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Painting & landscape: extending the dialogue |
Clea H Notar
Riverfall
Reprinted from ‘Painting and Landscape: Extending the Dialogue’,
exhibition catalogue, Southampton City Art Gallery, 1993 |
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As was so pointedly illustrated by much of the performance work
and ideas of Joseph Beuys, late twentieth century culture has become
characterised by the mediation of science and technology to such an
extent that we have had to invent for ourselves or discover in other
cultures, rituals with which we can re-experience nature; by which
we can free it from ideology. This return to an integrated state constitutes
a hope against the threat posed to nature by a Western culture of
hyper-consumerism and hyper-fragmentation. In this context the role
of the landscape artist has become more urgently political just as
the re-appropriation of our environment as an objectified and reified
image has become a politicised act. The history of Western landscape
painting is littered with the representation of nature as a backdrop
for portraits of power; the land having been reduced to a sigh of
the power of patriarchal man to tame and possess. Images which acknowledge
a plurality of possible origins, representations and states of reception,
are images which imply integration and equilibrium, ideas which stand
opposed to hierarchy and property ownership. Alan Rankle’s painting
is concerned with the ‘disruption of tradition rather than its
abandonment’. It is born from a studied practice and an empathetic
and receptive immersion with his subject matter; our natural environment.
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To a Hidden Place #3 2002
oil on canvas
4 1 x 41cm |
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At the age of sixteen, as a student at Rochdale College, Alan Rankle
developed an early interest in Chinese painting and poetry. He also
encountered and was inspired by the ideas of John Cage, through a
guest lecturer at Rochdale, a Black Mountain student. At Goldsmiths’
College Rankle wrote his BA thesis on the Origin
and Development of Early Chinese Landscape Art. At this time
landscape work was being translated into acts of land art and earth
work by Christo, Robert Smithson and Richard Long amongst others.
A commitment to landscape painting would have been highly unfashionable
at the time – the iconoclastic art stance within the iconoclastic
art world. Rankle remains active in both the tradition of landscape
painting and the burgeoning movement of installation and performance,
all the while continuing to explore the ideas and culture of both
the East and West.
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Untitled #1 2001
gesso, oil and ink on paper
38 x 29cm |
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It was during a six year period in Yorkshire, where Rankle produced
the Endless River Landscapes,
a series which were his first major group of works to relate the
precepts of Chinese painting to the Western naturalistic tradition
of landscape painting. It was here, too, that Rankle first concentrated
solely on the medium of painting. Using oils, pastels and watercolours,
he created small scale studies which were painted, en
plein air; simultaneously continuing and commenting on the
tradition of the landscape painter literally painting in the field.
The image is one which fits a mythopeic vision of the Romantic
nineteenth century landscape painter out in the great – bourgeois
– expanse of the English countryside, however it is also one
which, when viewed with a disruptive ironic humour, comments on
that particular ‘way of seeing’ the artist and the art’s
subject matter. For this stage in Rankle’s work was also a
deferential nod towards and practice of, landscape painting, which
Western innovators in colour, form and approach, such as Whistler,
Monet and Hitchens (the latter with whose work and ideas Rankle
shows a certain affinity) practised as part of a search, not only
to express a voice particular to their time, but also to discover
a more dialogic approach to landscape painting, such as the one
inherent in Chinese painting.
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Untitled #2 2001
gesso, oil and ink on paper
38 x 29cm |
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Dialogue is the key to Rankle’s work. His paintings –
and his ongoing involvement and commitment to art which is available
to and active within the community – encourage the expansion
of views, not to mystify or solidify knowledge. If his work draws
a veil, it draws a visible one in order to call attention to itself;
a veil of gold leaf on copper or dripping paint; of glazed and scumbled
layers over heavily wrought textures, deliberately offsetting the
conventional tensions of surface and space, illusion and reality
in the structure of the painting. It disrupts and interrupts itself
in order to disrupt and interrupt the tradition of ‘fine’
art and landscape painting, to pry open the restrictive and reductive
approach to viewing art and to the artist’s viewing of his
or her subject matter.
The experience of Alan Rankle’s paintings is one which includes
and reflects back upon the viewer, just as subject matter is included
and reflected back upon. This absolute integration of the works
in their environment, be it in a gallery, in a specific architectural
space, or in public, is what ultimately gives them their optimism
– like a double-sided mirror through which we can both see
ourselves and pass through to the other side to see what lies beyond
– and their dynamism – the potential born from the dialectics
of discourse to spark transformation. |
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