Today, the news carries reports of the findings of a UN panel on climate change. They are now definitely linking climate change to human activity and predicting increased flooding and heatwaves as the ice floes melt and the sea level rises. This, they say, will affect the environment, peoples’ lives and biodiversity. How did we let this happen? Can it be controlled now or is it already too late?
Today I was looking at some of the sketches of structures in my copy of the book Barbara Rae Sketchbooks. I enjoy the looseness, colour and line of her sketches which are made outdoors.
They inspire me to paint my own sketches outdoors using line and water-based colour both on Orford Ness and at the Dunwich coast. I’ve used pencil before but want to capture colour too.
Barbara Rae’s sketches are reproduced in the book Cork, R & Wardell, G (eds.), (2011), Barbara Rae: Sketchbooks, London: Royal Academy Publications.
Barbara Rae’s sketches may also be seen at http://www.barbararae.com/
Another place that seems to conjure the sublime for me is Dunwich with its strange contradictions e.g. the Sizewell nuclear power station and the Minsmere bird sanctuary. The work that I started based on the Gorse Walk at Dunwich Heath is of less importance to me now in this project and I want to concentrate on the rig structures near the power station (looking at the juxtaposition of these man-made objects with the sea) and also on the sea and shoreline. You wander away from society and this is what you see – the odd structures from the past and present, the nuts and bolts of our man-made existence and also the desolate, sublime, exquisite, dangerous planet. These are my themes.
The painting (top left) was based on a photograph of a tower structure in the sea off of Sizewell power station. I used masking tape to paint in the linear shapes initially. Some cropping of the image ensued (shown in the stages on the left) finalizing on only the lower part of the structure and omitting the horizon. In leaving out most of the structure I felt that the remainder had more impact because it is not self explanatory or “picturesque”. It is adjacent to the blue sea and interrupts it and that is the effect that I wanted.
Now seems like a good time to reflect on what I have written so far and where I am at now and where I feel that I am going with my degree project.
I started by looking at artists who addressed the sublime and/or a sense of place in their work and I said that this is what I want to do in my work. Nothing has changed there although I have meandered about a bit and fretted over canvas size, figuration/non-figuration, etc. I feel now that I have moved past these concerns. If something fails then I wil just try again, try different things. It doesn’t really matter – it is the experience of working that I enjoy and I am getting used to the ups and downs in the outcomes. I constantly get reminded not to bin work but sometimes I need to – it is therapeutic to oust stuff that I don’t want in my environment and in my head.
Orford Ness, to me, seems a place of the sublime – the sense of the past (what is that?), the desolation of this unpopulated, non-built-up part of the planet, the threat of flooding and loss (all to obvious this winter) and the remaining scraps of war juxtaposed against the delicate lichens and occasional sight-seer. A strange wasteland indeed. Sebald, in his book The Rings of Saturn (p. 237), said that the place made him feel as if he was “amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe”. I have tried to capture this in the paintings shown here. I reworked the painting Meaningless Wreckage shown in the third image 3 to make it darker and more menacing (as shown in image 4). It is as yet unfinished. I will go back to Orford Ness in April and May and create more drawings and paintings on these themes for my degree project.
This painting was made today – it is inspired by one of the photographs that I took during a visit to Orford Ness earlier in the year when I walked round the place. I wanted to capture the sense of isolation and remoteness and the rough textures. I used ground pumice and black lava gel to achieve the foreground textures.
