SHRINE Painting

“The term landscape indicates a humanized relationship to nature, whether this relationship is one of dominion, of self-affirmation through the conquest of nature, or, on the contrary, a desire to transcend and efface the self in the face of nature, as what we since Kant call the sublime.” (Mieke Bal) “Her green plastic watering can, for her fake Chinese rubber plant, in the fake plastic earth” (Radiohead) I am often cited as a Romantic painter, working in the landscape tradition of John Constable or Casper David Friedrich. Art depicting nature. But what is nature in the 21st century, what is the Romanic landscape of today? I aim for my work to express both the control and transcendence imbued within landscape painting. The subjects I depict come from the highly cultivated English landscape. The Blossoms from the orchard are genetic perfection, created to produce the ultimate yield, each tree within the orchard a replica of the other. The Oak is a bystander of this ever-evolving landscape factory, the bystander of time, a symbol of time past, present and future. The Ash is the tree of legend and the victim of the modern world. Drawings are on neon coloured acrylic sheets, mechanically created and perfect. Yet other subjects and elements of the work are pure imagination. The act of painting or drawing explores the paradoxical relationship of the landscape. The way marks relate to one another the way the colour and texture can imply meaning beyond what is depicted. The sky is created independently from the subject, transforming the original act of looking and recording into a composite reality which is totally fictitious and completely detached from its original state, often giving a hyperreal aesthetic. The traditions of landscape painting, which I am influenced by usually recognise two traditional ways of describing nature. The first one is that of the biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden. The second one is the Kantian idea of the sublime, the post-cultural. I see my work as being somewhere between the two. Man, has been banished from the Garden of Eden, the tree is a symbol of knowledge, of loss, of control. The landscape is manipulated, cultivated and cloned. Yet there is a lack of control, the sublime and the chaotic in the stormy skies, the frantic repetitive drawing marks and the acid corroded metals on the surface of the landscapes.