'Context' - A Blog
These figures stooking wheat in my railway painting 'Late Workers' are an essential component of the painting, but did they have to be?
The Meaning of a Figure in a Landscape (Part 2 of 2)
12/02/2021
Should the figures in our landscape paintings be harmonious or discordant, or even there at all?
After many years of thinking about it, I still have no clear idea of why nostalgic figures from the past in a painting seems to lend the art a simple, non-confrontational aesthetic, whilst figures of now seem to have the opposite effect. Our first ‘reading’ of modern figures seems to be one of jarring incongruence, perhaps even conflict. I can’t explain this, it seems to have no rational basis, and any sense of intuitive root I can see for it seems to centre around the simple power of nostalgia, which (rightly or wrongly) seems to colour our viewpoint to register aesthetic harmony, even where an informed view of the subject matter would lead us to expect discord.
If we can accept this as a truism, it seems to leave us (in landscape terms at least) with two choices: that of art that presents us with the now (with modern figures), but faces us with a sense of dissonance; or art that presents the past (with people from time gone by), but is simply escapist and has no bearing on our current relationships with the countryside. Possibly there is a third way, to just leave the people out altogether?
It all seems a bit of a fix. Perhaps though, we can quibble with semantics with purpose: Can we consider an apparent tendency towards escapism in this context as a tendency towards reflection? A mode of thought that is un-reactionary, but not un-progressive, a mode less prone to revolution, but not averse to muddling forward towards solutions. The long view. We cannot be always challenging ourselves confrontationally, but to be constantly peaceably questioning ourselves is a different modality.
Let us think back again to those wealthy Georgians and Victorians from the last article, favouring walls hung with paintings of idyllic rural harmony, whilst the social fabric of the countryside outside crumbled to dust around them. It is probably stretching a point, to note that the seeds of the next hundred years of (admittedly ever so slow) welfare reform were probably germinated in drawing rooms with some of the best landscape art in the Georgic tradition on their walls, but I can’t help feeling that it is worth noting.
To seek meanings in a landscape is a subtle and lengthy task. The first apparent meanings are often misleading.
The startling changes we notice often turn out to be the manifestations of elements of cycles of stasis that are remarkable for their longevity. The striking felling of 100 year old timber oaks in an ancient woodland seem like cataclysmic change in the view of one human lifetime, yet it is part of a sustainable cycle, that emerges in its stability from an unknown time in prehistory. The mowing of a field with a new Holland Tractor is merely another way of repeating the annual cycle of mowing the same field (albeit perhaps with more picturesque tools in the past to our eyes?) that has been repeated in many of the same fields for over a thousand years
.
The changes we don’t notice however might be the ones that really matter. The rapid loss of carbon based organic matter in the soils of our land is almost invisible, yet currently, maybe rates as one of the biggest threats to our ability to produce foods in the future. The parish boundary threading its invisible course across the countryside, marked only by the faintest dotted line on the map is still there, little changed, but no longer has the deep and divisive significance it held a couple of hundred years ago.
To contemplate a landscape in real life, or through its reflection in the gentler forms of landscape art, is to allow ourselves time and space to find real meaning. Perhaps the real problem of figures placed in a landscape painting is that they risk distracting us from having the reflective space to contemplate the art as a whole, in the same way that the sight of a family forgetting a picnic basket can hold our attention over and above a view of miles of unqualified beauty. Yet, not ever to include those same figures, past or present, risks missing the link that binds us all to them and the land they stand on.
If we can accept this as a truism, it seems to leave us (in landscape terms at least) with two choices: that of art that presents us with the now (with modern figures), but faces us with a sense of dissonance; or art that presents the past (with people from time gone by), but is simply escapist and has no bearing on our current relationships with the countryside. Possibly there is a third way, to just leave the people out altogether?
It all seems a bit of a fix. Perhaps though, we can quibble with semantics with purpose: Can we consider an apparent tendency towards escapism in this context as a tendency towards reflection? A mode of thought that is un-reactionary, but not un-progressive, a mode less prone to revolution, but not averse to muddling forward towards solutions. The long view. We cannot be always challenging ourselves confrontationally, but to be constantly peaceably questioning ourselves is a different modality.
Let us think back again to those wealthy Georgians and Victorians from the last article, favouring walls hung with paintings of idyllic rural harmony, whilst the social fabric of the countryside outside crumbled to dust around them. It is probably stretching a point, to note that the seeds of the next hundred years of (admittedly ever so slow) welfare reform were probably germinated in drawing rooms with some of the best landscape art in the Georgic tradition on their walls, but I can’t help feeling that it is worth noting.
To seek meanings in a landscape is a subtle and lengthy task. The first apparent meanings are often misleading.
The startling changes we notice often turn out to be the manifestations of elements of cycles of stasis that are remarkable for their longevity. The striking felling of 100 year old timber oaks in an ancient woodland seem like cataclysmic change in the view of one human lifetime, yet it is part of a sustainable cycle, that emerges in its stability from an unknown time in prehistory. The mowing of a field with a new Holland Tractor is merely another way of repeating the annual cycle of mowing the same field (albeit perhaps with more picturesque tools in the past to our eyes?) that has been repeated in many of the same fields for over a thousand years
.
The changes we don’t notice however might be the ones that really matter. The rapid loss of carbon based organic matter in the soils of our land is almost invisible, yet currently, maybe rates as one of the biggest threats to our ability to produce foods in the future. The parish boundary threading its invisible course across the countryside, marked only by the faintest dotted line on the map is still there, little changed, but no longer has the deep and divisive significance it held a couple of hundred years ago.
To contemplate a landscape in real life, or through its reflection in the gentler forms of landscape art, is to allow ourselves time and space to find real meaning. Perhaps the real problem of figures placed in a landscape painting is that they risk distracting us from having the reflective space to contemplate the art as a whole, in the same way that the sight of a family forgetting a picnic basket can hold our attention over and above a view of miles of unqualified beauty. Yet, not ever to include those same figures, past or present, risks missing the link that binds us all to them and the land they stand on.