A Painter of Landscapes
The Ken and Irene Hazell Collection

 

Alan Rankle is a painter of landscapes. That is a definition and definitions,
as we know, are dangerous, but one has to start somewhere.
The term “painter of landscapes” is quite deliberately chosen and is, to my
mind, quite different from “landscape painter.” A landscape painter would
be someone who observes a vista and paints it in a more or less
recognisable manner, a relatively recent development in art.

In the long tradition of artists for whom the landscape is a metaphor for
human experience, stretching from the early Chinese masters like Liang
Kai and Wu Wei to the European Baroque painters, Claude Lorrain in the
South and Jacob van Ruisdael in the North, to Turner, John Martin, Phillip
de Loutherbourg and Peder Balke, right up to modern times in the diverse
and yet arguably connected works of Peter Lanyon, Anselm Kiefer,
Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig, a painter of landscapes is someone who
sees a landscape, responds to it and paints the response.

Alan Rankle’s work is about his response to the natural world and the way
it’s perceived – a response mediated through particular places, ideas, and
significantly the works of other painters.

His landscapes are certainly not realistic. There are a handful of works
which are recognisably the Calder Valley or Beachy Head or Montsegur,
but more often than not the title is the only clue to the scene which
appears in the picture. Recognition is not the point. Realism is not the
point.

Rankle’s Light + Meaning series is probably the closest he has ever come
to abstraction (and, by the way, we will come back to what he means by
“series” later). Some actually are abstracts, some might be, some have
clear figurative elements. They are certainly not landscapes. Or are they?
Look carefully at Light + Meaning III and there could be the bones of a
landscape painting: a distant brown outline of hill, the over-painted loom
of a tree, the floating twig. In Light + Meaning V, can we see the some
elemental indication of a clash between earth and sky? And look again at
the other examples in this collection. I imagine Light +Meaning X to be
distant light, a blazing sky, seen round the edge of tree trunk. That may
be just my fantasy, but it is possible to see these small paintings as the
component parts, the working out of ideas – which will at a later stage
combine to form a major work.

 

For me, the Light + Meaning paintings contain the key elements of
Rankle’s approach to landscape. They are elemental paintings. They
contain the bones of the earth and the trees and the plants on which light
plays in order to stimulate the vigorous even violent response which is
painting itself.

“It’s a process,” Rankle said to me when we were talking about putting
the ideas for this book together. And if Ken and Irene Hazell’s collection
can be seen to have a collective meaning, greater than the individual
paintings themselves, it lies somewhere in the idea of process, in the
concept of the quest to achieve.

 

I want to stay for the moment with the idea of elements – both the
natural elements which are the building blocks of landscape; and the
painterly elements which are the building blocks of Rankle’s work, the
heavy swaves of colour, sweeping and textured brushstrokes, the curtains
of wash descending over the surface of the canvas. Rankle was born in
1952. His generation has seen a greater change in the natural world, in
the physical world about us, than any previous generation in the history of
mankind. That fact underlies so much of Rankle’s work that it is not
surprising that he should seek to parallel physical facts of the environment
with the concrete substance of his painting. And the Light + Meaning
paintings are clear evidence of that. They are objects in their own right,
works of art on a small scale. But they are also the building blocks of
Rankle’s response to the natural world.

His responses to landscape and in particular to the manmade within the
natural world are at the core of his work as an artist and his thought and
philosophy as an individual. At the same time, the deconstruction of the
natural world into abstract elements is also a disruption of the elements
which make up the tradition of landscape painting itself. The first essay I
wrote on Rankle’s work 1992 was called The Transformation of Tradition
and both the title and the concept seem to me to retain their validity.1
Artists do not create out of nothing. They learn the language of their art
as they study and grow and mature, just as children learn speech. They
learn by example: they are attracted to certain styles and repelled by
others. Some artists develop a style and stick with it. They neither seek
nor need to question their art in the greater context of history and
tradition.

Rankle is not like that. In terms of painting techniques he has been
influenced by, and extensively quotes from Baroque and 19 th century
artists: Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael, Philip de Loutherberg, J.M.W
Turner, G.B. Tiepolo, Caspar David Friedrich, and Modernists he admires
such as Ad Reinhart, Wilhelm de Kooning and Antoni Tapies. Within
another framework he clearly relates to Robert Smithson, Alleghero Boetti
and Piero Manzoni. The notion of the ‘found object’ being high on his
agenda to the extent that it allows him to freely use ‘found’ paintings and

compositions to make a conceptual point. The fact is all these
aforementioned artists belong to the same tradition of man-responding
–to-the-natural-world-in-art. Over the years, absorbing these influences,
Rankle has created his own anti-style and expresses his own vision of the
world. He is able to challenge not just the concept of ‘style’ but also the
whole tradition that lies behind it.

Challenge is perhaps too aggressive a term. Rankle’s approach is more
that of a student returning to old questions and re-examining them in the
light of experience. Which again returns to the idea that the paintings in
Ken and Irene Hazell’s collection represent a quest, an exploration, a
search for an answer which is in some sense bigger than the paintings
themselves.

 

The Bones of Landscape

Alan Rankle was born in Hathershaw, just to the south of Oldham. To the
east was the high, worn outline of Saddleworth Moor. Bleak, open and
wind-blown, littered with screes, cut into by deep v-shaped valleys and
bisected by dry stone walls which look like as if they were left behind by
an earlier civilisation, the Moor is nothing if not elemental. It hovered on
the edge of Rankle’s early consciousness just as it hovers on the edge of
the town in which he was born.

Although he has been based in the coastal town of St.Leonards-on-Sea for
many years and although the light and the form of the Sussex coast
appears frequently in his work, you cannot really understand what Rankle
is driving at unless you have seen the Yorkshire Moors. Moorland – its
stark beauty, its severe outlines and complex forms, its openness to the
elements – formed a part of his imagination.

There are six paintings in the Hazell collection which have the words
“Calder Valley” in the title. In all six, there is a valley, a cleft between two
hills, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away; in four of them, it is
clearly visible; in two cases, Study for Calder Valley 2011 and Calder
Valley Study (over Portsmouth), you can work out where it lies beneath
the over-painting. But it is there, as some kind of symbol or marker point
around which Rankle develops the rest of the painting. Clearly that V-
shape means something to Rankle. It could be quite simply be that he saw
a particular landscape feature which appealed to him at the time and still
appeals in memory. It could that this particular view triggered a moment
of realisation, an epiphany. It could be connected with an event or with an

individual – in Calder Valley Study (over Portsmouth) there is an overtly
sexual association. Whatever its meaning, this shape, this V-shaped motif
sits at the core of Rankle’s response first to the physical location and now
to the idea of the Calder Valley.

So from recognition of particular, fundamental features of a landscape –
the bones of landscape – came the first impetus towards his
understanding of what he wanted to communicate. In four of the Calder
Valley paintings in this collection, there is in the foreground a passage of
horizontal brushwork suggesting water. Of course it is not unusual for a
landscape paper to paint water. But water is not just a neutral feature in
Rankle’s paintings. Indeed, there are few, if any neutral features because,
as we have seen, he is not painting an actual so much as a mental or an
emotional landscape. Those horizontal brushstrokes suggesting water –
which featured so essentially in the 1991 breakthrough painting Riverfall
II - are a motif as important and essential to his work as the V-shaped
valley.

We are dealing here with origins and impulses, with Rankle’s journey to an
understanding of rock and water, the most basic components of the planet
on which we live.

Look again at three of the Calder valley paintings in the Hazell collection –
Light + Meaning (Calder Valley Study) 2006, Calder Valley Study 2007
and Study for Untitled Paintings (Calder Valley) 2010. In all three, the V-
shaped motif is present; in all three, the water motif is present. These
are enough for us to identify that in Rankle’s world, we have a clear
location – even if the title did not tell us, we would know this was a Calder
Valley painting. There are other common features – the encroaching
shape on the left of the canvas and the tree or proto-tree on the right.
These are motifs we will return to later. Now look at the sky. In the first, it
is pale, angry, storm-tossed; its elemental features in one sense
complementing the landscape in which both colour and brush-stroke
suggest violence and upheaval. In the second, the sky is a full summer
sky of warmth and haze, while the landscape, while still in a state of
active upheaval is constituted of colours and brushwork which suggest
flow rather than actual eruption. In the third, we have an evening sky with
light thrown up from behind the distant barrier of the hills; and the
landscape, while shadowed and not without a suggestion of threat, is not
active to the same degree.

What do these differences tell us? They are clearly more than simple
depictions or descriptions of weather and landscape. Are they expressions
of landscape extended or exaggerated as they are filtered through the
artist’s own moods? Are they a projection of the artist’s mood – a version
of the pathetic fallacy? Are they in some sense an exploration of the origin
or landscape? Or of fears for its future? They can, of course, be any or
all of these things, but the key point here is that Rankle’s motifs in these
Calder Valley paintings provide him with a departure point. He returns to

and sets of from the same departure point time and time again. Each time
the journey is different. Each time the painting is different. And in that
idea of repeated journeys from the same departure point, we have the
basis of Rankle’s concept of a number of paintings making up what he
calls a “a series.”

 

The Structure of Perception

The Hazell Collection contains four paintings entitled Yorkshire Study I, II,
III and IV. They all date from 2009 and give the impression of having
been painted, if not in sequence, at least very close to each other in time.
They are similar in composition. The lower third of each painting is land,
hills or moors, and constituted of horizontal brushstrokes, sweeping across
the canvas; shades of brown overlaid by a heavier brown that is all but
black. The rapidity, even spontaneity of the brushstrokes suggests fluidity,
but there is also an immense solidity which gives each canvas its
foundation. From left to right the land drops away very slightly and the
colour becomes less dense.

This is the Yorkshire motif: there is a shape, a form, to it, but its dominant
characteristic is colour. There is a clear sense of something observed, but
the land, transformed into motif, is at the same time removed from literal
observation and transformed into something approaching abstraction.
On the skyline beyond the hills, beyond the moors, there is an orange
glow. We assume it is evening, but it is not a tranquil evening, for the
landscape is dark, active and threatening, as is the sky – and it is the sky
which is the true subject of these paintings. Each sky is different. It is
tempting to take them in sequence. In Yorkshire Study I, a storm has
blown up over the moors and is just about to break. In II, it breaks
heavily with that sense of rain descending like a curtain, In III, the sky
has closed in and the horizon has disappeared. Only in IV is there a sense
of calm and the storm has moved away and both sky and landscape are
calmed, though there is still movement and the potential for threat. This is
not a pastoral world.

Is this mere fancy? Perhaps. But however you interpret these paintings,
you cannot deny that each canvas is full of movement of itself and that,
taken together, they offer a progression. It may not be a story, but Rankle
is certainly offering different views of or aspects of the same subject for a
reason. One take on the subject, he appears to be saying, is simply not
enough. There are many reasons for this, but the first one is conceptual.

For Rankle, perception is not a static moment. It is – as I have said before
– a process. True, what is produced as a record of that perception is an
object, a piece of canvas covered with paint. But the recreation of
perception in graphic form is more than the fixing of a conjunction of
visual and mental stimuli at one place and at one time. Suppose – as in
the case of a storm over the Yorkshire Moors – that the perception
develops form minute to minute, or even second to second. That change
cannot necessarily be encapsulated in one canvas (though it can
sometimes, as we shall see), which demands more than one painting of
almost but not quite the same subject. And what happens when these
moments of perception or recalled and reflected upon after the event.
That, too, requires consideration.

In terms of perception and its change from moment to moment, we are
very close to the Taoist and Buddhist notions which influenced Rankle in
his London days during the 1970s. Ch’an Buddhism has much to say
about the nature of perception, about the necessity of recognising a
moment and exploring both its beauty and its significance.
In terms of the graphic representation, we have Rankle’s characteristic of
paintings working in series. We can see how many of the paintings in the
Hazell collection share titles – the Calder Valley paintings, the Yorkshire
Study paintings, the Cornholm Study paintings. It is important to
understand that these are not simply repetitions; they are not attempts to
do the same thing as before but better. They represent attempts to
reconstruct and reproduce the same moment of perception, or the same
conjunction of elements and emotions that led a to perception, at different
times and in different ways.

Rankle has produced an impressive range of large scale canvases, which
are statements of intent yet what he communicates is equally accessible –
indeed, in some ways more accessible – in the progress which is
discernible as one moves through a series of studies, such as the
Yorkshire ones discussed above. On one level, for Rankle, as for other
painters of the past – Turner springs to mind, so does Monet and Sargent
(all painters obsessed with light) – the essence of his work lies not in the
“finished”, academy-style work, but in almost spontaneous response to a
moment of perception.

Rankle seems to have realised this from a very early stage in his career,
and this may well have been due to the Taoist teachings in T’ai Chi and
the arts of the Nei Chia he studied in London with Dr Liu Hsui Chi. His
mature work began with series where ideas are suggested in fragments
such as the Endless River Landscapes and En Pays Cathar. The Riverfall
series, twelve or more large paintings, all based round one moment of
epiphany in 1972 but not realised until the 1990s, were his breakthrough
works. The concept of painting in series is natural to him and the title of
the various series are significant in that they are allusive, poetic – Rain +
Waiting, Gates to the Garden, City on the Edge of Change. He is rarely

willing to explain what the significance is, but there is clearly a
significance for him and it appears to be rooted in a moment in time when
he saw and felt something – the moment that might simply be described
as inspiration, if that word did not raise at least as many questions as it
answers.

So perception and the idea of paintings coming in series are integrally
linked in Rankle’s work. But, even together, they are only part of the
explanation of what he is trying to convey.

 

Rankle and the Tree

Let’s take another group of paintings in this collection:
Study for Untitled Painting (Calder Valley I)
Study for Untitled Painting (Calder Valley II)
Cornholm Study I 2005
Untitled Painting VI 2012
Enigma: Light of the World
Enigma: Claude at Montsegur 2012
Enigma: Ruisdael + The Void
Study Fairlight from the Watermeadows
Another Green World 2012
Study for Beachy Head after George Vincent

 

These ten paintings have a number of technical and compositional
characteristics in common, but the most obvious is the tree. Not just any
tree because if you cared to make an analysis, I imagine that most of
Rankle’s landscapworks would feature a tree somewhere. This is a
particular tree. And these paintings are not alone – either in this collection
or in Rankle’s work in – featuring that particular tree. It appears
frequently in the Riverfall series, and in some of the Our World paintings,
and in some of the Rain + Waiting ones. It is a dark tree, carefully
painted, sometimes featuring a craggy, leafless branch which is probably
dead. Sometimes, as in Study for Beachy Head after George Vincent, it is
a big, healthy almost naturalist tree dominating its section of the
composition; at other times, as in Another Green Word 2012, it shows
sign of being overpainted; and sometimes, as in Untitled Painting VI, it
has almost disappeared beneath an explosion of colour and violent
brushwork.

 

We know that Rankle is painter who works by motifs, whose repeated
shapes and images have a particular significance. So what is this tree?
What does it mean? Whatever its original inspiration, it has clearly gone
beyond being a ”real” tree. In Cornholm Study I 2005, it is unreal in
appearance and an intrusion in compositional terms. In Study for Beachy
Head after George Vincent, it is, as I have said, almost naturalistic –
almost. Look again. Is it not just a little too big to be real, a little
oversize? And again, in Enigma Claude at Montsegur 2012, is that tree not
just slightly too large for its position. And you can go back through
Rankle’s work and find the same effect many times. Let’s be clear, these
are not faults in perspective. They are statements. But what is being said?
The clue lies in the appearance of the names of other artists. Claude and
van Ruisdael are two of Rankle’s greatest infuences, both pictorially and
conceptually. Standing at the head of the great landscape tradition, one
thing they knew about was how to paint trees – and their technique in the
foliage passages is something Rankle borrows freely. Nor should the name
of George Vincent be ignored. An early 19 th century English painter, a
member of John Chrome’s Norwich school, he got into debt and died
young, but not without leaving an impressive collection of landscape
paintings.

My guess then is that the tree is not only a symbol of the natural world –
the natural world to which Rankle feels connected and which he sees as
under threat – but also of the connection which artists in the past have
felt with the natural world. It has a double significance, linking Rankle to
the natural world and also to the tradition of his art.

Take a look at George Vincent’s A Distant View of Pevensey Bay and at
Rankle’s Study for Beachy Head after George Vincent. Rankle is not
making it easy for anyone who does not know the area, but if you are
looking at Beachy Head from the angle that he is in the painting, then you
are looking out across Pevensey Bay. There is a clear connection between
the two paintings. But what are the differences? Vincent’s work is clearly a
work which is itself in the great landscape tradition – Turner and
Constable are both present – and it is an idyllic landscape. The landscape
is cultivated; the sky is carefully lit; the human figures are small – the red
smock stands out but there is no sense of threat. Rankle’s world is darker.
The landscape is dark and uncultivated – unless the distant yellow at the
base of the tree is meant to suggest a cornfield. The light suggests
sunset, but it is not a healthy sunset. There is something ominous,
something suggestive of decay, in the way yellow shades to orange and
surrounds the distant shape of Beachy Head. The clouds threaten. The
foreground seems unformed, undefined; it seems to writhe and heave.
And man is absent.

 

Look at Enigma: Claude at Montsegur 2012 or Enigma: Ruisdael + The
Void. The relationship between the tree, the distant landscape and the
foreground is very similar. It says threat. The world that these painters
knew has changed, has become in some sense unnatural. And as the
landscape has become unnatural, so the tradition of landscape painting –
the human forms complementing the composition based on the natural
worlds, the unthreatening sky, the whole sense of pastoral idyll – has
itself broken down. Rankle is having to transform the tradition of
landscape painting because landscape itself has been transformed.
In Untitled Painting VI 2012 or Dunes Rorvig 2001 6. Suddenly threat has
become apocalypse. The vision that saw a threatened natural world is now
projected into full scale destruction. In Untitled Painting VI 2012, the tree
is still there – only just visible. The sky is still there. The rest is violence,
an upheaval of immense, destructive power. Red in Rankle’s work is often
associated with destruction. Whether we are meant to see the red and the
violence as a emanation of the painter’s mood, as a projection of future
destruction or as an almost literal upwelling of lava and magma from the
earth’s crust to destroy the natural world scarcely matters. For both the
environmentalist and the artist, the statement is one of anger and finality.
Landscape and the tradition of representing it have been all but
obliterated.

Another Green World 2012 offers a different take on the same scenario.
The tree, the distant landscape, the sense of destruction – but with
wonderful irony, the destructive force is green, the colour of the
environmental symbolism and rhetoric. Green, Rankle is saying, can be as
destructive as red. Symbols and words will not alter the result.

 

Light and the World

Light is the very essence of traditional landscape painting – sunlight,
moonlight, the play of light on the elements of the natural world. Turner is
supposed to have said that the sun was God and as far as the painter of
landscapes is concerned he may well have been right. It is also a fact that
no painter of landscape and no painter of English descent can escape
Turner. He stands there, a shifting, intelligent presence at the beginning
of what – for want of a better word – we may call modern methods of
graphic expression.

 

Rankle has never sought to deny Turner. From 1998 and continuing to the
present he has developed a suite of paintings called Turner in Hastings.
Hastings, of course, is where Rankle was living at the time and also a
place where Turner famously came and stayed, sketched, observed and
filled two thick notebooks which are now in the Tate Gallery. Done in oil
and silver leaf on small panels, Rankle’s paintings have no obvious or
direct relationship with Turner – except that he is clearly playing with
ideas of light and reflectivity, and except that the title tells you explicitly
that he accepts linear descent from the great man.

Whether it is sunlight – The Fighting Temeraire; Ovid Banished from
Rome; Rain, Steam and Speed – or moonlight – Fishermen at Sea –
Turner tackled light and the source of light head on. So, too did Claude
Lorrain in paintings such as Seaport at Sunset and Imaginary View of
Tivoli. Rankle does not. Rankle’s light is always oblique, distant, obscured.
It is behind the hill, behind the tree, throwing light up on the clouds or on
to the distant hills. Study for Untitled Painting (Calder Valley) 2010 I is
characteristic in this respect. So, too, are the first and third parts of the
River America triptych. Of course, not every painting is precisely the
same. Sometimes – Light + Meaning (Study over Cornholm) 2006; Calder
Valley Study 2007 – the foreground seems somehow to create or emanate
its own light. Sometimes the offset light seems high enough to flood in
from one side and give a degree of foreground illumination – Enigma
Ruisdael + the Void 2012; Study Fairlight from the Watermeadows 2012.
It seems that there is more depiction of light now in Rankle’s canvases
than there was in the earlier days. The Riverfall paintings, for example,
tend to be notably darker in tone. It is not the sense of threat which lies
at the heart of so much of Rankle’s work that has changed – rather he
now has two ways of expressing it. The earlier conception linked threat
with shadow and darkness and thus with uncertainty. In this collection it
finds expression most clearly in View over Cornholm I and II from 2002 or
in the Study for Beachy Head after George Vincent from 2000. This
approach has not actually disappeared – it continues in Monsegur II from
2012 and Study for a Day in Sweden from 2011 – but it has been joined
by that expression of threat as actual and active destruction, the
explosion of violent, destructive colour, which we explored in “Rankle and
the Tree” – and that process naturally involves more light.

Still, the fact remains that Rankle does not paint the sun. He does not
paint the source of light. There is nothing in the pictures to tell us that
Rankle’s indirect light is sunset rather than sunrise, but we know it is. It is
possible to argue that certain of Rankle’s works contain the elements of a
creation myth for landscape. Take, for example, Calder Valley Study 2007,
Sands Point Study 2011 or Study for Untitled Series 2011. The inchoate
foreground, the sense of something vital and seething set against the fully
formed distant landscape and carefully painted trees could be said to

represent an image of creation, of elements coalescing, of the process of
the natural world forming itself out of chaos.

But look again. Look at the colour values, at the quality of the light, at the
drama inherent in the captured movement of the foreground. It may be
that Rankle’s world view holds within itself the memory of its own
beginnings, but, whether we interpret these canvases as depiction, as
prediction, as fear or as warning, Rankle’s world is clearly a world which is
on the edge.

And in a world which is on the edge, light which remains hidden also
remains undefined. We feel we are watching a kind of a sunset – sunset in
this sense taking on a huge metaphorical weight of meaning as well as its
literal one – but there is still an enigmatic quality to the light. The light in
a painting such as Study for Tampere II is almost naturalistic – just as
almost naturalistic as the tree in Study for Beachy Head after George
Vincent. What about that yellow horizon? Is it not slightly too ripe? Is it
not again implying a sense of threat? And then we have Enigma Light of
the World. A corona of light spreads out from behind the characteristic
Rankle tree and the question is asked by the title.

The sense of light in Rankle’s paintings, the pictorial element, tends to be
less enigmatic as time goes on. In the years since threat-as-uncertainty
began to give way to threat-as-explosion, so there is more light and
Rankle asks his question of the observer that much more forcibly. Take
Study for Untitled Series 2011, Enigma Claude at Monsegur 2012 and
Study Fairlight from the Watermeadows 2012. Look at the light here.
What is it? The subtle suggestions of distance have given way to a glaring
yellow-orange light which contains its own threat. Is this sunset or is it
fire? Is this a painter’s anger or the world burning? Turner asked a similar
question in his painting The Burning of the Houses of Lords and
Commons.

Light illuminating and playing on the natural world is what landscape
painting is about. But as we know only too well, as we destroy the natural
world throwing chemicals into the atmosphere. And as the climate
changes, so the natural cycles of season, light and vegetation which
centuries of landscape painters have recorded change and become
unstable. It would not, in my view, be an exaggeration to call Alan Rankle
the first painter of climate change.

 

The Point of Perception

Conclusions are difficult. In the first place, Alan Rankle has always wanted
to be a painter of landscapes so it seems vaguely insulting for someone to

come along and sum up not only his life’s work but his life’s thinking in a
few thousand words. Secondly, and far more important, he has not
finished painting yet. That is important in the obvious sense that he is still
working, but also in a sense that we touched on earlier. Rankle’s career
has not been that of an academician with a side job as a tutor who
achieved a style, was recognised, received commissions and painted a
number of big works each year. Of course, he receives important, often
site specific commissions and produces a great many paintings, but that is
not the point. I quote again: “It’s a process”.

Rankle had a major museum retrospective exhibition in his home town of
Oldham in October 2006. It was hugely impressive collection of work
spanning over twenty years of his mature work. I remember two
conversations from that opening day – they both concerned change. The
first was pretty obvious. Oldham in the 1950s when Rankle was growing
up was a classic, northern working class town. There were the cotton
mills, an ironworks at Park Bridge, the Daisy Nook Canal down the hill,
just a mile or two from home. It was town in decline but it stood at the
end of a long and proud industrial heritage. By those standards, the
Oldham we walked round in 2006 was almost unrecognisable. It was a
new England, mixing assertive new architecture and urban decay, newly
multicultural but still stuck in a post-industrial limbo. It had ceased to be
what it was, he said, but had yet to achieve its new identity.

The second conversation concerned Rankle’s own work. Was a
retrospective the kiss of death? Did people only have major retrospectives
when they had nothing left to say? It was probably first night nerves: as I
wrote in the book which accompanied the exhibition – and which was
called (note the title) Landscapes for the Turning Earth – “Whatever
comes next, Rankle clearly hasn’t finished what he has to say.” And I was
right. Nonetheless, both conversations were significant; both dealt with
change; and taken together they reveal the connection Rankle makes
between change in the external environment and change in himself
Alan Rankle is not a Buddhist in any meaningful sense yet his thought and
painting and his life have certainly been strongly influenced by Ch’an
Buddhist teachings. This is not the place to examine the complexities of
Eastern philosophy, but the key issue for Rankle has been and remains
the concept of becoming, grasping that neither life nor the universe can
be understood and that only by accepting the process of change will
anything be revealed. And this is where we come to the importance of the
Ken and Irene Hazell’s collection.

With one or two exceptions, the paintings in this collection are series
paintings: they are connected to one of Rankle’s many different and
overlapping series. The majority of them are small works – 30 or 40
centimetres square – and many feature the word “study” in the title. This
is the heart of Alan Rankle’s art, of his “process”.

 

A qualification is necessary. I am not in any sense downplaying the
importance of the full-size canvases – Study for Beachy Head after George
Vincent or the three massive and masterly parts of the River America
triptych. What I am saying is that is that to understand Rankle as an
artist, to understand his major productions, you need to see, know and
understand works of the kind in this collection. Rankle is an artist to whom
intellectual preparation is essential. There may be – there is – a significant
element of spontaneity in the execution of his work, but the spontaneity is
underpinned by thought and study. The smaller painting, the Light +
Meaning series, the studies are where Rankle does his thinking.

I do not claim fully to understand the titles of Rankle’s series. Some of
them – Our World, Wilderness Approaching – at least give a clue. Others,
where there is a geographical name – Cornholme, Sands Point, Calder
Valley – at least make a link to a place where one can imagine that
something happened or a thought occurred. But there are many – The
Journey of the City to the Sea; Gates to the Garden; Edge of Arcadia;
Running from the House – remain a mystery. I am not sure if Rankle
himself understands them. They are intentionally evocative of something.
They are a form of poetry perhaps, but, as he himself said, “If I could
explain it all in words, I wouldn’t need to do the paintings.”

The point is that whatever the title of a series refers to is, as we have
seen, something which Rankle himself feels the need to come back to: to
explore, to examine and re-examine. A series is thus an experience at
once suspended and modified by time, repeatedly examined in the hope
that it will reveal its meaning. It is a process of becoming.

And so I return to where I started. Alan Rankle’s work is about his
attempt to capture and encapsulate his perception and his experience of
the immediate environment at any given moment. To capture a moment
of perception in graphic form is difficult enough – it took Rankle until the
early 1990s before he really found the way he wanted to express himself.
A painted canvas is a static form: that is its great advantage and its
fundamental weakness. To express the change in our understanding of
that moment of perception over time – the way we remember it, the way
it is modified by memory, the way it joins with, modifies, and is modified
by other perceptions – that cannot be the work of a single canvas. And so
we return again to the idea of a series, a sequence of paintings which
captures the process of perception and the development of perception.
And that is the process – the continuum of perception, expression,
modification and expression – to which we ourselves gain access through
the works in Ken and Irene Hazell’s superb collection.

Laurence Bristow-Smith 2014