BRIAN ASHBEE
A FUTURE FOR LANDSCAPE PAINTING?

ARTS REVIEW September / October 1999

It's not an easy time to paint landscape. Perhaps it's just not an easy time to
paint. But the combination of those two words, landscape and
painting, seems to imply a particularly conservative activity,
remote from the cutting edge of contemporary practice. This is
hardly new. Indeed, it might be argued that landscape in this
century has usually constituted a rear-guard action in the face of
the pressures of modernism. Landscape painting today is,
according to Charles Harrison, a marginal practice and is so far
as while landscape painting has been involved in the debate
about modernism and post-modernism, it has not been landscape
as a form of contemporary practice that has been the subject of
debate but the question of how to interpret 18th and 19th
century landscape painting. The landscape painting of the 20th
century, in contrast, has generally been regarded as too marginal
to be worth contesting, except by chose concerned to reassert
traditional - which is to say provincial - values. Provincial in
that lase sentence seems like a put-down; provincial values; may
well be worth defending, and are a topic to which I'll return. But
first, we need to define the forces which have undermined the
claims to seriousness of landscape painting in our century. First
is the commodification of landscape, a consequence of the very
success in the 19th century of landscape as a popular form. By
the last quarter of the century, chromolithography made possible
the widespread·diffusion of colour prints of mediocre landscape
paintings, while photography offered its own increasingly
authoritative and cheaply available account of landscape. By the
middle of our century, traditional 18th and 19th century
landscape conventions had become part of an ever-expanding
repertory of kitsch, recycled by amateur painters, postcards, and
advertising. 

 
Secondly, the commodification of landscape calls into question
the sincerity and depth of any emotion experienced in front of it.
In the words of W.J.T. Mitchell: Landscape is a marketable
commodity to be presented and re-presented in packaged tours,
an object to be purchased, consumed and even brought home in
the form of souvenirs such as postcards and photo. albums. In its
double role as commodity and potent cultural symbol, landscape
is the object of fetishistic practices involving the limitless
repetition of identical photographs taken on identical spots by
tourists with interchangeable emotions. Mitchell assumes the
emotions inspired by commodified landscape are degraded and
trivial. There is perhaps a hint of snobbery here; are we really to
assume interchangeable emotions in the millions of people who,
at one extreme, may be content with a quick snapshot of the
Grand Canyon bur, at the other extreme, may search out
wilderness areas or country parks for recreation and exercise?
John Barrell, one of the Marxist art historians favoured by
Mitchell, also addresses this point,  explaining how landscape
has become a repository of value in popular culture - but there is
a sting in the tail: By the end of Constable's time, the
countryside takes on the negative virtue of not being the city. It
is no longer a place of tension, but one defined as empty of
tension; a place of refreshment and recreation, where we may
discover a sense of our potential as sensitive individuals which
is lost in the urban life of affairs - a sentence full of cliches, but
so is the sense it describes. The feelings which animated
Wordsworth, Thoreau, Emerson, Jefferies and countless others
are dismissed as cliches. Why are these Marxist art historians so
disdainful of the contemplation of natural beauty? The answer
lies in the third and decisive factor: the re-reading of the 18th
and 19th century landscape tradition undertaken by these same
Marxist historians. Building on earlier work by Raymond
Williams and John Berger, recent studies by John Barrell and
Ann Bermingham have, in the words of Mitchell, decisively
overturned the idealising and aescheticizing account of British
landscape bequeathed to us by Kenneth Clark in favour of a

much more detailed and historically nuanced political and
ideological critique. At the risk of oversimplifying, one might
say that for Clark the development of landscape was a search for
pure form - the emancipation of landscape painting from its
earlier beginnings in the back grounds of religious and history
painting, towards an enjoyment of nature for its own sake; a
development inseparable from the emancipation of painting
from the process of representation. Landscape, in other words,
leads to abstraction. It has been the project of Marxist art
historians to drag landscape painting back into the socio-
political arena from which the painters of the 19th century had
so painstakingly abstracted it. Landscape, these writers have
insisted, is a means of naturalising cultural codes, inscribing
cultural meanings into the land, and hiding the traces of this
inscription in order co-present the ideology as if it is just in
nature. What does this mean, in practice? In the 18th century,
the English discovered their landscape as a cultural and aesthetic
object, just at the time when that landscape was undergoing
unprecedented social transformation. Precisely at the moment
when the countryside was becoming unrecognisable, painters
offered images of a landscape that was homely and stable. In
doing so, they were not acting for purely aesthetic reasons, but
responding to complex socio-economic pressures. A typical
Constable image of wheatfields, cart tracks, towpaths, stiles and
hedgerows seems to the innocent eye the very image of
untroubled continuity and tradition. It says Heritage. But even
the most superficial examination of the historical background
shows that the very forms of the landscape, far from naturally
given were for their public at the time the vehicles of unstable
and contested meanings - were, in other words, ideological. The
field system, the patchwork quilt which is such a comfortable
image of heritage England, is the result of the enclosure
movement, which suddenly accelerated in the second half of the
18th century. This movement was inspired by landowners
seeking co-maximise the productivity of their land, to dispossess
small-holders and re-engage them as tenant farmers or landless
labourers. The movement vastly increased productivity, making

England the most productive agriculture in the world. Enclosing
the common land meant parcelling it out into rectangles divided
by hedges; enclosed land at first looked smaller and artificial
compared with the more open common lands that proceeded it.
 
At the same time as the open commons were being enclosed, the
landscape gardening movement was putting the same process
into reverse: the enclosed, formal structure of traditional gardens
gave way to the more natural-looking landscape parks of
Capability Brown and Humphry Repton: as the real landscape
began to look increasingly artificial, like a garden, the garden
began co look increasingly natural, like the pre-enclosed
landscape. Thus a natural landscape became the prerogative of
the estate... ‘so that nature was the sign of property and nature.’
Ann Bermingham. Most contested of all is the role in art of the
working men and women who laboured in this landscape. How,
as John Barrell has asked, could these be an acceptable part of
the decorations of the drawing rooms of polite society, when in
their own persons they would not be admitted even to the
kitchens? The 18th century begins with images of Arcadian
shepherds in dalliance and repose, proceeds through
intermediate stages showing a contented but recognisably
English poor, at first cheerful, sober and industrious, then
ragged and inspiring of pity, ending with Romantic images of
the poor whisked away from uncomfortable proximity and
safely absorbed into Nature. By the time of Constable, they
work in the distance because the resentments of the poor are
now known to us all, and...could not be concealed in any
credible image - except by hiding them in the middleground
‘where we can see their labour but not their expressions.’ John
Barrell. A century and a half later, we may prefer to read
Constable’s images as innocent transcriptions of Nature - hut in
doing so, asks Barrell, do we not identify with the interest of
Gainsborough’s and Constable’s customers, and against the
poor they portray? In order not to see the social and economic
problems of which the landscape is evidence, we can only look

at it as repository of painterly effects. This was the strategy of
Constable and later painters down to and including our own
century, for whom landscape has largely been a stimulus to
purely formal effects and abstraction. Whatever the merits of
this Marxist perspective on landscape, its effect on the
possibilities of contemporary landscape practice has hardly been
enabling. This approach contests the legitimacy of any approach
to landscape which does not include its economic and political
aspects. The artists gaze is characterised, in typically reductive
terms, either as that of the owner (in which case the
representation expresses class ownership of the landscape), or
conversely that of a tourist (in which case it expresses a desire to
appropriate it). Viewing landscape as a category of ideological
control negates any possibility of the artist’s relating to the
landscape as a source of individual, spiritual or religious value -
indeed, these very terms provoke Marxists to reveal themselves
at their most scathing and self-righteous (as witness the
exchanges between the late Peter Fuller and Terry Eagleton.)
Rather than attempt to continue that unproductive debate, I
would simply observe, of Mitchell and his school, that in the
words of Richard Wollheim) many art histonans, in their
scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they tried to
live their lives by it, would have them at the end of an ordinary
day without lovers friends or any insight into how this had come
about.” In place of narrowly focused but ultimately reductive
approach, I wish to offer an alternative. Instead of visions and
revisions of art historians, it is based upon recent work in the
natural and cognitive sciences, and it suggest a theoretical
perspective within which the work of landscape artist can be
seen in a new and much more positive light. It draws heavily on
the work of a French geographer, Augustin Berque, whose work
is not available in English but which deserves to be much better
known in what the French charmingly call .the Anglo Saxon
world. On one substantive point, both Berque and Mitchell
agree: landscape is not just a genre of art but a medium. This is
at first a puzzling claim. It maintains that the common-sense

notion that the artist looks at the objects in the environment and
transforms them into a work of art is simply mistaken.
The landscape is itself already structured and layered by cultural
symbolism. Mitchell explains it like this: ‘Landscape is itself a
physical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation,
water, sky, sound. and silence, light and darkness, etc.) in which
cultural meanings and values are encoded, whether they are put
there by the physical transformation of a place in landscape
gardening and architecture, or found in a place formed, as we
say, by nature.’ The simplest way to summarise this point is to
note that it makes Clark’s title, Landscape into Art, quite
redundant: landscape is already artifice in the moment of its
beholding, long before it becomes the subject of pictorial
representation. This formulation of Mitchell’s, produced as it is
with something of a magicians flourish, remains unconvincing.
Just how is a natural landscape, untouched by man, already a
representation even before the artist makes his own
representation of it? Berque traces the roots of this paradox to
the cognitive sciences. He finds the answer apparent even in the
word landscape itself, which in European and Oriental
languages refers both to the thing itself and its representation.
This oddity of language cannot be just an accident; in fact it is
telling us that the landscape we perceive cannot be divorced
from the way we represent it: both are in a crucial sense mental
constructs. Landscape is not an object. To understand it, we
need to do more than study scientifically the forms of the
environment, though we must do that. We must do more than
study the psychology of perception, though that too is important.
We must also study the cultural, social and historical
determinants of our perception - those elements that constitute
human subjectivity. Landscape is the medium in which the
objective reality of the environment combines with human
subjectivity.

 

This way of thinking is not at all self evident. It does not fit
easily with the positivism that dominates the natural sciences,
especially those disciplines which study the objective forms of
the environment, such as classical geography and ecology.
These study the environment as a thing-in-itself, independent of
the observer. What Berque - and indeed Mitchell - insist on is
the fact that the landscape is as much in our minds (the subject)
as it is in the environment (the object). We recognise objects by
inference, referring the optical information they give us to a
stock of schema, or templates, which are located in our personal
and cultural memories. Our gaze is not just on the landscape, to
an extent it is the landscape. This approach has been advanced
by Gibson in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, of
which a central thesis is that our visual system evolved to make
us fit for a particular environment; as a result, the subject and
object of vision must be treated as part of the same system.
 
Gestalt psychology and Gibson’s ecological approach both
suggest that learning about the environment proceeds from an
ongoing interaction between subject and object: knowledge
proceeds from perception, but perception then proceeds in terms
of knowledge. To take a simple example. Our perceptual
apparatus naturally favours regular, simple forms. A circle, for
example, is inherently more recognisable than an irregular
polygon. Once the schema, or mental template, of the circle is
learned, we will notice that the environment contains many
forms which approximate to the circle, and which can then be
represented by it. As Terry Wright has noted, the environmental
features identified by Gibson, which he calls affordances, and
upon which our perception depends, are those commonly found
in Australian Aboriginal painting. Things that are or can be
classified as roundish or enclosed, for example, water holes,
fruit or campfires, can be represented by circles; things that can
be classified as elongated, such as rivers, paths, spears and
animals lying outstretched, will be represented. by a straight
line.

 
Once a form has been learned and a mental schema or template
acquired, there will be a tendency to find that form in the
environment and with it, a tendency to adjust irregular forms in
the environment to fit existing mental templates. The circle as a
mental idea is a Platonic abstraction, to which roundish forms,
like fruit, campfires and waterholes (rarely in fact quite circular)
can be made to fit. The circle as a perfect form, incidentally,
runs through our own cultural history as much as the
Aborigines, from prehistoric stone circles, the rose windows of
gothic cathedrals, the maps of the medieval world (even when
the world was supposed flat) to the mud and stone circles of
Richard Long. I believe that extrapolating from this can tell us
much about the way art develops. Styles in art are also forms of
regularity, or simplification, just as a circle is a form of
regularity in the geometric sense. Once a style of art is learnt,
we tend to find corresponding forms in nature. That is to say,
the environment furnishes us with complex data onto which
virtually any style of painting can be imposed; or, more
precisely, art furnishes us with perceptual templates by which
the complexity of the environment can be simplified, allowing
us· to perceive, and represent, landscape. When Mitchell and
Berque insist that landscape is a medium, they are pointing out
that such processes are inevitable; built into our very act of
seeing. Paint or photograph the sea on a calm day. A flat horizon
dividing the picture plane suggests formal abstraction.
Photograph the sea in a storm, with a slow shutter speed, and
you have an image suggestive of Abstract Expressionism. The
20th century painter, well-versed in a vast range of styles, looks
at the natural environment and finds there confirmation of
whatever vision he brings. The post-modernist painter may look
rather at the degraded or second-hand images of nature
circulating in our culture. But neither has direct, unproblematic
access to the objective reality of the world. Even when we look
at the landscape seeking the Other, we can see only what the
templates of style allow us to see - and that is more a reflection
of ourselves and our culture than it is a vision of Otherness.

When Andreas Gursky photographs a featureless patch of dirt,
he is seeing it as a minimalist painting. When Bill Brandt
photographs the female nude as if her forms were those of
rounded rocks in a landscape, or when Georgia O Keeffe paints
the rocks of new Mexico as if they were the sexual organs of
female nude, both are performing the act of seeing as - seeing
one thing as if it were another. 

In much the same way the 18th century traveller, well educated
in Arcadian landscapes, looked at the landscape of Tuscany or
even Warwickshire, and saw them as the pastoral visions of
Claude; and if he needed a little help, he could raise a CIaude
glass to his eye and gave any Landscape lacking in charm the
golden glow of a much varnished canvas. This act of seeing has
come to be known as intertextuality. And the transformation of
the English landscape into parks was the result of not one but
two acts of seeing: firstly, Poussin, Claude and Salvator Rosa
seeing the Italian landscape as if it were that of Greek and Latin
pastoral poetry. Then the English nobility of the 18th century
seeing the English landscape as if it were paintings by those
same French and Italian painters. A remarkable form of
intertextuality embracing two thousand years of European
history.

Berques analysis of Modernism has profound implications for
the future practice of landscape art. Modernism, for Berque, is a
cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond the narrow confines
of art. The classical paradigm of Western Modernism was
constructed in the 17th century. Its crucial architects were Bacon
(experimental method); Galileo (decentring the cosmos);
Descartes (subject/object dualism); and Newton (absolute space,
homogenous and isotropic.) At its heart was the discovery of the
physical world as such and in itself, uncoupled from human
subjectivity. This approach has since been validated by the
unprecedented progress in science and technology; but it also
provoked an unprecedented fracture in human history: from now
on, the objects of the physical world are posited independently
and separately from the phenomenal world, in which those

things are perceived by men. A simple example of the
difference: in the physical world, the earth rotates around the
sun. In the phenomenal world, the sun rises in the East. It is in
this latter world that landscape exists. It is in this latter world
that we exist. The spirit of objective investigation that
characterised Modernism (in Berque’s wider sense) expressed
itself in art in two closely related ways: the birth of landscape
and the discovery of perspective. Linear perspective constituted
the symbolic form of the emergence of the modem subject in
Panofsky’s words; it depicted a world reduced to·a collection of
objects all describable, measurable and manipulable - and
emptied of all subjectivity. The subject has now vanished from
the space objectified in the picture; the spectator is confined to a
single, unmoving viewpoint outside the space; the subject and
the object are confined to two incompatible worlds. In the same
way, science now studies an objective world, from which human
consciousness has been excluded. Cartesian dualism lies at the
heart of the Modernist paradigm: thought divided from the
world, mind from matter, subject from object. The subject,
enthroned at the centre of absolute, homogenous space,
expresses itself by means of symbols inscribed onto the physical
world, over which his technology has given him a new mastery.
He reorganises the physical world in the light of perspectival
representations such as the linear perspectives of the baroque
palace or city, such as Versailles and St. Petersburg. In 18th
century America, the grid pattern favoured by city planners
inscribed the squared format of their graph paper over a
continent. With the 20th century, glass, steel and the elevator
made possible the extension of the grid upwards, into vertical
space. Absolute space, thanks to the International Style in
architecture, has asserted itself all over the planet, neutralising
the individuality of real places, imposing identical forms every
where in the name of modernity. Everywhere the same thing all
over the earth, symbolising the self-creating invariability of the
modem subject. The space thus imposed on the world is hostile
to tradition, destructive of all architectural vernaculars; it is
utopian space (where topos means a non-place) It has been clear

since the 1960s that the Modernist paradigm has outlived its
usefulness. We can only represent the world at the cost of a
reduction in its complexity. {It is only in a story by Borges that
a representation.- a map - can be of the same size as the terrain it
represents.) All other representations simplify, falsify. That is
their power, their beauty and their danger. The templates of
perception are useful because they simplify, but they lose their
usefulness when, as tends to happen in time, the aspects of the
world they leave out become too glaringly obvious. This is why
styles in art outlive their usefulness. The modernist impulse has
today lost its authority. What role can the landscape artist have
in constructing an alternative?

Berque has envisaged a recoupling of the physical and
phenomenological worlds that the Modernist vision had
separated. A re-symbolisation or re-enchantment of the world.
Not based on a return to older forms, such as superstition or
religion, but based rather on what he calls ecosymbolism. This
means a re-engagement with the world in all its complexity, co-
opting all the tools of knowledge we have at our disposal,
including those available to the physical and natural sciences.
The question is how to preserve, without being overcome by,
the complexity of the world; to compensate for the destruction
of natural eco-systems, at risk as never before from massive
economic and political pressures. The Third World is desperate
to Modernise, at whatever cost to its natural environment.
Wilderness areas, of which few remain, will be under increasing
pressure, shrinking constantly, as the wealth of species within
them is steadily reduced. Remorseless human population
growth, and continued flight of people from the country to the
cities will lead to the continued expansion of these cities, in
particular the shanty towns that surround the high-rise business
districts: islands of affluence in a sea of squalor. As the majority
of mankind come to live in predominantly man-made
environments, severing their links with the rural and semi-rural
environments which evolved over millennia, the question poses
ever more urgently of how we are to construct the landscapes in
which we will live. But the fact is, we no longer live in

landscapes, but cityscapes, or even midscapes,
soundscapes...new virtual realities created by information
technology and image manipulation. How do these effect the
communal sense of place which past societies evolved, and
through which they developed a sense of identity, of belonging
to a particular place? It seems likely that the effect of these new
technologies will be to anaesthetise the sense of place essential
for landscape sensibility. Increasingly, we are a society which
has before its eye images from elsewhere, but these elsewheres
increasingly seem to resemble one another, as the homogenising
effects of modernisation effect more and more parts of the
globe, just as the holiday destinations to which we dream of
escaping increasingly resemble one another, and the natural;
landscapes we dream of resemble theme parks, whose theme is
nature - like the Centre Parks now opening in the UK. Of course
it’s no use trying to freeze landscape in heritage areas. Living
societies evolve by transforming their environments. But the
opposite extreme from mummification, that of decomposition
into incoherence is equally alarming. The post-modem aesthetic
of do anything, anywhere, risks being just as damaging to a
sense of place as the modernist aesthetic which it replaces. The
end of the grand designs of modernism, especially those of the
modern movement in architecture, have left the landscape
directionless. No one knows quite what to do with it. And so
much the better. There is a need to abandon grand designs and
attempt to understand how each individual landscape is made,
how it evolves and how it functions. Working thus, we will be
better equipped to create worlds which are worth living in. And
it is here that the role of the landscape artist may be crucial to
the construction of a new sense of belonging to the planet.
 
Landscape, should now be clear, is more than just a
representation of the surfaces of things: it is the medium through
which we construct our common sense of the world. Artists
working in landscape need not feel marginalised, or provincial
to return to the quote from Harrison with which I began. And

what in fact does provincial mean? It means rooted in a specific
place, both historically and geographically. This is clearly at
odds with Modernism, which has detached artistic practice from
its roots in particular societies to claim autonomy for art, but
which has ended in a global phenomenon of everywhere,
everything the same. The same abstract paintings adorning the
boardrooms of identical office blocks in New York, Paris,
London and Hong Kong. Provincial may mean art that has
reengaged with life as it is lived in a particular place; art such as
that of Terry Setch, for example, studying his patch of Welsh
beach, a natural environment of sand and rock, continually
reshaped by the tides and the intrusive pollution of man - a
laboratory in which destructive global forces can be seen at
work. These works, as Paul Moorehouse has pointed out,
celebrate a new dissonant order forged from a marriage of the
natural and synthetic, and simultaneously they warn us of the
threat that man poses to his environment. Equally rooted in
particular rural locations are Michael Porter in Derbyshire, Ian
McKeever in Devon, and John Virtue in Exeter: all of them
reworking the language of modernism in the light of their
personal sense of place. Perhaps, as Keith Patrick has suggested,
provincial means no more than art before the processes of
international marketing have got hold of it. These artists all have
established reputations, and a proper analysis of their work and
its relationship to place might well redefine provincial in more
positive terms. I’d like to end, however, by considering the work
of two artists, a painter and photographer, whose work brings
these issues into particularly sharp relief. Landscape, in the
photographs of Charlie Meecham, is raw material shaped by
powerful economic and political forces, and the human
presence, a figure at the corner of a street, a face glimpsed in a
passing car, or an allotment surrounded by industrial wasteland -
seem barely of account. Nevertheless, this landscape of the
industrial North does bear witness to work-dominated lives, in
the ruined industrial buildings, dilapidated housing and eroded
tombstones which coexist uneasily, as if accidentally, with the
electrical transmission and road networks which strike across

this ravaged landscape with sovereign unconcern for the small
lives lived in their shadow. Many of the photographs are scenes
of such ordinariness as to seem like casual snaps. Empty car
parks, crowded traffic junctions, a traffic island in the middle of
nowhere, its street furniture an eerily modernist statement of
formal purpose in a landscape drained of meaning.
 
Meecham avoids aesthecicizing his subjects, declines to frame
and crop them in such a way as to bring to the foreground their
formal characteristics, preferring rather what he sees an
openness to interpretation, an invitation to the spectator to
engage with the implications of what the image often leaves
unsaid. And that, to me at least, is the question of how we have
allowed this extraordinary world to seem so ordinary, so given,
as though it were quite natural. The effect on the landscape of
road and motorway building programmes has intrigued
Meecham, who has followed the contractors over many months,
documenting the processes of construction and destruction in
what he describes as a non-judgmental way. His most recent,
on-going work also involves a road, whose existence may come
as news to many in these islands: the E20. This is a road
concept, much as a walk by Richard Long is an art concept: it
only exists in the minds of Brussels road planners and links
Limerick to Dublin, Liverpool to Hull, Esbjerg to Copenhagen,
Malmo to Stockholm and Tallinn to St Petersburg. The
geographically challenged may not have noticed that this route
involves no less than seven sea crossings, many of them not
served by ferries. Clearly this is a route of the mind, rather than
reality. Meecham, perversely perhaps, has been documenting its
English stretch, more familiar to you and I as the M62. He has
made two sets of pictures, one of the landscape seen from
moving lorries, the other set taken from fixed positions and
responding to the questions raised by the travelling glance, the
idea being to set up a dialogue by pairing the pictures and
possibly forming a sort of visual echo.

Meecham is intrigued enough by the project to want to extend it
across its whole European length, following a narrative thread
linking different cultures and landscapes, inspired by histories of
salt ways and silk roads from pre-industrial epochs. What is
palpable in Meecham's work is the sense of landscape as a
medium constantly evolving, expressive of our political and
social relationships, and often expressive in ways that are brutal
or functional or indifferent to human or aesthetic values - except
that these, too, are human in their raw purposefulness. The
natural is squeezed into corners, or glimpsed as a blurred outline
through a vehicle window - a background murmur whose voice
is easily drowned by the louder statements of roads.
The industrial North also figures significantly in the work of the
painter Alan Rankle, who grew up on the edge of Oldham,
surrounded by the relics of the industrial revolution, whose
presence is hidden and transformed with references to the
Arcadian landscape tradition. This willingness to address
tradition, running from Claude and Poussin through Turner to
our day, makes Rankle almost unique among contemporary
landscape painters, and it is perhaps in part a consequence of his
period working on the restoration of 18th and 19th century
landscape paintings. Rankle's aim, however, is not pastiche or
parody but rather a reappraisal of it’s tradition through it’s
disruption. There is a strong sense in Rankle’s work of
landscape as a site of conflictual readings, in which various
styles of representation vie for primacy - not as a mere exercise
in style but grounded in the struggle to convey in paint the direct
experience of landscape forms. Rankle has studied Chinese
brush painting techniques, as well as the mental and physical
discipline of Tai Chi (of which he is now a teacher) which have
strengthened his belief in the unique capacity of painting and
drawing as a vehicle for psychological inquiry. Long study of
natural forms, acute concentration and practice of manual skills
permit the artist to convey, in gestures of great economy and
directness, a form of knowledge which no other medium can
convey. Rankle's work enacts a confrontation between the direct
experience of nature and the mediating styles of art, and the

violence of this confrontation can be quite shocking on first
viewing. This initial emotional charge is gradually refined, on
prolonged attention, as the expressive gesture (so evocative of
the painter’s presence and his attempt to seize the reality of his
subject) gradually dissolves into the scene represented, recalling
as it does so, the landscape conventions of Claude or Ruysdael.
Rankle is a skilled performer of the act of seeing, and the
paintings offer us the pleasures of complex perceptual games:
see this blob of opaque golden paint as a gesture, replete with
the urgency of the painters hand, but see it also as the late suns
rays catching the trunk of a tree, magically reminiscent of
Claude. Dribbling glazes, abrupt marks made by large brushes
suggest the vocabulary of expressionism, but - combining
unexpectedly with delicately painted foliage remi¬niscent of
Ruysdael, suddenly transmute into representational marks
conveying atmosphere, light and shadow. The intertextuality of
which I wrote above, that links Latin pastoral poetry to Claude
and Poussin, down to Turner in the 19th century, is here
extended to embrace Chinese brush painting and abstract
expressionism. These paintings confront the reality of landscape
today as an unstable theatre of conflicting signs, a site in which
observation, gesture, description and abstraction seem to co-
exist and in his best work, to fuse into a momentary vision
uniting two thousand years of landscape tradition. If Meecham's
photographs raise questions about landscapes future, Rankle's
paintings assure us of the vitality of its past, and its continuing
vital role in our culture. As he has written, ‘For all of society’s
opposition to the natural environment, we and all our works are
nature... the medium is our collective psyche, our link with
Nature’ Essential to our post-modem situation is a painful
awareness that we create the landscape with our gaze. But also,
increasingly, with our bulldozers. And therein lie the problems
of tomorrow. Landscape can no longer be a means of escape
from history, from society, from ideology, into a world of
unmediated, unproblematic experience. Nature no longer seems
the Divine Other, as it did to the Romantics. The Sublime is
barely an option, except with a heavy coating of irony, sugaring

the bitter pill of loss. Nature today is so enmeshed with Culture,
and the planet so contaminated with our presence that neither
the upper surfaces of the atmosphere nor the deepest
parts of the ocean are free from our toxic wastes. Nature is no
longer wilderness, but rather our spoiled, soiled back yard. Our
Second Nature. Human Nature.