Why think about an apple when you can think about a tree?
In a departure from the process of taking food and allowing it to become medium, I am currently considering landscape. Landscape draws several parallels to still-life in that it’s a discipline that is steeped in art history, but can be re-told in order to become relevant in the 21st Century.
With my food works, I was able to take individual foodstuffs and manipulate them so that, whilst their meaning remained the same, they were able to simultaneously mean something else and become liberated from their original physicality. Can we apply this to landscape? When the components of landscape are removed from their surroundings, and applied to something else, what are we left with?
I propose that by manipulating these components just enough so that they are to become perfectly usable as paints, whilst still enabling them to retain their intrinsic natural elements, then what you will be left with would be a medium with infinite possibilities which can be applied to a surface and at once represent visually whatever subject an artist wishes, whilst also retaining the subject of landscape: Landscape will still exist – incognito, still and subtle – but imbedded within whatever subject the paint is said to render.
Basically, I’m doing what I did with food, only with landscape, except here I am regarding the components of landscape in a richer way. This, in turn, has allowed me to ask critical questions of my food-based practice. Why am I choosing the food I am choosing? Are the components of a meal more important than the end product? Does an audience consider the same food relevant as me? These questions would not have emerged if I did not take a slight departure from food to consider landscape: Therefore, my professional development may have stagnated. This confirms my belief that it is important to embrace whatever challenges come your way: If you don’t, you may end up creating things of no value to an audience.
