GUTHANNA ÁR SINSEAR

Guthanna Ár Sinsear

(Voices Of Our Ancestors)

This 60cm x 30cm canvas is currently available for sale over on my Big Cartel site at losdave.bigcartel.com

Inspired by painting the big wall at Southsea Coffee Co. I spent a couple of hours in the studio at the weekend - the first productive studio time I've spent since Christmas. The whole concept and mythology surrounding these ancient megalithic landscapes has really got the ol' juices flowing.

Anyone familiar with my landscape work will recognise the themes of emptiness and wilderness. I choose my words carefully in describing these places because while they are unpopulated, they are far from barren or desolate. Often, there is a great deal of life in them, it's just not immediately obvious. This is partly because I was diverted from the clichéd path of the tiny figure in the large abstract landscape at college, with dire omens and the foretelling of a doomed career in Graphic Design - the 'Dark Side' of illustration!

I have a natural aversion to populating my landscapes with tiny figures. My enduring interest is in the idea of the landscape while it was still pristine and undivided. When the only borders and boundaries that existed were formed naturally by geological and meteorological processes; where coasts meet the oceans, valleys, rivers, mountains, forests and plains.

I've said elsewhere that for a long time, I've been itching to do something with the subject of ancient archaeology; standing stones, stone circles, Mesolithic and neolithic structures. This period lies on the path to the imperative to decorate ourselves and our surroundings; to communicate and tell stories, to record events, to remember and respect the past, to make 'art', something deeply, deeply primal.

These archaeologies mean I can add traces of habitation without obvious direct references to actual people. Stone monuments refer to 'us' rather than 'me'. They are both in and of the landscape and they have a strong sense of 'other-worldliness'. It's a huge psychological leap to understand that these structures were built by the same people as us - our ancestors, and that their culture is as embedded in our DNA as these massive stones are embedded in our landscapes.

I imagine that somewhere in the long distant past there was a man who stood in the tall grass eddying under a windswept leaden sky, with the shadows of the forest at his back, atop a hill looking out over an untamed landscape, who looked at his companions and said* "You know what would look fricking amazing just here, right... You remember that sort of bluey grey granite we saw up that mountain in Wales?"

*But in Gaelic

This painting has now sold, but you can still Follow me on ArtFinder