Landscape

It’s been a week of landscapes and of contrasts.  Proper landscapes with bleak Lancashire moorland, pasture, shallow stony streams and solid stone-built farms and outbuildings.  As you might imagine the countryside of Lancashire if you were pondering it.  Or maybe not – in the valleys and occasionally straggling up the hillsides are the industrial towns; Accrington, Blackburn, Burnley, Nelson.  And the over-grown townlets of places like Clayton-le-Moors or Great Harwood.  And finally, the smarter places with their country feel still intact – Clitheroe, Whalley, Ramsbottom.  If you drive aimlessly in your campervan (a Lancashire drift) then you lurch from soot grimed stone to the scent of cow and back again in the blink of an eye.  One unexpected set of traffic lights and you are in the throes of a nineteenth-century building boom.  One sharp left turn and you are on a single-track road to the top of a moor and breath-taking views forever if only there was space to stop for a moment.

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I don’t mind a portrait, I admire some religious art and neo-classical stuff just annoys me with its anachronisms.  But I do love a landscape – especially when it is as the artist sees it, not as it is.  Which is true I suppose of Constable.  But my favourite landscapes are those of 20thc artists.  Close enough to be tangible, far enough away to feel other-worldly.  Ivon Hitchens, Winifred Nicholson, John Piper, Ben Nicholson (all the usual suspects).

I’m trying to find my own way into landscape through weaving – how to represent what it means to me, how much it matters.  The way it waits whilst humans rush around on its surface – changed (those moors aren’t ‘natural’) but enduring.  I don’t want my work to be twee or superficial or overly complex, but that intersection between time and place… that’s tricky.  So, I sketch and make samples and I reckon that I could make a life out of weaving Lancashire if I chose (always good to have a plan…).