Paul Carey-Kent Pastoral Collateral

 

Alan Rankle has been corrupting the traditions of landscape painting for over two decades, during which the environmental issues behind his work have become ever more prominent in the news. As he says, ‘painting landscapes has always been political, but now we’re experiencing the  random disruption of the weather systems of the whole planet, and the landscape is the collateral.’ Hence the polluting irruptions suggested by his more abstract passages. He draws a parallel between past and present, explaining that 19th century Romantic paintings, with their classically-inspired vision of an idyllic natural world, were sponsored by those who made their fortunes out of the Industrial Revolution on the back of slavery and the Enclosures Acts forcing people to move for work in their factories and mills. That laid the foundations of the environmental pollution we face - but now the displacement of people and despoilment of the earth operate more intensely and internationally. ‘Since the 1940’s’, says Rankle, ‘the big oil companies have been spending a lot of money to wipe out any progress towards less polluting engines and to discredit the environmental movement’. And the tech barons who buy art also operate like their Victorian equivalents, ‘but on another level.

 

Pastoral Collateral II 2022 features Rankle’s cipher for triggering the idea of the landscape of the past – trees originating from his sketches from walking around farms in Chadderton, near Oldham, where he grew up. That meets the language of abstract expressionism - for which, he says, ‘the final gesture is sometimes just throwing paint on with the faith that you’re doing the right thing at the right time’. Here the coloration reminded me of the orange paint thrown by Just Stop Oil activists. Rankle wasn’t illustrating that, of course, but relates to the idea that ‘while bringing out what’s inside them, artists can be conduits for how they see the world on a subconscious level’. And he sympathises with such action: ‘they know what they’re doing - they haven’t damaged anything yet but they have gained international attention.’

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