Wild Observations of a Tamed Landscape

Peter Thomson

“Embankment”, “Scrapyard”, “Scrapyard, Full Moon”, “Green Sky”.

A starting point for these paintings is a fairly obvious observation of decay. I don’t read this as a negative statement but simply an attempt to find interest and fascination in what might be assumed is just a pile of detritus, “beauty in decay” is a rather hackneyed term but probably appropriate. There’s also a fascination with the short term thinking of consumerism and rampant consumption. There is a lurking fear at the back of most minds that at some point a substantial material change has to be made to the way we structure our economies and the indulgence of cyclical fashion, which encourages the rejection and discarding of functioning technology, clothing, art?…. almost anything that is marketable for the ephemeral thrill of novelty.

One the challenges faced by contemporary figurative painters other than the technical handling of paint is how they deal with the content they include in their painting. In essence it’s how to lift an image above and beyond a simple illustration.

Symbolism and metaphor are of course the tried and trusted, and painters are also in the fortunate position of being able to draw on a vast record of imagery from predecessors easily available from the internet and books.

With this in mind I often refer openly in my own work to artists who have inspired and influenced. This can also be daunting as the artist tries to come to terms with how they can possibly fit in, within this crowded historical landscape, and what relevance they have within the ever increasing number of contemporary professional painters.

My own response to this is to embrace the uncertainty, to regard each painting as an experiment and not to use a prescribed approach to painting itself. What I mean by experiment is that each painting as it develops suggests the appropriate level of finish, which can be either highly resolved or loosely handled, or somewhere in between and that from the point of the initial idea the finished piece may bear no resemblance to that idea in both representation and concept.

Over the years I’ve moved from drawing almost entirely from the imagination to now using both imagined imagery and directly observed objects and landscape to construct the painting. Again a challenge presents itself to render the familiar in the most interesting manner possible.

This has served to give me a greater freedom of practice and an invigorated approach in the ongoing development of my own painting.

PUBLICATION: Wild Observations of a Tamed Landscape

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