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art, arts, British Library, creativity, high tide, landscape, marsh, marshes, words
Marsh, mixed media on paper, copyright Diana Hale
Having written last time about the British Library Writing Britain exhibition of writers interpreting place and landscape, I was consciously thinking about this while painting this week. The rather provocative second part of my title (given a lot of those who read my blog are writers!) refers to a slightly different but related aspect of representation and how it works, which I leave in the air.
Saltmarsh, mixed media on watercolour paper on board, copyright Diana Hale
The marshes above are painted somewhere I know well and that means a lot to me, with associations personal and literary in fact. However it could be anywhere. There are no distinguishing features or combination of features to locate it in a particular place. As I wrote a month or so ago on a guest post on Under a Grey Sky this is very much what I am aiming for in my painting. One advantage of this may be to make them appeal to more people – anyone who likes this type of landscape whether a marsh in Norfolk, Essex, Hackney or Wales, or even Maine or South Carolina. The painting at the beginning and the ones below are a different marsh from that above.
Marsh Sunrise, mixed media on paper, copyright Diana Hale
Do people want to know where something is painted? Or do they just appreciate the language of the painting? – colour, brushstrokes, lines and marks, space, atmosphere. The composition can be a more specific element to locate a place geographically as well as climate or vegetation, but not necessarily.
Marsh High Tide, mixed media on canvas, copyright Diana Hale
I may be consciously trying to do something or reacting to something or somewhere while painting and probably a bit of both. Painting in a place or afterwards or from imagination will all make a difference to the finished work as well as time of day, season, weather if in situ. What else affects the creative process? – mood, time factors, outside pressures.
All creative endeavours are making something out of nothing, whether in words or pictures or other materials – clay, fabric or whatever. Poetry may be more like painting as it can be more abstract and less specific than a novel. Photography can be specific or more abstract or universal. I am starting to ramble a bit here so maybe it is time to stop for further reflection. Any thoughts?
Further reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words
Reblogged this on photos4share.
Diana,
These paintings are so lovely. I especially like Marsh Hide Tide; something about the light.
I do like to know where things take place, but that’s because I have serious wanderlust and am always looking for new landscapes that inspire me. That being said, there is something mysterious and quintessential about a place being a place being a place. We can see a bit of our own life places in it, no matter where we are.
I say yes. Very nice paintings!
To know where a work of art (and your work certainly achieves that status)is set does not necessarily improve the experience for the viewer. What that knowledge does do is transform that art into a document of time and place that can be referred to for ever more.
I try in a stumbling way to do this with words. This is why I don’t delve too deeply into historical detail on my travels. I want them to know what it was like at that moment that I saw that particular place. In more subtle ways I’m sure your mood affects the way that you paint.
No matter that I don’t know where it is set, your work always provokes an emotional response in me. Edge-lands defy definition in any case. Knowing where you are on The Medway carries no certainty of finding your way back from it!
Good to hear your thoughts on this. I agree about mood and capturing the moment in time without being too concerned about where one is!
P.S. I see that Julian has already said in a beautifully succinct way what I was trying to express in my over-long ramble! Sorry for the mini-essay!
Beautiful work, Diana… I particularly love the shimmer of light in ‘Marsh High Tide.’ That triggers a deep sense of recognition and remembered experience in me. I think that’s what is most important for me, when I’m reacting to a sense of place in an art work – that recognition of experience of the elements, and the particular spirit of a landscape. If a painting has captured the essence of a marsh, woodland, moorland… whatever landscape it depicts, the truth of that is the factor that reaches me, more than a need to know if it is of a specific, identifiable place. It’s kind of a universal spirit of place-identity, rather than a pinned down, geographically located one – though, having said that, it is wonderful when the two coincide! One of my mum’s friends is an artist, and his wonderful paintings of the village landscape where I grew up, transport me back there when I feel exiled and missing those soft, tree-topped hills…
I think a picture conveys place in a more instant way than words – with that all-in-one, immediate impact you take in with your eyes, all those neurons firing instant reactions and associations in a matter of seconds. More will slowly unfold of course, the longer you look at a painting – but it takes time to even initially unfold the experience of a place with words. A poem can give you more of that immediately felt impact of a painting. A novel allows you to live in a place in all its changes and seasons, and from the many perspectives of different characters. The place interacts as a character with the people within the narrative, and with the reader. Our reactions to paintings are entwined with so many of the experiences and perceptions we bring to them – and we paint pictures with our own imaginations when we experience a place through words… All magical experiences!
Please don’t apologise for such a heartfelt response. I love reading these rambling or succinct comments! You echo my own feelings so much especially that ‘universal spirit of place-identity’! It is very encouraging to evoke recognition or remembered experience in other people through my paintings.
Marvellous work here, Diana! Marsh and Saltmarsh particularly speak to me, pulling me in to remembered places while at the same time evoking landscapes that I’d love to explore. Words require our imagination to work in tandem with them, while painting or photography has a visceral and immediate quality rendered through our eyes. They reach us within seconds (though that can be deepened with repeated viewing) while written places arrive more slowly, being built up through an accumulation of details. I can’t say whether a picture is worth a thousand words, but I do know that my life would be less than it is if I had to lose either one of them. The places crafted through both mediums hold me in their clasp.
Thank you Julian for such a well considered response. I think we all seem to agree there is a difference in response to different art forms. The importance of place seems to most people to have an element of personal interpretation and/or association as I suspected. I certainly agree that both words and pictures are central to and essential to my life as well.
Lovely work Diana. Marsh Sunrise is my favourite. It’s funny how they also remind me of parts of the Fife coastline which perhaps also ties into how I personally would answer your question. I suppose for me place matters when the artwork/text establishes some form of reference that the viewer/perceiver engages with not necessarily on a particular place specific level. In general, some images speak to me whilst others don’t even though they may be better executed artistically. I suppose it’s back to that notion of the viewer completing the meaning of a text/artwork and that will always have some degree of subjectivity regardless of the intention of the artist/author. (Think I’m rambling now so I’ll stop!).
Absolutely – all responses to art work of any kind are subjective and I think where there is room for the viewer to bring their own associations, interpretations or whatever to their appreciation they are adding something to it. Thanks for adding your comments and don’t apologise for rambling!
More of your gorgeous blues (and that yellow…)
I’ve got pictures, cards or other images that remind me very specifically of a certain time and place, but where they are painted doesn’t seem to matter – I can find an image a couple of years after being in a particular landscape or scene and be taken straight back there even though the image might be deepest Scandinavia or somewhere completely unrelated to the place I associate it with. Don’t know if it’s light or colour or shadow, or a particular movement in the image, but it’s that recreation of an atmospere I locked away which I associate with the place, not the physical representation of the location…
Images (or anything other than writing) – and the creating of them or the observing of them – I’ve always felt come from a ‘free’ place. They seem to come straight out of somewhere mercifully loose from analysis because what goes into them is spontaneous and feeding on all those bits of history and future and present that make up our consciousness. Of course writing comes from this place, but the very nature of words creates a process not unlike translation of the feeling (or whatever we want to call it).
How’s that for rambling then?!
There are a lot of interesting aspects here which I do agree with. Association is what makes something personal to someone and atmosphere is a more abstract element of meaning. I think some painters do work in a more conscious or deliberate manner but not to the extent a writer has to. Thanks for the ramble!
Hi. In ‘Marsh High Tide’ you have achieved the sparkles on the water. jane
Thanks Jane. Thanks for the other likes and the follow too.
I think you’re right – it takes a gifted writer to evoke landscape or place as convincingly or concisely as a painting (or photograph?). Dickens was good, of course, and there are other novelists, too. But it’s poets who manage to do it with as few deft touches as a painter. This is Alice Oswald, evoking the source of the Dart:
tussocks, minute flies,
wind, wings, roots…
listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it
Thomas A Clark, in ‘The Hundred Thousand Places’ manages it, too:
knee-deep in bracken
wade out into green
the displaced waves
of bracken fronds
settling around you
Or –
stretching inland
blackland and moorland
grassland and acid heath
a dark country
of heather and moor grass
of deer grass and moss
around the ruined
sheep folds and shielings
green islands
of sweet vernal grass
bent grass and fescue
rescue wilderness
I really like these, btw, especially Saltmarsh, the second one. Thanks for sharing them.
Thank you Gerry for those excellent examples. I do love Alice Oswald’s work especially. I didn’t know Thomas Clark so he is someone to follow up on. I did ‘Saltmarsh’ last week and the others were done together a few weeks ago. I do think they are quite different in style as well as place!
I love the painting. Marshes have a strange atmosphere – you have it spot on.
Thanks for that!
Diana, i love the first 2 paintings…the colours in particular. In Art & Lies Jeanette Winterson begins with a quote from a lecture, i think. It states that every work of art is its own world and must be entered on its own terms. I’m paraphrasing, but hopefully not missing the point. I don’t necessarily need to know where something is painted or written or composed. I agree with that quote. I mean, if a physical place–factual or imagined–is a huge part of the work, then it has to be at the fore. And sometimes place-context is crucial because of its significance. I guess i would say it depends on what role place has in the work. Happy weekend to you
Well put Kathryn and I like the Jeanette Winterson quote – I shall look that up. Thanks for again giving some useful feedback.
Here you go:
The nature of a work of art
is to be not a part, nor yet
a copy of the real world
(as we commonly understand
that phrase),
but a world in itself,
independent, complete, autonomous;
and to possess it fully
you must enter that world,
conform to its laws,
and ignore for the time the beliefs,
aims, and particular conditions
which belong to you
in the other world of reality.
(Oxford lectures on poetry:
Professor Bradley: 1901)
–Art & Lies, Jeanette Winterson
wow…absolutely stunning
Glad you like them!
Your paintings evoke a strong sense of place–beautifully rendered. I especially admire Marsh Sunrise.
Thanks Doug – I’m always interested in which paintings different people prefer!