THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 4th MARCH 2021: DAY 340

New painting: "Uncertain Encounter".
Oil paint on canvas, 610 x 610 mm.

19, 20, 21: Finding a reason to paint, in search of the sublime. 4th March 2021.
Part 41: 'Interpretation, abstraction, illusion.
An Unsettling Appeal: Insearch of the Sublime.

If we as observers instinctively attain a close proximity to other individuals when we converse with them, the reverse is true when we engage with a landscape. This form of encounter is almost a polar opposite in terms of meetings, to begin with we are not experiencing the kind of intimate interaction with one sentient being as we are during our portrait encounter; now we are spreading out attention over a wide and on the whole unresponsive plane. We are, during these occasions, purely observers, we do not anticipate any two-way conversations as part of such engagements.

Although we do not generally have any input into our meetings with landscapes the possible sources of information on such occasions are so multitudinous that to fully appreciate the scale of the data, we must take both a figurative and literal step backwards in order to wholly absorb it. We begin by scanning all of the possibilities in order to identify individual characteristics and their role in the composition of the scheme. It is by this reading of a landscape that we begin to perceive how the component parts of it work in unison to form the narrative of a single subject. In a natural landscape this form of narrative may be very obscure and our senses will possibly not be attuned enough to appreciate it, however within the composed variety, represented via means of the pictorial plane, the idea of the extended context is likely to have once again been artificially exploited.

To be continued...