Liminal Zones - Towards A Poetic Horizon

“The edge of a painting is its frontier, where the artist negotiates his boundaries with the real world.” - Andrew Graham-Dixon

In art the aphorism ‘It’s not just the path you choose to take, but how you choose to walk it’, often defines the perceived identity of the artist. Some artists are so strongly identified by and with their work that their identity and their work become elevated in a cloud of mythology. Especially those with a strong style - Warhol, Picasso, Basquiat, Banksy. Context is everything. The art is the artist and vice versa.

In my own work, the landscape is the context for every living experience here on Earth. Even the oceans exist on a bed of rock. As we look across the land, the horizon is the last visible surface; the very edge, the very limit of the solid/liquid Earth, above which everything is vapour, gas and space. The boundaries between subsequent layers become increasingly obscure as the atmosphere peters out.

The landscape paintings I make are often dark, monochromatic, superficially empty; apparently unoccupied. Ethereal tonal and textural shifts underpin and overlay spontaneous, improvised ‘calligraphic’ mark making, organic details and forms. Always there is the horizon delineating the edge of the visible world. But this edge shifts. Every step we take towards it, so it moves on a step. The edge/horizon is as easily a perpetual, incremental shift as a sudden cut to something else. And because the world is a ball, we can chase the horizon, the edge forever. There is only change and continuity.  

Conversations about my landscapes often revolve around the impression of aged conflicts and aftermaths. Arbitrarily select a period of time between the formation of the Earth and its current state and draw a line; a horizon. At first empty, devoid of any animate presence, but there is always geology, weathering, erosion, movement and change. Once, there were no fences, no borders, no roads; only horizons. There was a time when the Earth was simultaneously burnt and frozen; a time when life on Earth was microbial, small, but on an epic, epic scale; enough to change the composition of the atmosphere and the evolution of life on the planet. These are dynamic spaces. Change and continuity.

Such boundaries are imaginary and crossing them or transgressing becomes an impossibility. So in art, how can we tell a simple line is a horizon and above it sky, below it Earth? Anthony Gormley refers to “The space occupied by the human consciousness when our eyes and ears are closed”. The senses are the horizon between our selves and the world. Our images, our lives are lived on internal landscapes. Our consciousness is an ethereal presence. When we look, we occupy. But ultimately we cannot efface the permanence of loneliness. There is nobody in here but me. All the rest are ghosts, memories, dreams, fantasies; implications of a population/presence. The weather and geological processes are effects of external experience; erosion of memory, the corrosiveness of living. All of this is drawn through an awareness of tonality and texture that extends into atmosphere, mood and space; grey, liminal. The senses are the boundary, the interface, the horizon between what is solid and what is esoteric, our selves and the world.

You can see much more of my landscape painting on Flickr --> Here

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