Right Here. Right Now.

Writing about one’s art is risky business, especially visual art. My work is not language based and the ideas don’t easily translate. However, in an effort to give some insight into the work and its origins, here goes….

I admire theory but it is experience I trust.

Revolution, Watch and Horizons are made directly from observation to record what I see accurately, spontaneously and without addition or subtraction. In this way the wind, the rain and the sun are in the driver’s seat, not me.

Even as a student I knew these ideas were important to me and I also knew if I was to make any kind of contribution to ‘landscape painting’ I had to come to terms with Impressionism first. It is well documented that they sought to accurately record what they saw also. I knew that for me understanding their work meant doing more than just looking at the paintings, reading their letters and studying the theory in which their work is placed. I knew It meant learning their techniques too so I could stand in their shoes and see Impressionism with my hands. And so, even though I had no interest in becoming an impressionist painter myself (what would be the point of reinventing the wheel and making paintings that look like they belong to the 1880’s?) I set about copying their paintings in the museum. I focussed primarily on Monet’s work. I learned to grind my own pigments to achieve the viscosity needed to make his marks. I learned to fashion the brushes and knives he used. I learned how to order his gestures and build his images and then I went out into the world to commune with nature and explore his way of expressing it. I learned many things from this work and perhaps most importantly I learned that any desire to impose a landscape painting onto environmental experience gets in the way of direct expression. As talented and quick as he undoubtedly was, what one ends up with is ultimately a fiction. A compelling fiction perhaps but a fiction nonetheless. Environmental phenomena moves too quickly to account for all the relationships they attempted to account for and I think it is fair to say that all of them acknowledged as much. Whatever impressionist paintings are, they are better characterized as creations rather than accurate records of experience.

I try to put the recording of experience ahead of everything else. The way the work is made - and viewed - is determined by the environment and not by the goal of making a landscape.

Each day is a unique evolution of independent yet causally connected experiences. Nothing is ever repeated. How could it be? Nature knows nothing of repetition. This is as true of a space measured in millimeters as it is of grand vistas.

Ben Whitehouse