The Tainted Sublime / Dust to Dust Drawing

The device of the ellipse is not an arbitrary decision. The artist as I have said is a lens through which world is focused. The process of distillation within the artist and thus image is also a process of elimination: the artwork is a focused vision. Human binocular vision corresponds in aspect ratio to about 1 - 2.25. Our peripheral vision is vital to our bodily sense of space and distance. The ‘rectangular’ support and frame convention, particularly in landscape is something that I wanted to redefine in such a way as to more closely represent how our visuals attention feels. My large scale elliptical format for the Carbon series are intended to encourage the viewer to look into rather than at the image. The scale of the pieces - approximately 2-5 = 3m wide and 1.2m in height mean suggest a correct distance: the focal point for the viewer to stand. This ‘projects’ the image from the surface out to the viewer from within the ellipse towards the viewer. By the device of the black elliptical surround the viewers’ peripheral vision is defined absolutely. What we call peripheral vision in the field of vision in human sight is that which occurs within the horizontal place (and it does not occur in the vertical place) and has an elliptical character. Thus within my pieces I have dispensed with the extraneous visual areas in the corners of conventional framing and cropping. I have always felt when observing that the convention of rectangular (whether landscape of portrait format) framing to be a very odd way of looking at the world. This convention serves to disconnect us from the world for by defining it within the rectangle we impose upon it and thus render it a fiction. Now, there are manifold questions to be asked as to why we do this and I suppose one answer is that it is analogous to the atomising, scientific method of making sense of the mess of the world: by dividing the world up in to clearly defined units nature is more ‘manageable’. But nature does not make mistakes. Indeed quantum mechanics, field and string theories acknowledge this; the world is unstable, mutable and ultimately un-controlable irrespective of our wish for it to be otherwise. However in this Anthropocene era there is an awareness that while we cannot control the world our agency upon it is clear and apparent and in one sense this is what I wish to convey both in form and content. These are not mere landscapes: ideal places seen and rendered, there are certainly not picturesque. My elliptical landscape formatting could be seen then as, literally and figuratively, creating vignettes: creating scenes rather than depicting or representing ‘place’ ; they are both: creating and depicting and there is within each piece my own agency: I compose these ‘places’ just as humankind has re-composed nature for its own needs. Thus these works are ‘anthroposcenic’ landscapes which have encoded within them the pertinent allegories and analogies of this era, each piece is a condensed narrative, a reconfiguration of actual places and a mediated reality. The romantic sense of wonder or awe at the natural world, replaced by the sense of the limitless power of human agency in the scientific era has in the contemporary mind become a kind of tainted sublime. The title Carbon for this series is thus derived both from the material used (charcoal carbon) to create the works and from the effects of our uses of carbon upon the environment. (and therefor also upon ourselves).

Drawing:Charcoal on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:106.3 W x 44.9 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.