About landscape painting

Recently I went to see the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, “A bigger picture”. Hockney, now in his seventies, remains active and prolific. Most of the work has been created in the last ten years and a lot of it was done specifically with the show in mind, especially for the large walls available to him. All the paintings on show are landscapes, revealing Hockney as a proud defender of a great English painterly tradition going back to the likes of Constable, Turner and Cotman. Most of these landscapes are of Yorkshire and as such deeply resonant to me as a fellow Yorkshireman. Hockney makes a strong case for figurative painting as a pleasure to the eye. Pretentious intellectual snobs may dismiss it as neither difficult nor challenging but they forget that art is intended not only to provoke but also to produce beauty.

The paintings are a celebration of nature in its wonderful ordinariness close to home. This is art that makes us look again at our surroundings and enjoy them more. It is also the art of a real skilled craftsman (Hockney cheekily remarked that he had personally made all the works on show, unlike he implied some of his contemporaries). Hockney is a fine draughtsman with a delight in colour. He has created some huge works (several metres across) made up of many canvases which fit together in a grid producing an effect that is quite physical, you feel yourself entering into the painted woodland.

Hockney has also worked hard at catching the changing seasons, doing the same landscape in spring, summer, autumn and winter (we are reminded of the series of paintings by Monet, eg of haystacks). He wants to show us the paradoxical permanence of ever changing nature in its repeated cycles. It is as if in old age after decades of having painted a great variety of subjects, nature is now what matters most to him and he has been fired with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to get all of this down while he still has the time. Because of this the paintings have a communicative spontaneity. Some may find the show repetitive, but I found the cumulative result makes landscape painting something far from static.

Some of my favourite painters were specialists in landscapes, I think in particular of Cézanne, Monet and Van Gogh (there’s a few references to Van Gogh in the show, eg hayfields and swirling blossoms).

To begin with, in the history of Western art, landscape was only valued as a backdrop to the human interest, the madonna and child or whatever the subject was. In one of my favourite Brueghels, “Hunters in the snow”, the landscape is magnificent, it structures the painting and is an important part of it, but ultimately it is only there to provide a framework for the human activity. It is also in fact totally imaginary, being a composite of familiar Flemish villages and Alpine vistas remembered from the road to Italy.

I suppose some of the first landscapes for landscapes’ sake were done by such 17thC Dutch painters as Van Ruisdael. These are flat landscapes with great lowering brooding skies and the odd windmill or belfry. In fact it was at this period that the Dutch word “landschap” was imported into the English language to describe this kind of painting. In a way these landscapes which are based on local reality are an extension of Dutch Golden Age genre paintings, that is scenes from everyday life, such as people in taverns, church interiors, servants pouring milk. Unlike their Italian counterparts painting biblical and mythological scenes on commission for the church and nobility, the Dutch painters were seeking to sell pleasing scenes to merchants who could relate to the subject matter.

A further boost to landscape painting came in the early 19thC with the Romantic movement’s admiration of nature. This is when the dramatic natural scene really takes off in such works as Caspar David Friedrich’s strangely remote and intimidating mountains. This is also the period of Constable and Turner. Slightly later, in France, Corot and the Barbizon painters start taking their easels outside to paint countryside scenes not far from Paris and this feeds directly into the ever popular work of Monet, Sisley, Pissaro and the like. Landscape for a time becomes the dominant genre in the 19thC. Then Cézanne starts to analyse the geometric structure of the view and Van Gogh to simplify the lines and colours stamping his own personality on it. From there it is a short step to Kirchner’s bold expressionist Alpine landscapes, but the interest of artists is already attracted to other more urban subjects and is beginning to veer off into abstraction. So it is quite refreshing after so many decades of neglect to see artists like Hockney return to landscape painting.

The bulk of my own paintings over the years have been landscapes. For the artist a landscape is a convenient subject, it’s there for free and it keeps still. it doesn’t move about as much as a person. As a painter you just have to choose your viewpoint, set up and get on with it. It isn’t of course quite that simple, as outdoors the light keeps on changing with the rise and fall of the sun and the passing of clouds. It tends to change much faster than you can get it down. One technique to deal with this challenge is seen in Greenaway’s film “The Draughtsman’s Contract”, where the artist is commissioned in the late 17thC by a nobleman to do a series of views of his country estate. He works on each picture in stages during a given time slot. I have often myself done a sketch on day one and then coloured it on successive days at the same time of day. That of course depends on the weather not having changed.

What I describe here holds for working in the field only from observation. You can of course make a few preliminary sketches and then go away and work from memory back in the studio. Before the impressionists and the outdoors movement, that was actually the usual technique, not least given the size of canvas worked on and the taste for fairly precise brushstrokes requiring time for the paint to dry before continuing. Hockney has used both techniques, working outdoors from observation and in the studio from memory, and you can compare the results in the show.

I myself prefer to paint from observation. For a start it’s a great excuse for sitting still outdoors and since I’m painting on a small scale with watercolours there’s no imperative reason to be indoors to do it, unless it’s really cold and I’m looking out of the window. Actually it’s the process of making the picture which I find as rewarding as the take home souvenir. It’s being forced to really observe and allow myself to become impregnated with the scene. During the drawing It’s about making countless decisions of my own on how to convert three dimensions into two instead of merely copying the flattening of the camera lens. During the colouring it’s about how I attempt to convey the impression of colour I perceive. Even from one position we see from a variety of viewpoints as we move our eyes and change our focal distance. We subjectively highlight certain shapes and patches of colour which become for us focal points even if in terms of overall surface area they are insignificant. How often have you taken a photograph and been disappointed with it because it is not what you thought you saw ?

When they are successful I find my landscapes closer to how I remember a place than a photograph, in the sense that they convey a certain feeling as much as what is inevitably an imprecise graphic record.

Here are six of my landscapes.

Cévennes, France

Julian Alps, Italy

Hermanus, South Africa

Elba, Italy

Hvar, Croatia

Dolomites, Italy

About my reading in 2011

About my reading in 2011

Looking at the list of books I read In 2011, I seem to have increased the share of non-fiction, though not greatly compared to 2010.

My big achievement in this area was to read Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” which I had failed to finish on a previous attempt. The trick is not to get stuck on the pseudo mathematics “let x be..” and the intimidating looking formulae. You just skip over them because he nearly always immediately goes over the same argument again in less abstract and plainer English. He is very convincing and it’s hard to diagree with him, so you end up really wishing his policies were being acted on more right now. The great thing about Keynes is that he sees money not as an end in itself but as a means to satisying needs. For him the real purpose of economic policy should be to provide employment and this is too important a task merely to be left to the markets and speculators, for they fail at it. There is a clear rôle for the state. In our twenty-first century, post-cold-war world of roaring unfettered capitalism, that is of course an unwelcome message to big finance. But Keynes’ time will come again, the economies of the developed world are in free-fall, and his policies are what we need in order to return to a fairer world of shared prosperity. Not that Keynes was a socialist by any means, but he grasped why certain economic behaviour is actually counter-productive, even if that may seem counter-intuitive.

An easier but very enlightening read on contemporary economics is Lanchester’s “Whoops” a great explanation of how we got where we are in the current crisis; but offering no quick-fix solution, although he clearly points in the direction of my own preferred option: nationalize the banks, because they have failed us, lost the plot and are starving the real economy of its lifeblood.

In the popular science department, I read Deutscher’s “Through the language glass” a potentially intriguing book for a linguist on the subject of how the language we speak may influence the way we think. In the end he spends most of his time on just two examples: the well known fact that words for colours are not an exact match between languages; and the fascinating case of some remote tribal languages that base directional information not on the changing egocentric view of the speaker (eg left, right) but on a fixed geographical framework (eg north, south).

I was going to read all of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” but somehow ran out of steam half-way through volume 2 around about Justinian. Volume 1 is a cracking good read though.

I read a couple more books by De Botton “Status Anxiety” and “Architecture of Happiness” but I’m starting to find him a little inconsequential; although he writes elegantly and makes some good points, he can give you the feeling of lacking an overall compelling argument which leads you to a conclusion.

Weightier indeed was J.S. Mill“On Liberty” and “On Utilitarianism”, two basic texts of political philosophy.

My Hellenist friend Umberto gave me a good essay by Grosdent “La Grèce existe-t-elle?”, which is amusingly written in the style of a Platonic dialogue. The subject turns out to be quite topical with the ongoing crisis (Greek word of course) in Greece. Grosdent takes to task the Western idealizing vision of an Ancient Greece that probably never was but which causes disappointment when confronted with the Modern Greece. He argues that the modern is indeed a descendant of the ancient, it’s just that we were a bit naive about the ancient.

Rousseau’s “Confessions” I guess I should still include under non-fiction, though they have clear literary pretensions. They are in fact two books. The first is quite disarmingly frank and a fascinating read. In the second book his confessions start to get more paranoid and self-justificatory. However, while on the subject of himself as a young man he has no particular axe to grind and this is a refreshingly sincere warts-and-all autobiography. I certainly frequently thought “what a prat”, but this perhaps is the point as he challenges us into questioning some of our own unreflecting behaviour, certainly when young and more spontaneous. Clearly the biggest problem with Rousseau is that he gave away his own children for adoption and then proceeded to pontificate in vast tomes on education. What a prat! I’m sorry but there’s no way around that one.

I also read “Le contrat social” which like many French monuments is not all it’s cracked up to be. This short text is a bit overly descriptive of existing systems and skimpy on ground-breaking political thought; it is rather lightweight compared to Hobbes and Mill. The French intellectual establishment is good at self-publicity, whereas the English, in so far as it exists, tends to forget its own heroes.

I also re-read some of Pascal’s “Pensées”, actually as it’s name suggests a collection of often brilliant insights though never mustered into a coherent whole.

I turn now to fiction. Last year I got seriously into audio-books for very long car journeys, so one or two of these titles were actually listened to rather than read, but I think we can still count that in this survey.

I re-read Dostoievski’s “Crime and Punishent”. I still think a great book, but it doesn’t get any less strange and let’s be frank, Raskolnikov must be pretty unhinged to kill just out of curiosity.

New to me on the classics front was Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”, a ripping yarn whose resourecful heroine endears herself to the reader notwithstanding her breaking of several moral codes.

Stendhal’s “Chartreuse de Parme” is another epic adventure story, this one also offering a study of ambition and of the Italian psyche.

Another French classic was Balzac’s “Lys dans la vallée” which is worth persevering with through all the descriptive passages for its rather unexpected outcome which puts the rest into a different perspective.

The author I read most of last year and who was new to me was Emile Zola. I listened to the early murder story “Thérèse Raquin” and read six of the series of twenty novels about related characters from the same large family, the Rougon-Maquart, living in France in the mid 19thC, so almost contemporary with him. Zola wanted a real setting for his stories or “natural” as he called it, but to our modern minds it is more often what we would call urban and industrial. He researched each novel carefully and includes fascinating descriptions of how things work rather than the rather boring superficial descriptions of how things look typical of Balzac. In fact the setting takes on a life of its own and plays a leading rôle as one of the characters, an infernal machine often consuming and destroying the working man. Thus Germinal is about coal-mining and an ill-fated strike, la Bête humaine about the railways and living with a murder on your conscience, l’Assomoir about working class alcoholism, l’Oeuvre unsuccessful artists contemporary with the impressionists, Nana about the theatre and high-class prostitution, and l’Argent about the stock exchange and speculation. These seem surprisingly modern subjects for novels over a century old. In terms of plot, I find Zola refreshing, instead of yet another love story, improbable action packed adventure or whodunnit, the interest relates to the outcome of a more down to earth drama. Zola’s characters are frequently weak and driven by money and/or lust. His dialogues are convincingly real. I like him, so I may yet read the other fourteen.

After all last year I read my 17th and 18th Graham Geene the early “England made me” set mainly in Stockholm and the late “The Human Factor”, a realistic cold-war counter-espionage story. Perhaps, with their eye for sordid local detail and what really motivates people, Greene and Zola have a lot in common.

And so, finally, to recent fiction.

On a Jonathan Coe recommendation I bought the acclaimed Japanese novelist’s Murakami’s “Wind-up bird chronicle”, which like many books I buy would probably have adorned my shelf unread for a long time had it not been for a theatrical adaptation of it I was going to see at the Edinburgh Festival. Anything Japanese brings with it a certain sense of other-worldliness, something for which I think the expression “cultural difference” is too polite to render the utterly different take on life. Coe said he admired Murakami’s writing for the way in which everyday life serves in it as a trigger for profound insights into the human experience, which is in his way what Coe does in his writing. Only Coe is Western and Murakami is Japanese. So Wind-up bird turns out to be startlingly original, certainly for a Western reader, and often quite odd, even unsatisfying, but definitely not boring and sometimes actually quite poetic in its imagery in a way that stays with you afterwards.

The American Jonathan Frantzen has a huge reputation, and I loved “The Corrections” written in 2001. He is not very prolific and his next novel “Freedom” only appeared in 2010. I think it is good but not as good as “the Corrections”. I also had troubles with it stylistically and I suspect that his choice of a simple English close to the colloquial American vernacular will make it age quickly. Still it is very much a novel for today about what is wrong with America today.

Mathhew Kneale’s “English Passengers”, which won the Whitbread prize for a first novel 10 years ago, is a styslistic tour de force being written in as many different styles as its various narrators. It’s a great many-layered story, both funny and moving, initially about how a Manx smugglers’ ship gets chartered for a crackpot vicar’s quest to find the Garden of Eden, but ultimately about 19thC British colonial racist treatment of Tasmanian aborigines. The ending is brilliant.

Finally let me talk about Joe Powell’s “Breaking of eggs”. The title comes from Stalin’s famous quote comparing making a revolution to making an omelette, “it can’t be done without...” The hero is a Polish born communist sympathizer living in Paris who used to make his living writing tourist guides about Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin wall and state socialism changes all of that and he embarks on a journey of political and self-discovery, realizing he has been living in a world of self-delusion and that many lives including his own were broken by the old system. It is a fascinating story written in a thoughtful, sensitive, uderstated way that evokes a huge chunk of post-war history we have been hastily brushing under the carpet or summarizing in convenient slogans.

So that’s what I have been reading over the last year. I hope you may be stimulated to try some of these titles for yourself.