Transcriptions – Landscape
2nd August – 1st September 2007Pre 19th Century artists considered landscape as a decorative backdrop or symbolic motif with which to enhance a narrative – whether through religious, mythological or society painting. Landscape for the painter was a metaphysical rather than emotive experience to nature.
Artists such as Turner and constable liberated the genre from these constraints, and unleashed the artist’s imagination and with it a new approach to composition and painting techniques. This new passion for landscape – its vistas, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and distant horizons, heightened the artists’ sensibilities and revealed a primordial need to feel a close affinity to the natural world – a human rather than religious visual experience that marked the beginning of modernist painting.
Our second exhibition of transcriptions focuses on this genre and we have asked selected artists to choose a personally relevant landscape from art history and re-interpret it in their own style.
The artists have been testing themselves by working outside their normal boundaries, either through different ways of making an image or a complete shift in subject matter. For instance Patricia Rorie is working on a landscape rather than her normal portraits, and Andy Stewart’s work will use a more figurative approach than his usual gestural abstract painting. Some of the works in the show are more direct transcriptions than others – several are contemporary depictions of scenes that have changes in the intervening years, some use recognisable motifs from well-known paintings while not working in the same manner as the original, and others are more conceptual. As well as providing refreshing interpretations of other artists’ work, the exhibition demonstrates a good insight into the thought processes of participating artists.
By focusing on Landscape we hope to reveal the relevance of contemporary landscape painting in an age of conceptual and computer based art.