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.
