Rediscovering the Landscape
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
The other day my grandmother revealed to me how little I have learned about reading people’s artistic preferences when she visited me at my commercial gallery job. I figured that a well-dressed octogenarian with a predilection for sumptuous floral prints and afternoons spent in the garden amongst her flowers would love the delicate, elegant watercolour lily or the bombastic pinks in an electric garden on canvas.
She kept saying to me, “Carolyn, I want something restful.”
I showed her about a dozen images pulled from the back rooms before she verbalized what she really wanted in a way that I could understand:
“I want a scene.”
As she described her desire to sit in her sunroom and gaze at a space that she could travel through on the wings of her imagination, I came to realize that she wanted to buy art in preparation for her increasingly sedentary life. It was a recent car accident and not her age that made it necessary to hang up her tap shoes. She wants to be visually led into an image via winding paths or wonder about the tenuous life a dilapidated barn clings to, barely held together with a few malformed and rusty old nails. Is that the remains of washed-out red paint in that image, or is it the reflected sunlight ricocheting from poppy field to barn?
I get it now, her need to have art as comfort, as reassurance, and as a way to be a part of environments inaccessible in real-life circumstances.
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When I began working in a commercial gallery, I was rather cynical about whether “serious” artistic value could be found in the shelves stacked tight and high with endless prairie landscapes. What is appealing to many but boring to me is the instant accessibility allowed by the incredibly literal and idealized prairies found on these canvases. My ideal art viewing experience is not something complex or particularly profound. I just want something that I can spend time looking at and thinking about. If all this work is done for me, leaving no secrets to uncover on the canvas, the intellectual work of art interpretation has been lobotomized.
There is a particular scene in the film High Fidelity that speaks to the relationship many people want with the art in their homes. John Cusack’s character is the owner of a Chicago record store, and after his obnoxious employee cranks the volume while playing some cheesy old pop song, he exclaims, “I just want something I can ignore!” No one wants to be forced to engage with a work of art in her or his own home or personal space. And in choosing to cultivate a looking relationship with a work of art in the regeneration centre that is one’s home, who wants to be made profoundly uncomfortable on a regular basis?
The wide and narrow canvases that contain vignettes of our prairie landscape have that instant soul food feeling. They are familiar, and therefore more likely to be safe and unchallenging to our eyes and intellects. Countless people filter through the gallery looking for an image to capture the affection or nostalgia they feel for their immediate surroundings. And it is in this exchange I have with patrons that I have found my own love of landscape painting.
I get it now - the private purchase and display of local landscape paintings is a way to reinforce an appreciation of the beauty and bounty of Alberta land.
I think this is a good thing, and a useful one for the arts. As far as I know, IKEA doesn’t sell reproductions of our prairies translated into two dimensions. To get the art you want, you have few choices beyond the locally owned galleries and perhaps a stall or two at a farmer’s market. Although a client who buys a work of canola fields that they love may not see it this way, there is an implicit political statement in the money spent by investing in the local creative economy. Of course there is privilege attached to having the considerable dollars necessary to own original art, but if the money of those who have more than a little is going to be spent somewhere, I can think of few better places than in support of artists.
As curator Anthony Easton distills in the title of the forthcoming show in the ProjEx room, “Not Another Fucking Landscape,” growing tired of landscape painting is an all too familiar feeling. I’m tired of talking about the Group of Seven too. I also have trouble finding the patience for fields of sunflowers and canola. And the unfortunate side effect of the G7 broken record played in tourism-motivated celebrations of Canadian painting is that the eye rolling applied to these shows can easily bleed into an understanding of all landscape painting.
I think we need to give our landscape painters more credit. From the time I’ve spent with landscapes by variety of local painters, I have grown to really enjoy the challenging and enjoyable experience of looking at these works. The variety of brushstrokes and colour palettes that convey the subtle range of tones in wild grasses and spectacular reflected light that dramatize the clouds in our skies. There is no shortage of energetic and unique approaches to mark-making and unusual use of materials.
Why should this be a surprise? I believe an over-saturation in a very particular approach to the landscape ends up colouring our assessment of all works. And I look forward to seeing how far the artists in Easton’s show can push us to challenge the idea that there is little value in interrogating our landscape, and preconceptions of what this means.
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In the coming weeks I will continue to search for the image that will capture my grandmother’s imagination and give her an instant portal into another intriguing world. I hope that I can find something that will give her the comfort and the rest for her mind that she seeks.
