work could not have been made in an instant, but gradually over the course of time. It is then a panorama, viewed in a moment, and made of many thousands.

www.nicholashedges.co.uk

Introduction

Although I have studied Art History, I am an artist rather than an art historian and this blog of writings and musings on art may well reflect that fact. I will over the course of the coming weeks and months, select works of art to write about, choosing images from books, or discussing work I have seen in galleries or elsewhere. I do not claim to be an authority on art - far from it, and those who read what I write may profoundly disagree with what I have to say. Furthermore, the entries may seem rather erratic in that I might start with a painting to which I will return over time depending on what I discover, either about the artist or the work in question. Nevertheless, I hope to make what I write informative and above all enjoyable.