Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now

Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now

Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now First published in 2023 to coincide with the exhibition Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now 26 April – 29 July 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted © The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, except where otherwise stated ISBN 978-1-874331-68-1 EAN: 9781874331681 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery University of Leeds Parkinson Building Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT Designed by Phil Illingworth Printed on 100% recycled paper Front and back cover images: Simon Callery, Stura, 2021 (detail). ©Simon Callery. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023

Foreword

At a time of serious ecological crisis when pollution and unsustainable ocean and land use are threatening both ecosystems and human existence, the exhibition Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now feels more relevant than ever.

The show raises pertinent questions about who has access to nature, where and how. It also explores issues around equity, environmental racism and the colonial legacies of landscape.

One cannot forget that there are huge inequalities in terms of who has access to natural spaces and who feels a sense of belonging in them. In the UK, even from the times of the Industrial Revolution, the poorest and most disadvantaged people, including many multi-ethnic communities, have ended up living in the more heavily air-polluted areas and facing greater barriers to access nature whereas affluent people have often lived (and still do) in greener and cleaner areas.

The wonderfully broad spectrum of artists represented in this exhibition show the vitality and variety of contemporary painting in all its materiality and visual richness. They also approach nature from many different directions, expanding the notion of contemporary landscape painting in new, unexpected and sometimes radical and playful ways. The idea of British landscape itself is a heavily loaded concept. It can take us to an idyllic, harmonious and pleasantly aesthetic realm that helps us connect with our true selves

and with the world around us in its most basic form. At the same time, it is inevitably charged with white privilege as it is a symbol of status, for example in the form of Capability Brown’s vast areas of smooth undulating grass curated for an elite whose wealth was closely associated with the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This exhibition challenges that notion of nostalgic, idyllic and elitist landscape whilst acknowledging some of those hidden histories of exploitation.

For instance, it addresses the role of the working classes in shaping the landscape through quarrying and mining. Moreover, it opens up the understanding of what constitutes British landscape through the eyes of artists of the Global Majority.

The exhibition embraces and celebrates nature in all its forms, acknowledging that in the twenty-first century most people in the UK access nature on a regular basis through allotments, community gardens, public parks or even simply through windows and screens. In fact, the exhibition borrows its title from the ideas of anarchist author Colin Ward, who in his book Arcadia for All, co-authored by Dennis Hardy, explored the plotlands as alternative ways in which working class people accessed nature from the 1920s onwards, through self-built huts, chalets or even adapted railway carriages and trucks, using them as weekend and holiday retreats. In the show, there is also space for 3

wilder woodlands and forests, but these are often used to convey human personal experiences, including the uncanny, or to explore the meaning and significance of landscape in a post COVID world. The exhibition invites slow contemplation and encourages us to take the time to stop and mindfully connect with our surroundings.

The fragility of our environment as a result of human activity is also a key theme. Some of the paintings included in this exhibition highlight the pressures that capitalism is imposing on nature or offer alternative systems to live off the land collectively. Many of the artists present fragile, uncertain, ruined and vulnerable landscapes.

However, there is also a common thread of hope for the planet linked to the insignificance of humankind and the fact that life will go on.

We feel honoured to have worked in this project with guest curators Dr Judith Tucker, Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, University of Leeds and Geraint Evans, Pathway Leader MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and we hope that the exhibition is an opportunity to discuss some fundamental and pressing issues of our times.

Dr Laura Claveria Associate Curator of Exhibitions The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery

Imperfect Invisibility: Landscapes of Infrastructure and Industry Driving to my mum’s house I pass a huge new building. It is made of different shades of grey. For a moment the dark grey panels look like trees in a closely planted woodland, the lighter greys give the illusion of space between the trunks. But only for a moment. Not all the building is visible from the road. I can’t see its edges, I can’t work out its dimensions, and I don’t know what it is.

I look it up. There is a promotional film, the footage has been taken by drone. It is a visual inventory cataloguing multiple huge grey buildings on the site, each one identical. The arial perspective has been chosen to demonstrate the scale of the place. It is an attempt to convey the size of these buildings, to place them in relation to the network of roads and the fields that surround them. It is strange then that the film seems only to communicate a lack of visual information; as it flies above the site it appears to record the same unit of space again and again: grey roof, grey wall, grey tarmac. The more I look, the less I understand.

The website copy provides little help, it is full of terms like: employment park, home of leading businesses, infrastructure works, logistics centre.

Phrases which feel as full of air as the empty grey buildings on the film.

These places are difficult to see. Sometimes this is because they are geographically remote, but

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more likely in the UK, they are simply difficult to access, they are replete with physical boundaries – fences, embankments, they are encircled by check points. Some, like the building I drive past on the way to my Mum’s house, draw on camouflage design techniques developed during the First World War, in order to disguise themselves in the landscape or at least make their true size and shape hard to grasp.1 This difficulty in comprehension also extends to understanding the activities inside the site; this may be hidden underground workings in the case of extraction industries or the largely unseen global networks of labour and infrastructure that both support and are supported by these places. Media theorist Lisa Parks writes on the intentional invisibility of infrastructure technologies, arguing that techniques of deliberate concealment keep us uninformed about the structures, technologies and processes that are embedded in so much of our day-to-day existence. She notes that infrastructure only shucks off its cloak of invisibility when it malfunctions by either breaking down or being situated somewhere which is perceived as the wrong place. This theory is born out in my curiosity about these gigantic roadside complexes only being ignited when one is built close to my family’s home, and therefore from my perspective ‘in the wrong place’.2 How can contemporary landscape painting 5

engage with these contemporary landscapes and their intentional concealment? Rather than going for the big reveal, perhaps paintings are at their most effective when they engage with this invisibility, helping us to understand the power and the purpose of these disappearing tricks.

In her aerial landscape paintings of places like these – the compounds, industrial plants and other workings of late capitalism, Carol Rhodes recognised this indeterminacy.3 Her images are often composite, melding one place with another, creating abstract arrangements of forms that stubbornly refused to coalesce into the rational, systemised sites of production demanded by the eye of capital. Adding to this ambiguity, their colours are not the browns, greens and blues of the landscape tradition, but sit within a range of muted tones that could equally be sourced from a gravel pit, human body or polluted river.

Hannah Brown’s series of paintings The Field Next to Tesco that is Soon to be Built makes me reflect on my apparently NIMBY-ish attitude in relation to infrastructure landscapes, as well as their imperfect invisibility. In these works the eponymous Tesco and the forthcoming buildings are unseen. Instead, we are presented with a green landscape of meadow, woodland, hedges and wildflowers, rendered in almost Pre-Raphaelite detail. This is not part of an expansive landscape, what is beyond the treeline is unclear, all we see is an opaque grey sky tinged with a chemical orange. It is an everyday scene in many ways, one of those unremarkable pieces of land that continue to exist between things. Footpaths through new 6

housing estates, round the back of supermarkets, at the edges of industrial estates will lead on to spaces of this very kind. Accessed by dog walkers, fly tippers, teenagers hanging out after dark, this utilitarian heterotopia is given a powerful nostalgic charge by the title of the painting. Whilst the Tesco store and the coming new development remain invisible we feel them waiting in the wings, triggering that fundamental trope of the pastoral genre: loss. From Nicolas Poussin to Brideshead Revisited: In Arcadia Ego, the idyllic landscape is always already lost.

Whilst I have so far marvelled at the invisibility and associated indeterminacy of these infrastructural projects, it is important to also consider the very material effects of the transformations of land and lived experience wrought by these structures and processes. For many people across the world what goes on in these sites is not a mystery but the everyday reality of work. A reality which is felt in the body, the mind and in a myriad of ways through associated economic effects.

The great industrial and infrastructural projects of recent human history have also left their material trace on the geological record leading to designation of the Anthropocene. Geographer David Matless has used the term Anthroposcenic, (a portmanteau of Anthropocene and scenic, relating to the scopic nature of landscape) to speculate on how we might visualise landscapes ‘as emblematic of certain processes marking the Anthropocene’.4 This term is useful in helping us to think about the landscapes paintings of Barbara Howey and David

Ainley. These works take the extractive industries of fracking and mining as their respective subject matter. Howey’s work Fracked and Flooded reads as a scene of desolation. The cylindrical structures of a fracking site, and its accompanying perimeter fence - a set of otherwise abstract shapes which are recognisable largely from repeated media images – float adrift in a watery green space.

Like Rhodes, Howey’s works are attuned to the indeterminate nature of these sites, also like Rhodes there is a sense of a distanced aerial view. But Whilst Rhodes’ paintings often feature road like markings that stretch beyond the edge of the painting hinting at connection, Howey’s site is isolated, surrounded by a disorientating expanse which plays between the real surface of the paint and illusory reflections of flood water. David Ainley’s Extractive Industry (After Georgius Agricola) could also be read as an aerial interpretation of an industrial compound, however it is in the repeated minimalist mark marking in these paintings where we find the primary connection to the Anthroposcenic. The scarred surface of his works resonate with the labour of hand or mechanised processes of hewing resources from rock. Ainley’s works remind us that it is both environmental and human exploitation which is being registered in the geological deposits of the Anthropocene.

Scholars like Professor of Inhuman Geography, Kathryn Yusoff, advocate for more nuanced understandings of the Anthropocene which recognise the brutal connections between this new (and still unofficial) geological era with human exploitation and specifically transatlantic trade in

enslaved people.5 This connection between fossil fuels, slavery and the British Landscape surfaces in the painting Industrial Hills by Lubaina Himid. In keeping with the theme of invisibility, no industry is to be seen in these industrial hills, instead what stands at the centre is a monument to the captured and enslaved Africans who were forced to produce the cotton to feed the mills which have become synonymous with these northern British landscapes. Mills which ran on steam produced by coal and the labour of the working class poor.

While the intentional concealment of histories, structures, industries and labour continues apace, contemporary landscape painting has an important role to play in directing attention towards those hidden places and imperfect invisibilities.

Rosemary Shirley Associate Professor of Museum Studies University of Leicester Rowan Moore, ‘A shed the size of a town:​what Britain’s giant distribution centres​tell​us about modern life’, The Observer, 15 April 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2018/apr/15/shed-the-size-of-town-what-britainsgiant-distribution-centres-tell-us-about-modern-life.

1

Lisa Parks, ‘Around the antenna tree: The politics of infrastructural visibility’, Flow Journal, 5 March 2010, https:// www.flowjournal.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-around-theantenna-tree-the-politics-of-infrastructural-visibilitylisa-parksuc-santa-barbara/.

2

Dan Ward, ‘Anti-Pastoral’, Text Zur Kunst, 23 June 2021, https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/anti-pastoral-danward/.

3

David Matless, ‘The Anthroposcenic: Landscape in the Anthroposcene’, British Art Studies, Issue 10, November 2018, https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-10/ landscape-anthroposcene.

4

Kathryn Yusoff, A billion black Anthropocenes or none, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

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Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now What might it mean to paint ‘landscape’ here and now, in Britain in the twenty-first century? On the surface, a straightforward enough question to engage with, perhaps. The answers, if there are any, are as wide as the range of ways that these paintings engage with the contested premise ‘landscape’. We borrowed part of our title from the anarchist social historian Colin Ward, and added a question mark, inviting questions of what we might imagine Arcadia to be, but also who might be allowed to access and enjoy it, whether in the real, or in the gallery in painted form.

The paintings we selected explore landscapes cultural and natural; ours and theirs; lost and found; worked and holidayed; dreamt and experienced, wild and cultivated; resplendent and mundane; inhabited and empty; domestic and grandiose; trespassed and owned; impoverished and fertile; scarred and beautiful; urban and green; industrial and rural; gone and going; open and closed; filmed and walked; hidden and public; joyful and harrowing; beneath and beyond; sheltered and expansive; witnessed and obliterated. Here also are so many of the lively possibilities intrinsic to contemporary painting, an incredible range and understanding of surface: meticulous precision; close observation; gestural abstraction; scrapes, scratches, glazes, stained canvases; thick impasto; pattern and colour; chiaroscuro; paintings informed by the photographic, digital and filmic.

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We imagined what the conversations between the works might be. Some might find it easy to talk to each other, having already met or sharing an idiom or motif. Others might be surprised and shocked to meet here, and these more unexpected juxtapositions reveal the complexities inherent in the concept of ‘landscape’ in relation to painting.

The word ‘landscape’ has long invited questions about what is natural, and what is unnatural.

Landscapes are places in which the human and the more-than-human are interconnected and entwined and cannot be understood without acknowledging specific historical contexts nor viewed without accounting for our intrinsically embedded cultural tropes. In this exhibition we understand landscape to be small-scale and local as much as picturesque, pastoral, or sublime.

Contemporary landscape painting often engages critically with its own history, with older landscape traditions as many of the paintings do here. If ‘landscape’, contested term though it may be, is one way through which we might understand our place in the world, it also offers a means to comprehend our impact on the world. As concerns mount in relation to climate change and environmental degradation, the exhibition asks how landscape painting might respond.

Since in our title we invoke Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward’s Arcadia For All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape,1 it is apt that many of

our paintings deal precisely with the idea of a ‘makeshift landscape’ a vernacular, hotch-potch, allotment sort of landscape, in which self-built huts and sheds proliferate. Of course, it is not just through sheds and parks that legacies of the long Industrial Revolution and its contemporary aftermath, climate change, echo through the works. They hark back to the interwar years when the aspiring working class made their own Arcadia in plotlands or allotments, and a landscape that also offers future possibilities: Colin Ward himself is well known as a pre-cursor of the transition movement with his concerns about the unequal distribution of land and the need for sustainable housing.

Mark Fairnington’s exquisite paintings of jerry built structures, the allotment sheds and river-side shacks that dot the Northumberland countryside were made following an extended walk in the footsteps of the eighteenth century wood-engraver Thomas Bewick. Julian Perry’s sheds and rhubarb plants were once part of the Manor Garden allotments in the Lea Valley in East London. They were removed to make way for the Olympic Park in 2007 and Perry records this community before its enforced demise. His allotment paintings were exhibited under the title A Common Treasury, a phrase coined by the Diggers, a seventeenth-century group of nonconformist dissidents who promoted the cultivation of common land, motivated by a belief in agrarian socialism. Judith Tucker’s paintings explore the Humberston Fitties, one of the UK’s last surviving plotlands. Set at dusk, they explore the uncanny transformations of chalets after

dark. There is a poignancy to these small chalets, remnants of working-class tourism, on this small piece of land sandwiched between the traces of the coal industry and the current oil, gas, and wind industries. Alternative communities that seek new beginnings as an escape from the rat race through communal living and self-sufficiency are also the subject of Greg Rook’s figural paintings. Perhaps they might have enjoyed the impressive Modernist building in Benet Spencer’s Mountain House 4 perched on the edge of a rocky outcrop in a vast and otherwise unpopulated mountain landscape.

The new utopias depicted are riven with both hope and the threat of failure or violence.

Not all our huts are rural. The moss-covered, graffitied one in George Shaw’s The Oldey Worldy stands in the middle of a public park, a space for leisure, a legacy of the philanthropic aim to create open, green spaces within the rapidly expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution.

Shaw is also a wonderful chronicler of the muddy lanes and woodlands around the Tile Hill estate in Coventry. We are all familiar with such edgelands, wastelands and post-industrial, semi-wild landscapes. Hurvin Anderson’s Bridge is another case in point, considering the railway line in Handsworth Park in Birmingham. Here concrete juts into rich foliage and wires slice through green, invoking the Caribbean as much as the Midlands, yet also resonant of mid-twentieth century neo-romanticism. During the first COVID lockdown in 2020, Narbi Price made a series of paintings of benches entwined with red and white hazard tape designed to prevent people from lingering.

Although the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns 9

refocused our attention onto the natural world through walking, the closure of these benches undermined the invitation to take in a scenic view and to own it. In many of her paintings, Louise Bristow explores the public spaces and urban parks of the Soviet Union, on the one hand spaces of social exchange and shared civic pride, on the other, places of fear undermined by the realities of a society shaped by a culture of surveillance, control, and paranoia.

Many of these works could be read through the cultural geographer David Matless’s term the ‘anthroposcenic’, depictions of landscapes which are emblematic of the Anthropocene epoch.2 Hannah Brown’s The Field Next to Tesco that is Soon to be Built on disrupts our illusion of a pastoral ideal, unspoilt by industrialisation and urbanisation. The title reveals the inevitable spread of the built environment into green field sites to fuel new economies. In a similar fashion, David Ainley’s labour intensive paintings reflect on the hidden histories of the labourers who worked the mines and quarries near his Derbyshire home, narratives and lives that are too often ignored in what he terms the aestheticization of landscape as scenery and what John Barrell coins the dark side of the landscape.3 Ainley’s paintings might be places seen from above, a familiar strategy in the aerial viewpoints of Carol Rhodes whose paintings map signs of human activity, but distanced, akin to surveillance photography. The sheer scale of the developments depicted: airports, motorways, industrial parks, mines, and their imposition on 10

their surroundings are astonishing given the modest scale of Rhodes’ paintings. There are no signs of the mill workers nor the enslaved cotton pickers on the wet, windy Lancashire moorland behind Lubaina Himid’s imagined monument to those very people. This freighted history is both inscribed into the painting and into the heather clad hills themselves. We know this is a place haunted by the Industrial Revolution and empire, an ecosystem ruined by decades of acid rain and still used for grouse shooting. Fragile and ruined landscapes are of deep concern to Barbara Howey who employs an unsettling and toxic colour palette in Fracked and Flooded to depict a contentious industrial process that only exacerbates the climate crisis. Paula MacArthur’s crystal, the result of extraction, is landscape in its elemental form, an embodiment of deep time that also reminds us of human and environmental exploitation of mining. The tents and marquees in Joanna Whittle’s sumptuous miniature paintings have a ruined and desolate appearance. Buffeted by ominous clouds and listing into the surrounding flood water, they are images of uncertainty and precariousness at a time of climate catastrophe, whilst recalling the Romantic ruin.

For some painters, walking as a direct, visceral experience of landscape is key. Sam Douglas takes camping trips in the Cheviot Hills to seek out Neolithic or Bronze Age sites and monuments, producing a contemporary reworking of visionary landscapes, worthy of Samuel Palmer himself.

Iain Biggs’ recent series Notitia, one of which we show in the exhibition, combines multiple ways of visually representing place, an approach

to deep mapping that Biggs has described as polyvocal.4 These are playful pieces, using an extraordinary range of materials and categories of sign to explore ideas of landscape, environment, and representation. Biggs refers to his walking as groundwork, a term we could also apply to Simon Callery’s multi-sensory paintings, made partly by physically tracing the sites of archaeological digs in layered strips of dyed canvas redolent of geological deep time. These visceral and embodied encounters with the natural world are crucial to other artists in this exhibition such as Clare Thatcher who uses pure colour and raw pigment to articulate her emotional experiences of the coastal landscapes with which she feels a deep connection. Colour, and its ability to evoke a place, experience or feeling, is also important to Phoebe Unwin, whose work Beach is a vivid, almost hallucinatory, scene. Unwin draws on observation and memory, collapsing experience and time into fragmented images and lively, improvised brushwork and layers of translucent painted motifs. In Rebecca Partridge’s Night Forest Mirror, we glimpse the night sky through the canopy of a silhouetted wood. Partridge often makes paintings in series, taking the sky as a theme. She reflects on the legacy of the Romantic Sublime whilst drawing on first-hand observation.

Others consider cultural representations and mediated landscape. Natalie Dowse’s Between Dog and Wolf 2, from the French phrase for dusk (entre chien et loup) focuses on a nocturnal arboreal landscape, an uncanny, almost filmic space illuminated by the headlights of a car.

Elsewhere, woodlands are the focus of Lara

Cobden’s Flipside of Nowhere which depicts a solitary, hooded figure passing through a dreamlike landscape at twilight. In many of her works, Cobden refers to the folkloric and spiritual meanings of trees. Christopher Orr’s spectral woodlands in The Ghost of an Old Forest conjure an uncanny and mysterious ambience. Dan Hays transcribes low-resolution, web-camera digital images through systematic, painterly brushstrokes.

The screen, he believes, can undermine multi-sensory and visceral encounters with the world while the physicality of the paint and the labour invested in its application re-establish a haptic connection with the subjects depicted.

The café window in Andrew Grassie’s Window Seat, Loch Ness reflects the mountains opposite as an ephemeral silhouette, a metaphor for the fabled monster reputed to dwell within the chilly waters of the loch: a peripheral, phantom presence. This framing of a view of a famous landscape reflects an enduring strategy of the tourist experience that commodifies our landscapes. The hotdog-stand in Geraint Evans’ Frankfurter is in a clearing of a seemingly wild landscape, an incongruous interloper upon which a large cut-out of an anthropomorphized sausage lies, winking at us invitingly, offering a fix of processed food for our hike into the ‘wilderness’ beyond. Tourists will often want to view nature as a pristine space, unsullied by human activity, an idea undermined by their very presence and the act of witnessing.

We know that when we are in one place, we often think of, remember, or dream of another. Elizabeth 11

Magill makes work about the coastal landscape of her childhood upbringing in County Antrim. Her evocative paintings are richly layered and employ a range of montaged, painted, and silkscreened images. The painting feels at once exhilarating and disorientating, shaped by the unsettling histories embedded in the Northern Irish countryside and reflective of the trauma of our uncertain times. The vibrantly coloured paintings of Cara Nahaul draw on her childhood memories of visits to Mauritius and Malaysia, the countries of her parents’ birth.

The beaches, huts and tropical vegetation evoke blissful, paradise-like scenes, an Arcadia sold to tourists, that simultaneously hides the dark historical realities of exploitation and injustice.

Matthew Krishanu’s autobiographical paintings draw on memories of his childhood in Dhaka. Two Boys (Mountains, Kashmir), is based loosely on the artist and his brother. The figures crouch before a vast valley, its distant mountains, painted in thin layers of translucent colour. These are confident and independent children, a stark contrast to the depictions of objectified brown bodies in the paintings of Western art history. Kashmir remains a deeply contested space in the wake of the British colonial period, but for Krishanu, this landscape is both distant and personal, a fondly remembered ‘other country’, evocative and deeply felt.

What possible futures might all this work allow us to dream of? Could we dare to think of Arcadia for all? In a recklessly optimistic moment, let’s hope for that, an Arcadia as serene and harmonious as in Kimathi Donkor’s painting, in which a black couple sit quietly on a rug in a field of flowers, above a pale coastal landscape far below, a place 12

of calmness, beauty and repose. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might be some justification for the extensive length of time that we painters have spent smearing substance onto substrate to make sense of the world we all find ourselves in now.

This is not only a show of ideas, but it is about the visual and material, a real extravagance of painterly landscapes brought together, a gift for our viewers. What all the works in this exhibition do is challenge us to look differently, to dream differently, to feel differently, to look slowly, to think slowly and above all, to be careful.

Dr Judith Tucker Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, University of Leeds Geraint Evans Pathway Leader MA Fine Art: Painting, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All: the Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (London: Mansell, 1984).

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2.

David Matless, ‘The Anthroposcenic’, Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965) 42, no. 3 (2017): 363–376.

John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Paintings, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

3.

Iain Biggs, ‘The Spaces of “Deep Mapping”: A Partial Account’, Journal of Arts and Communities 2, no. 1 (2011): 5–25.

4.

David Ainley, Extractive Industry (After Georgius Agricola), 2017, acrylic and oil on three-part cut panel. ©The Artist 13

Hurvin Anderson, Bridge, 2013, oil on canvas. University of Warwick Art Collection ©Hurvin Anderson.

Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery 14

Iain Biggs, Notitia 6: Suburban Edge, 2018, mixed media. ©The Artist 15

Louise Bristow, Gateway, 2020, oil on wood. ©The Artist. Photo: Bernard G Mills 16

Hannah Brown, The Field Next to Tesco that is Soon to be Built on 5, 2017-19, oil on marine ply and oak. ©The Artist.

Photo: Anna Arca 17

Simon Callery, Stura, 2021, canvas, distemper, thread and wood. ©Simon Callery.

All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023 18

Lara Cobden, Flipside of Nowhere, 2020, oil and ink on panel. ©The Artist 19

Kimathi Donkor, Call Me Blessed, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas. ©The Artist 20

Sam Douglas, Coquet Valley, 2022, oil and varnish on board. ©The Artist 21

Natalie Dowse, Between Dog and Wolf 2, 2018, oil on canvas. ©The Artist 22

Geraint Evans, Frankfurter, 2022, oil on canvas. ©The Artist. Photo: B J Deakin Photography 23

Mark Fairnington, Shed (boots), 2022, oil on panel. ©The Artist 24

Andrew Grassie, Window Seat, Loch Ness, 2022, egg tempera on paper on board. ©Andrew Grassie, courtesy Maureen Paley, London 25

Dan Hays, Delilah Lookout 3, 2020, oil on canvas. ©The Artist 26

Lubaina Himid, Industrial Hills, 1991, acrylic on canvas. ©The Artist. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate 27

Barbara Howey, Fracked and Flooded, 2019, watercolour and oil on gesso board. ©The Artist 28

Matthew Krishanu, Two Boys (Mountains, Kashmir), 2021, oil on canvas. ©The Artist. Courtesy the Artist, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo: Peter Mallet 29

Paula MacArthur, Coming home to a place we’d never been before, 2022, oil on canvas. ©The Artist 30

Elizabeth Magill, Red Iris, 2022, mixed media on canvas. ©The Artist. Courtesy of the artist, Annely Juda Gallery and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning 31

Cara Nahaul, Rivers to Tend, 2022, oil on board. ©The Artist 32

Christopher Orr, The Ghost of an Old Forest, 2021, oil on linen. ©The Artist. Courtesy of the artist and HdM Gallery, London and Beijing 33

Rebecca Partridge, Night Forest Mirror (diptych), 2019, watercolour and ink on birch ply panel. ©The Artist 34

Julian Perry, Olympic Shed and Rhubarb, 2018, oil on panel. ©The Artist 35

Narbi Price, Untitled Bench Painting (Lockdown) 2, 2021, acrylic on panel. ©The Artist 36

Carol Rhodes, Deposits, 2009, oil on board. ©The Carol Rhodes Estate 37

Greg Rook, Untitled (tents), 2012, oil on linen. ©The Artist 38

George Shaw, The Oldey Worldy, 2017, Humbrol enamel on canvas. ©The Artist. Courtesy of The Artist and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London. Photo: Peter White 39

Benet Spencer, Mountain House 4, 2022, oil on canvas. ©The Artist 40

Clare Thatcher, Vision of Landscape II, 2018, oil and pigments on canvas on board. ©The Artist. Photo: Jo Hounsome 41

Judith Tucker, Night Fitties: we came for Barnsley feast week, oil on linen, 2023. ©The Artist. Photo: Tom McVeigh 42

Phoebe Unwin, Beach, 2022, acrylic and oil on canvas. ©The Artist 43

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Contemporary British Painting, University of the Arts London, Simon & Simon, Phil Illingworth, Tony Rae, Layla Bloom, Fred Pepper, Laura Millward, Laura Beare, Laura Wilson, Claire Evans, Emma Hunt-Shelley, Lauren Hollowday, Holly Buck, Cat Lane, Tamsin Key, Sasha Napoli, Sophia Lambert, Joseph Massey, Ellen Dutton, Abigail Boon, Lane Osborne, Katherine Tiller, Rebecca Higgins, Laura Smith, Qona Wright, Helen Price, Josh Sendall and University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, Masud Khokhar.

With special thanks to all the participating artists, artists’ estates and private lenders for making this exhibition possible.

Joanna Whittle, Blackwater (Adorned), 2022, oil on canvas. ©The Artist. Photo: Damien Griffiths 44

ISBN 978-1-874331-68-1

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