Pastoral Dystopia, There Am I

Art North Magazine
Ian McKay, 13 Sept 2019

 

Two years ago, Alan Rankle showed a body of work at
Bermondsey Project Space titled Pastoral Collateral. In
his latest presentation in the gallery, this time titled
Mothland, the work on show comprises recent paintings,
works on paper and videos, all of which indicate that
Rankle continues to develop the primary themes for
which he has become widely known; namely those works
relating to the Romantic tradition in landscape art and
what the artist describes as the ‘increasingly fragmented
[and] clearly insanely broken relationship of our global
societies to the natural environment’. Given the fact that,
at the time of writing, the current issue of Art North
magazine concerns a re-evaluation of the Sublime in
contemporary art, it is understandably a ‘no brainer’ that
I should attend to Rankle’s output and give it some brief
analysis.

 

Curated by Claudia De Grandi with whom Rankle
regularly collaborates, in Mothland three specific series
are brought together in reference to each other – they
being Rankle’s prior Pastoral Collateral series in which
he reflected on his own personal backstory in the North
of England, his Castle Paintings, created initially for
Capture the Castle – a ‘historical survey exhibition
where he montaged images of bombed out ruins in Syria
to provide the backdrop to elegantly depicted,

picturesque views of English castles’ – and his Turner in
Hastings works that comprise an ongoing visual essay
which considers artists such as Turner, Whistler, De
Wint and other renowned watercolourists who stayed and
worked around Rankle’s adopted home of St. Leonards
on Sea.

 

In the latter of these series – Turner in Hastings – one
immediately runs into the compositional conventions that
were not just a commonplace for Turner and his
contemporaries, but continued for some time after,
eventually reaching a point of reconciliation between the
archaic and the modern in William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay,
Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (1860) – a
work (see below) that was once described by the critic
Peter Fuller as showing “women and children hunting for
fossils (evidence against the idea that nature was [God’s]
divine handiwork) on a bleak, grey, godless shore.” Two
years earlier, Fuller had written of the Dyce’s Pegwell
Bay that, the artist was not asking us to believe that those
depicted in the painting ‘are tracing the finger marks of
God’, for each seems insulated within her own space:
‘None is looking at another. Over the heads of all of
them passes a comet, symbol of impending doom and
disaster.’ Well, that was then.

In Rankle’s Turner in Hastings I of 2017 (above),
disaster it appears has now struck. Although conforming
to the compositional conventions of the late-18th
century, the shoreline in Turner in Hastings I is
consumed by a murky yellow-orange over a sickly green
underpainting. The sea has risen, too, and although the

blue sky at top may hold true in terms of Rankle’s nod to
masters of a different day, the yellow-orange seepage
referred to appears about to engulf all that as well. If
Dyce’s picture is of a Godless and uncertain world (at
least in terms of faith in that world’s architect or maker),
there are hints in Rankle’s Turner in Hastings series that
it is we who are now the architects of its destruction –
something that he consistently explores in several of the
works on show.

Indeed, as the artist has said of his practice in this regard,
‘The flurry of Romanticism wherein we appreciated the
sublime divinity of Nature remains as a shadow, hanging
across the changing skies of these paintings like the grin
of the Cheshire Cat – a fleeting moment destined to be as
forgotten as our species itself’.

 

First comes blind faith, then human enquiry but, as finite
as the world itself, human and planetary destruction self-
wrought and as unthinking as is our want and greed
seems to follow. Do we see in Rankle’s Turner in
Hastings series the endgame of civilisation as we know
it, just as we see in Dyce’s Pegwell Bay the endgame of
not just the Pre-Raphaelite challenge but also the
collapse of faith in a maker? I think so. Come the point
of Rankle’s Turner in Hastings II, the lurid slick of
yellow that I have referred to above has already been
transposed to a sun-setting sky, and in the foreground a
slick of black oil is almost one with the cliff face itself.

Turning to Rankle’s Castle Paintings, created initially
for Capture the Castle, exhibited in Southampton in
2017, the artist has said that:
‘…these paintings are part of an ongoing series of works
about castles and their iconic relevance to modern times.
[…] I first addressed this theme working in a studio at St
Quentin la Tour, a twelfth century maison forte in the
region of the Cathars in South West France in 1986.
These recent subjects, Bodiam and Lindisfarne, were,
like many castles, built to dominate what are stunningly
beautiful landscapes, which to contemporary observers
provide a reassuringly picturesque context to the
barbarism enacted within and without their walls.’

The wooded glades of mature broadleaf trees in some of
Rankle’s castle paintings are here reminiscent of so many
works by Claude Lorrain (1600 – 1682) and his Dutch
contemporary Salomon van Ruysdael (c.1602 - 1670), if
not Fragonard (1780 – 1850), too. The detail here, which
might be taken for a straight ‘lift’ from their works is,
however, overpainted with the smeared colours already
encountered in the Hastings series, the only difference
being that in Rankle’s castle paintings the vegetation is
backgrounded by the architectonic blocking in of castle
forms as seen through a clearing; stark, pitch black, and
against a deep orange sky in the case of Untitled Painting
XXVI (Bodiam). The sky here is as bright as the Madeley
Wood Furnaces painted by Philip James de Loutherbourg
in the background of his Coalbrookdale by Night (1801 –
see below) and should not (perhaps cannot) be taken for
any natural sunset. Something more sinister is afoot here,
as if the castle is ablaze.

 

Interesting at this point, perhaps, is that with regard to
Rankle’s previous Pastoral Collateral series, the artist
describes that body of work as his coming to terms with
his own roots, ‘growing up in the Northern landscape
amid the detritus of the Industrial Revolution’, whereas
in his Castle series he has transposed the extremes of the
‘natural’ and ‘quasi-industrial’ as if the industrial
revolution has collided with the agrarian revolution that
facilitated it, in terms of manpower at least.

Were the ‘new castles’ of the industrial revolution not
the heart of empires that arose in the form of the mill
towns of Northern England anyway? Were they not what
Blake referred to as our Dark Satanic Mills, a phrase that
encompassed the very destruction of nature and authentic
human relationships? As the literature accompanying
Rankle’s current exhibition states (and as mentioned
above, remember) what he develops here relates to the
idealised tradition of sublime romantic landscape art and
our increasingly fragmented and clearly insanely broken
relationship with the natural environment.

 

In works such as It's Not Dark Yet III (2017) it is indeed
clearly not quite dark yet, but it may as well be!
‘Picturesque’ may be the vegetation, but the colour
harmonies and the colours themselves are here breaking
down. A deathly, pallid grey makes itself known both in
the sky within the picture as well as on the picture plane
too – in the case of the latter a ‘stain on nature’ as it
were.

 

• • •

 

In Britain, the words ‘picturesque’ and the ‘sublime’
have often mistakenly been used interchangeably, with
William Gilpin being viewed as the father of the
picturesque (according to his 18th century formulation of
ideas concerning that topic), and Edmund Burke being
considered in some way father of the sublime. And yet,
when conflated, what we arrive at are mere satires such
as Thomas Love Peacock’s novel titled Crotchet Castle
of 1831. Indeed, early analyses of the Sublime as it was
experienced in both art and life, had originally followed
the precepts laid down by Burke and others whose
writings were easy meat for the satirists of their times.
In Crotchet Castle, for example, Peacock inserts the
fictional character of Miss Susannah Touchandgo; a
young woman who is described as a lady in search of the
awe-inspiring sublime of the natural world to be found in
‘fissures in rock’ and ‘gnarled and twisted oaks’ from
which she would sit and stare into the abyss; a darksome
mass that she would lean into, in fact, ‘her heart beating
audibly.’ This ‘perception of the sublime,’ wrote
Peacock satirically, ‘was probably heightened by an
intermingled sense of danger and that indifference to life
which early disappointment forces upon sensitive
minds.’ So much for the sublime as plaything. In a 21st
century world that is facing down climate catastrophe,
there is no longer room for satire and the joke quickly
thins until it is just not funny any more, for that which is
most ‘awe-inspiring’ now is the very fear of extinction
itself.

 

Little wonder, then, that Rankle turns to artists such as
Goya in his pictorial rendering of what likely awaits us. I
may have this wrong but in Fairlight from the
Watermeadows IV (Goya), (2018) Rankle assembles a
pastoral scene again, for sure, but if ever there were such
a thing in genre painting as a ‘darksome idyll’ then
Fairlight from the Watermeadows IV (Goya) would
qualify for inclusion. Here the tree resembles more a
gallows pole than anything else. The central trunk that
rises from behind a crimson smear or stain goes nowhere,
strange fruit indeed hangs from its single branch, too.
Unlike Goya’s cartoons such as Boys Climbing a Tree
(1791-92) in the Prado Museum (a painting that
epitomises pastoral pleasantries, and was made in
preparation for one of the tapestries in King Charles IV's
office at Monasterio del Escorial), Rankle’s Fairlight
from the Watermeadows IV appears to have more in
common with Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, a
series of prints depicting 17th century war crimes and
torture, or Jake and Dinos Chapman’s glitter painted
transcription of the same, titled The Disasters of Yoga
(2017).

 

Make no mistake, though, Rankle is no ‘showman of
shock’; these are considered works that he exhibits in
Mothland, and there should be no misunderstanding
about the fact that he calls upon a careful and studious
consideration of European landscape painting to develop
his darksome vistas. Cynics might call him out for giving
Claude Lorain ‘a Gerhard Richter makeover’, but this

would be foolish. There is a lot more going on here than
just a paltry pastiche of past masters, updated for our age.
As the artist himself has said: ‘Since I’m interested in
landscape painting the work begins with walking and
catching ideas. I like to talk with writers and some artists
I’m close to about the way painting can be a catalyst for
noticing symmetries and relationships between all kinds
of phenomena. As Shih Tao put it: “in terms of
penetration and development, painting is the greatest
guiding form in the world”.’ On being asked of his
process in making these works, Rankle offers some
insight with the following text (extracts from a
forthcoming book about a project to make eight paintings
for a villa in Venice) also:
‘The works of painters of the Venetian School along with
the paintings of other notable 17th century artists have
been of great interest to me since my student days. In the
early 1970’s studying at Goldsmiths’ College, in what
was to become a conceptual forum of contemporary art, I
nonetheless found myself increasingly drawn to the
theatrical virtuosity and sheer articulateness of artists
like Titian, Ruisdael, Salvatore Rosa and Claude
Lorrain. It seemed to me these painters, in making an
astounding leap in terms of painterly methods and
techniques, had also uncovered a way to reconcile the
need for art to retain a sense of the urgent visceral
immediacy within the instinctive rapport we have with
nature. They opened the doorway for the development of
painting as an art in Modern Times.’

 

The ‘virtuosity’ that Rankle refers to, he says, can be
attributed to the development of oil painting with the the
Venetian school, developed through many artists who
inspired him, (e.g. ‘where the modern use of oil painting
methods, wet into wet, glazing and scumbling, allows a
free spontaneously evolving way of creating the work.
Related to these historical techniques I decided to
explore other ideas about the nature of painting. The
illusions of ‘pentimenti’ which I used on the layered
paintings at La Villa – often in conjunction with photo-
montaged images – are coming from observations on the
way some Renaissance and Baroque paintings become
more transparent with age to reveal the under-painting
and also any changes and alterations the artist made on
the surface of the canvas.’)

Rankle’s paintings being exhibited currently, he
therefore claims, may be read as an evolving presence:
‘Significantly sometimes a figure previously painted out
emerges from the shadows years later; often a portrait
can be discerned to have several expressions.’ The
result? An intrigue with regard technique that the artist
deploys frequently in his work. ‘It’s potentially a
metaphor for the effects of time in landscapes and for
allowing the mystery of places and past events to be
alluded to and of course it evokes such theatrical devices
as sub-plots, undercurrents, hidden dealings and the
implied ability to ‘re-write’ history as so many powers
and shady characters have tried to do.’ In fact, one sees
what Rankle refers to at its clearest in works such as
Edge of Arcadia, 2018, (above).

Compositionally the right hand side of Edge of Arcadia
carries a fleeting and somewhat superficial resemblance

to Constable’s The Lock of 1824, but the black smear to
the left hangs as heavy as the tricolore in Delacroix's La
Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) of
1830. If traces are what interests Rankle then perhaps my
own rather superficial observations are relevant, too. Or
not, as the case may be. To force the juxtaposition would
be wrong, but it merits a passing consideration, I think.
The black smear to the upper left of Rankle’s Edge of
Arcadia may merely be a compositional device, but it
carries a weight and a gravitas that draws our attention. If
the artist has an interest in theatrical devices, hidden
dealings, and an ability to ‘re-write’ history as so many
powers and shady characters have tried to do, then the
works that I refer to from the first decades of the 1800s
are surely relevant, as they both have come to represent a
shift towards Romanticism from Classicism.

But here’s the rub… Is Rankle a Romanticist or a
Classicist in both outlook and interest? I would argue he
is both. Though meant for artists such as Samuel Palmer,
the art historian Kenneth Clark invented the term
Micropolitan Art as a descriptor for a much wider style
of painting – by which he meant a ‘pure and self
sufficient art’ that is neither Provincial nor Metropolitan,
rather in some ways both. In formulating his view of
what Micropolitan actually was, Clark claimed that ‘truth
to nature and individual judgement’ are the recurrent
catchwords of the provincial ‘in its struggle to free itself
from the dominating style’, while ‘metropolitan art, in its
struggle for formal perfection, prefers to repeat the same
subject, and even the same pattern, again and again.’

These two brought together then, Micropolitan art
resembles very closely the informed pastoral

provincialism of Rankle’s painting, yet the recurring
motifs are what often catch one’s eye the most and are a
reference to modernist repetition perhaps. They
frequently reappear as the common tropes of landscape
painting from past centuries and by those artists Rankle
cites as being of primary interest to him. Take for
example variations of the same stumps and broken
boughs (below) that comprise the arboreal detail of
several paintings in this exhibition. They appear
frequently, and are there for a reason – tropes as said, but
there as a nod to where the picturesque and the sublime
in art might meet too, maybe.

 

For a group exhibition Axis: London Milano for Fabbrica
del Vapore in Milan that Rankle co-curated with Claudia
De Grandi (an exhibition that included work by
Catherine Balet , Jake and Dinos Chapman , Tim Craven ,
Oska Lappin , Stephen Newton , Matthew Radford ,
Kirsten Reynolds , Cat Roissetter , and Charlotte Snook ,
among others) Rankle included his own painting,
Untitled Painting XIII (Herne) as his contribution to the
show. As he said of that work, ‘in what at first sight
appears to be a straightforward painting of a wild
northern landscape reveals on closer inspection an
image of a startled stag, running scared from an
unknown terror and floundering into a visibly polluted
stream.’ However one situates Rankle as an artist,
stylistically or conceptually, in that one statement his
underlying interests are made patently clear, and they
persist in Mothland at Bermondsey Project Space.

.
In closing perhaps it is apt to remain mindful of Alan
Rankle’s last outing at Bermondsey Project Space with
Pastoral Collateral. For that show he laid the ground for
what was to come in an interview with critic Anna
McNay:
“I wanted to relate ideas about historical, idealised,
pastoral landscape in art to the grim reality of the
environmental crisis that we are in, which isn’t just an
environmental crisis anymore, it’s a totally impregnated
social and political crisis heading towards disaster.
Considering the historical origins of the genre in relation
to my own paintings, I wanted to convey the irony
implicit in how the 19th century Romantic movement,
with its emphasis on the idyllic natural world of an
imaginary past, was sponsored by people who, having
made gigantic fortunes out of the Industrial Revolution
by building their empires on the slave trade and the
criminal use of the Enclosures Acts (forcing the poor
from their traditional peasant homes to work in their
factories and mills) also laid the foundations of
environmental pollution on a catastrophic scale. Turner
and other artists were commissioned by the barons of the
Industrial Revolution to take the Grand Tour and pick up
ideas from artists such as Claude Lorrain, Titian,
Dughet and Poussin, who were themselves employed to
evoke the fantasy of a golden age, a sort of Narnia in
Ancient Greece and Rome, where people talked to
animals and fucked gods.”

In the post-industrial world of corporate capitalism and
neoliberal excess, of course the Gods we now fuck just

fuck us back, but harder. The landscape that we
collectively populate is polluted by our own hand in the
vain attempt to still consume the fruits of our own labour
(which we buy back on credit and always at a higher
price), later divesting ourselves of those ‘fruits’ as per
the ever-faster turnaround of both fad and fashion,
increasingly thrown breadcrumb-like at our feet.
Meanwhile, on the high ground and moors of North
Yorkshire and the Pennines, the soil is still stained black
with soot to a depth of 60cm, a reminder of the now-
closed mills of the 19th century and the black snow that
they dumped on the landscape. Only cotton grass and
bilberry grows where once grew over thirty species of
flora in Turner’s time. If this is the dystopian reality in
which we are living, Rankle captures it well with his
lurid stains and vivid colours, all obscuring what was
once the Eden (or Arcadia) that we will never know. Et
in Arcadia ego? – "Even in Arcadia, there am I." The
reference is to death but Arcadia may have once
symbolised the pure, rural, idyllic life, far from the city.
There’ll be no going back, of course. Live we must with
our delusions and dreams, meanwhile contenting
ourselves with the twisted beauty of Rankle’s work, and
those other artists (becoming rarer in our time) who can
still hold a mirror up so that we can at least get a glimpse
of the folly of our ways.