Timeline - Oh, what a lovely war... joyeux noel, Act 4.1 winter Painting

By Tom Best of The Auction Collective: Ian Pentland, the Belfast born artist and architect, has created a remarkable series of ‘Timeline’ works. The artist takes a birds-eye view of a fictional landscape and, over numerous canvases, records man’s mark on the landscape as it changes and is forced to evolve. However, no human figure is ever recorded in the scene – only the consequences and products of their actions. ‘Oh what a lovely war’ is a eulogy to the First World War. The artist creates a fictional landscape in the north of Europe. Over a series of four Acts (groups of paintings of the area) Ian records both the effects of the four seasons on the landscape as well as an invasion on the town. As the four seasons progress, the greens of the countryside turn to oranges and later whites as the snow comes in. At the same time, brown pock marks appear in the fields as the enemy attacks. Trenches appear and buildings crumble. As time progresses battle lines advance and retreat as the struggle for land is fought out. Each Act records season by season the expanding footprint of destruction until its final closing Act and eventual regeneration. By Timothy Warrington of European Confederation of Art Critics: Ian Pentland is a visionary artist with a journey that takes him on a parallel course, yet unique and profoundly different. Rather than searching for lines in order to create the illusion of depth and distance, Pentland has the ability to look further through the contours, into the next dimension as an interpreter of form. Pentland’s work is a process of academic growth where the principles of artistic genius are re-discovered as well as challenged while we are introduced to an unknown and unchartered world. The series “Unmapped” wants to break away from the status quo, to provoke thought and stimulate the viewer to question the composition in an intricate examination of our reality. The factors that contribute to the sense of intrigue are numerous; on the one hand we see Pentland’s roots as an influential architect; on the other hand however, the viewer, who may be uninformed and unfamiliar with the artist's background, is touched by a sense of purity and perfect harmony in an unsymmetrical but wonderfully balanced composition. There is a sense of natural order and timelessness that is captured and communicated in these artworks that convey a subtle dialogue between strong use of form and shape, with an intrinsically delicate and soft nature.