Studio notes & field studies
The commission to make seven paintings for Villa Rose on Isola delle Rose came following an earlier work I’d completed for the same client, entitled ‘Une Autre Fois en Fragments’ an installation for the Paris Marriott Opera Hotel.
In discussions with the owners of Isola delle Rose I explained how I wanted the commission to reflect
the Venetian landscape in its iconic aspects and also depict the sense of mystery present in the hidden backwaters and byways of the place, while at the same time evoking something of the rich legacy of Venetian art.
The works of painters of the Venetian School along with the paintings of other notable 17th century artists have been of great interest to me since my student days. In the early 1970’s studying at Goldsmiths’ College in what was to become a conceptual forum of contemporary art I nonetheless found myself increasingly drawn to the theatrical virtuosity and sheer articulateness of artists like Titian, Ruisdael, Salvatore Rosa and Claude Lorrain.
It seemed to me these painters, in making an astounding leap in terms of painterly methods and techniques had also uncovered a way to reconcile the need for art to retain a sense of the urgent visceral immediacy within the instinctive rapport we have with nature. They opened the doorway for the development of painting as an art in Modern Times.
The art of these painters, and other later masters and visitors such as Tiepolo and Turner is inextricably entwined with the extraordinary cultural legacy of Venice and I began to look for ways to reference their presence obliquely in the studies towards the paintings.
For the commission in Paris I’d begun to explore techniques introduced to me by a friend, the Norwegian artist Per Fronth whose work I’d initially been impressed with in New York. Per who
started out as a documentary photographer, had developed a way of creating photographic prints on roughly painted surfaces which brought a more powerful physical presence to the image. I could see how the same method could be expanded to involve several layers of painted and printed imagery which could be integrated by, for example photographing already painted surfaces and printing these back onto the canvas at a later stage as the painting evolved through successive glazes – making a kind of time-lapse sequence of related gestural imagery.
As the work progressed in the studio the relationship of these paintings made by such fast developing methods, to the sense of optical depth, and sense of mystery, one finds in old master paintings became quite clear. In terms of imagery the working studies and drawings began to fall into two distinct groups, scenes of panoramic coastal views featuring the iconic seafronts and waterways and more intimate works depicting the hidden life of the city and in particular the mysterious world of the tourist mask shops with their medieval looking displays of strange demons and outlandish faces. These aspects of Venice intertwine in some of the later pieces and mark a point where the ideas in the studio overflowed from the commission for La Villa to become a longer series of ongoing works.
As well as the paintings which I’d titled ‘Alluvione di Nero’ as a reference to the encroaching environmental threat to Venice created by global warming.
I wanted to develop some wider possibilities from the accumulation of drawings, oil studies and photo-montages.
A suite of prints and paintings on gold leaf made in collaboration with Rebecca Youssefi entitled ‘Alluvione d’Oro’ focus on the cultural interplay of the interrelated Venetian traditions of Church and Carnival. In these pieces the sumptuous religious iconography of Venice is juxtaposed with the emblematic folk imagery of the Masquerade and it’s elemental libertarian motifs. Another interesting development from these studio notes and ideas came about through a commission to design an architectural intervention for the ‘Coastal Currents’ festival in St. Leonards-on-Sea called ‘Point of Decay’ which gave the opportunity to bring elements of the Venetian seascape to be installed directly facing the English Channel – a play on the notion of 19th century artists such as Turner and Bonnington returning from the Grand Tour bearing treasures and tales of Italy – yet with an undercurrent of concern for the fragile nature of these increasingly vulnerable seaside towns.
Alan Rankle
St. Leonards-on-Sea 2015