A Landscape One Can Hold in One’s Hand For hundreds of years, artists have responded to the call of the wild, seeking inspiration from the rugged beauty of far-flung places in the British Isles. One such destination is the Lake District which has served as a Mecca for itinerant artists drawn to the sublime and picturesque aspects of its varied landscape. Abbot Hall Art Gallery has the collection to prove it - a vast array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century watercolours by painters both amateur and professional alike. Some sought picturesque effects, looking to edit and manipulate the components in the scene before them to create a harmonious composition that is pleasing to the eye, while others felt the pull (and commercial appeal) of the sublime and chose to emphasise the overwhelming power and grandeur of the landscape. The Lake District was never a source of inspiration for Graham Sutherland, however. What would he have made of its perfect picture-postcard beauty, its sylvan vistas framed by gently bowed boughs, its broken crags mirrored in glassy lakes? Sutherland found creative sustenance in a different environmentPembrokeshire - whose varied scenery, covered lanes, estuaries, hills and lush fields provided fertile ground for the transformative powers of his imagination, in the same way that Picasso, a hugely influential figure for Sutherland, used the mundane still-life as a springboard for magical explorations of form, space, and perception. ‘I wish I could give you some idea of the exultant strangeness of this place’, Sutherland wrote of Pembrokeshire in his essay A Welsh Sketch Book of 1942, ‘for strange it certainly is, many people whom I know hate it, and I cannot but admit that it possesses an element of disquiet. The whole setting is one of exuberance - of darkness and light - of decay and life. Rarely have I been so conscious of the contrasting of these elements in so small a compass’. Not for Sutherland the geographical extremities and physical grandeur of the ‘sublime’ scenery encountered in certain parts of the Lake District, North Wales or Highlands of Scotland. For him, the allure of the Pembrokeshire landscape lay in its human scale and sense of proximity - a sensual realm in which every element feels within reach. ‘Can you imagine anything more boring than mountain gorges?’ he asked in 1951, perhaps having in mind the kind of imagery favoured by artists such as JMW Turner in the early part of the nineteenth century: the terrifying, vertiginous ravine and towering rocks in Turner’s The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) (fig.1), whose immensity is defined by the mules and minute figures braving the narrow balcony path, offer no thrills for Sutherland. It is the microcosmic elements of a scene such as this that hold the key: ‘If you were to take a piece of lichen from a rock in one of these gorges, or pick up a shaped stone, a drawing of these would seem to be more interesting, because man, after all, could have plucked the lichen off the rock and picked up the stone’. Sutherland was less interested in depicting nature as an overwhelming, sublime force so much as a substitute for man - what need of people in his seething, self-contained world, populated by menacing trees, insect-hedges and prehistoric hills enacting their own private dramas? This vision of nature as an independent force prevails on and off throughout Sutherland’s career but is expressed most energetically in the works from the first 20 years or so of his life as a professional artist. Fig.1
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