Terrain, inside and out,

One can speak of being inside and outside landscape: observing and participating. The window on the world is something that we have long been familiar with and there is a stasis which has worked  to place us in relation to landscape as an onlooker. The problem of describing involvement with landscape has also been addressed, one doesn't have to think hard about this, and I have mentioned Peter Lanyon in a previous post although with him there is the cultural engagement too. 

I was reading about Simon Edmonson yesterday, the paintings that he had been making in Spain, the concept of I within It, John Clare; Ortega y Gasset, who proclaimed that "I am I and my circumstances", Gerard Manley Hopkins. What I wonder can be said in paint about Landscape and human existence. How is paint to be used to set down what is seen and felt just being in IT. And what is IT? The wind in the trees, the sun on the face, the force that is the fundamental basis of nature, and nothing to do with us.  It is a poor thing I think to try to use coloured stuff squeezed from a tube, a poet would come nearer, words are more than adequate, words are progenitive, I say tree and you think of any number of different trees, the word gives birth to its offspring and expands our sense of the world: what use is paint? 

Terrain. oil on wood panel. 50x50 cms.

                                                  

                                              A gust of wind.  oil on canvas. 80x80 cms.