Landscaping

• Adding to "the stock of available reality" John Berryman on R.P. Blackmur.
• Wordsworth's "spots of time."
• A bustle in your hedgerow.
• Paul Nash's "solving the equation" of elements in the landscape.
• Ursula Le Guin's magical realism.
• Inscape.

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• Desire as "The colour of where you can never go"
• "The far becomes near, and they are not the same place."
• "And I'm not sure the island was meant to be arrived at for up close it's glowing gold would have dissolved into scrub and soil"
• The "tangible landscape of memory"
• "This place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you're present, posesses you in its absence"
• "Introspection outdoors"

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• Maybe the micro is the key to a strong sense of the macro.
• Landscape as known thru art. Are Ravilious's/Rowntree's views of England more English than the landscape itself?
• What do we see when we're looking? What do we see when we're not?
• Not painting 'beautiful landscapes' but the effects they have on the soul/self.
• When a landscape resonates it is with memories of other landscapes. Each painted landscape is a stack of memories. The composite landscape.
• Making is an idea.
• The painting matters, as does the body of work.
• Can we look at landscape afresh?
• For me, the act of painting is about remembering.

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• "There is also the quite distinct feeling that we are permanently screened off from things by the limitations of our perceptions and that we shall only know them as memories."
• "The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later; and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past." Virginia Woolf
• "She does not need to sretch or exagerate her subject because it is her own temperament which produces the change." (On Sheila Fell)
• "About once every seven months, two colours will come together and look right" Sheila Fell

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• "...places drawn by longing and memory, places just beyond our reach, places that aren't really there at all..."
• "The nostalgia that is most powerful is...the sudden transcendence, the piercing of the present to reach a season long gone. It is not just a moment of recall but carries with it the exhilerating sense that all time exists behind the screen of the physical world."
• "...the borderless spaces of the imagination."

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• "It was a great surprise to realise that my practice has this whole other shape that's not at all confined to the studio". Amy Sillman from Faux Pas
• "Pictures of emotional situations" Howard Hodgkin
• Deep, tired landscapes. Beyond beautiful. As our connection to the past. To our inner and outer worlds. Marks on landscapes. The human hand everywhere.
• Deep history that swallows human time.
• Every landscape is an inner landscape.
• Tactile surface - age, friction through time.
• Christian Wiman defines religion as "everything we do with our spiritual experiences". In that sense my paintings are religious paintings.
• "Remembrances" as John Clare referred to thoughts-turned-poems about the landscape of his childhood.
• Painting is "but another word for feeling." John Constable
• John Clare's "divinity of fields"

February 17, 2022