I am currently running a little art exhibition at the Art House, Wakefield. The exhibition shines a few, tentative watts of electric light upon the elusive values that the landscape offers artists, and in turn (perhaps) the ways in which artists influence our view of the landscape and what it means to people.
As a photographer I know that the landscape is devilishly difficult to capture. Who would think that something that is so blatantly just there, and so much a part of our lives, could somehow elude being adequately captured by a camera. Looking at the photos in the exhibition it seems to me that it is the details, close-ups even, within the landscape that are most effectively articulated in art. What's more, the landscape only exists in that moment when it is pictured: sure, the same place might be there all the time but every time you look at it, visit it, it is slightly different. Even in painting, the same might be true: one picture in the exhibition is of Robin Hood's Bay, and simply uses colour to distinguish between land, sea and sky, but that use of colour seizes one moment in the individual's experience of that landscape.
I chose to dedicate this blog post to Kate Bush and Tony Hart because they are artists who, in my view of the world, have mastered the capturing of a moment, but in very different ways. Kate's music is personal, playful but not really accessible: much of it, from Wuthering Heights through Running up that Hill to her recent(ish) Aerial album conjures landscape (the same way that, for me, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here has always conjured a dejected view over a windswept seashore, somewhere where there is an industrial scar just behind the scene so that you daren't turn around and break the spell) - and this is the only way to get an insight into the music - to see it. Tony Hart, on the other hand, made his career out of helping people - from their youngest years - to access art: he put the daubings of his young viewers on the television, he showed how art is created, he showed you how to look.
You could say that Tony Hart enabled me to listen to Kate Bush. Though I'll never be a painter.
AW.
