Landscape as expression.


oil on paper. 68x75cms


oil on paper. 65x78cms

To consider landscape painting as a vehicle for expression or for implying that there is inference to be taken from the image is well established and does not need retelling. However, I was interested in a comment from the American painter George Inness who said : Some suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilised landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction that that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, every thing of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been.

 - and then from Patricia Tobacco Forrester; Often the painting develops in a way that I had not anticipated, and I either work at pulling the image back to the original plan, or amplify. the tendencies that have emerged. I scrub out and overpaint as necessary.

These paintings that I am making at the moment attempt to explore something that both began as a reaction to the destruction of hedgerows and the sense of metaphor that can be read from a single image.



 

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