Philip Braham Prescient Nature
Philip Braham Prescient Nature February 2024
16 Dundas Street | Edinburgh | EH3 6HZ | 0131 558 1200 | scottish-gallery.co.uk
Foreword
Landscape in art has a long history, but until the eighteenth century it was incidental: the setting for something more uplifting: religious or classical subject matter, the landscape like the scenery for a play. But in the period of the Enlightenment ideas of the sublime, of the natural world as a space of awe and terror, the raging sea and lofty, icy peaks of mountains, became the subject of painting intended to give us a sense of our own insignificance and of our lives as fragile. The contemporary landscape painter is no longer obliged to choose tempest and wilderness. After all, the viewer of art today engages with the subject, allows their own experience and resultant feelings to become relevant and indeed vital, a long way from the didacticism of previous eras. Philip Braham will not dictate how his paintings are to be understood but neither is his art supposed to be passive. Landscape exists in time as well as space: it evolves and interacts with man as well as nature. Braham’s title Prescient Landscape speaks to the ecology of the future, how an icy forest, or landscape billowed in snow, or the reflection of winter trees in still water are not raw materials available for man’s disposal, but closer to Heidegger’s realm of sky, earth, mortal and divine with the artist an agent in aletheia, the disclosure of truth. Braham makes beautiful paintings, beauty, a human perception, all the more poignant given its fragility.
Guy Peploe
Prescient Nature by Philip Braham At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1935)
We think of time as a river. Forever flowing from the moment of our birth, we move in our milieu downstream, relating and gaining agency before disseminating and finally departing. Our knowledge of the certainty of death makes time seem tangible. Years are divided into days and hours, our Being constantly drifting towards its ultimate end. Yet the metaphor is misguided: the river is everywhere simultaneously, as rivulet, stream, waterfall, estuary and ocean, vapour, cloud, and rain. It seeps and irrigates, growth erupts from the earth and everything in existence is entwined in the dance of life, past and future together and inseparable. In Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot recognises the folly of our constructed notion of time from the perspective of the individual, noting we are just part of the much greater dance that is the fullness of the world always in flux. He conjures the still point, that fleeting moment when momentum ceases then changes direction like the swing of a pendulum from birth to death. He describes it first as “neither flesh nor fleshless”, raising the philosophical problem of body and mind, of where consciousness resides, whether as chemical and electrical transactions in our brain, or as spirit temporarily inhabiting our bodies. What he evokes in Burnt Norton and widely across his oeuvre, is a transcendent lifeforce that interconnects all living things and all histories, past, present, and future as folded into
one, signified in this poem as white light still and moving, and elsewhere as the unspoken word. We sometimes casually say that a landscape or an artwork speaks to us when what we mean is that it triggers a recollection or excites an emotion that makes us feel connected to it. But that is not quite correct, because that would suggest a relationship of subject to object, percepting and perceived, when what is in-play is a complex array of signifiers in which we are complicit agents in the exchange. The medium is light and the unspoken word, and our obligation is to give it our attention, to be open to whatever is revealed and to respond as required. Martin Heidegger uses the term Gelassenheit, releasement, as this attentive waiting, which is described as “the spirit of disponibilité (availability) before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.” My approach to painting is to let things be as they are, without leveraging anything. I work to reach towards what is already present. What I behold is what I draw upon to bring forth in the painting. Thus, for me, painting is a faithful act of attention and correspondence within the flux of the world, a still point full of possibilities. Stillness and reflection feature in the two paintings of the River Earn, Radiant River, High Summer
(Cat. 2) and Radiant River, Early Winter (Cat. 3), and in Mirrorpool in a Birch Wood (Cat.1). During that period, I had been thinking about Claude Monet’s series of paintings of The Seine at Giverny, 1897, that capture the nuances of varying light and weather effects on the surface of water. But while Monet sought to rapidly catch the essence of the scene before it changed, my approach is slow and contemplative, giving equal attention to each part of the composition. The Seine and the River Earn are part of the same arterial system that circles our planet, and light dances on water everywhere and endlessly. A series of monochrome studies titled Dark Sea 1 – 4 (Cat. 28-31) looked at a much larger body of water, whose currents and tides cause turbulence under the gravitational influence of the moon. These led to two paintings from the southern shores of the Mediterranean, Dark Sea, Tunisia (Cat. 27) and Night Crossing (Cat. 32), titled to acknowledge the political turbulence associated with illegal migration, without making that the central theme. Instead, it is the breaking waves and the vibrant Tunisian night sky that hold my attention. These are constant features of this landscape, extending before and after the yearnings of man. In late November 2021, Storm Arwen struck with devastating force, destroying great swathes of forests and woodlands in Perthshire and elsewhere. Torlum Wood, on the outskirts of Crieff, was turned into a sea of shattered limbs and foliage, leaving trunks standing like broken matchsticks against the sky. The woods I was so fond of were rendered unrecognisable overnight. I was reminded of the painting We Are Making a New World by Paul Nash, painted after the end of the First World War and depicting a ravished landscape of blackened, broken trees, with a sun rising above the backdrop of red mountains. I took photographs of the forlorn scene as a record of its fate. Three months later we witnessed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and every evening
our TV’s showed the bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, wreaking ever greater destruction and havoc. In the wake of these events, I painted Apokalypsis (Cat. 8), the first in a series of paintings conveying storm damage. The Greek meaning is revelation rather than catastrophe. Rationally, Nature cannot be said to be prescient, but imagination permits us that thought. Thus, to me, the destruction wrought by the storm acted as a harbinger for the destruction of Ukraine and later of Gaza, and no doubt of other places yet to come. Our forbearers understood such signals in Nature, but we disregard this as superstitious nonsense. These forewarnings can survive in the artistic imagination. In any case, these constructed concepts are just motivations for me to paint a particular landscape rather than a different one, and whatever my intentions are at the outset, there comes a point in the process where the emergent painting overtakes the initial idea, and one gives oneself over to the orchestration of form and colour necessary give the painting autonomy. This performative element requires subtle attunement, attending to what is there and to what will follow. That the painting acquires its own autonomy while the authority of my intentions diminish, permits it to enter the world as a vessel for the gaze of others whose personal histories may suggest alternative interpretations. Not all my paintings are metaphorically conceived either. In fact, most are simply attempting to capture a particular light or atmosphere that I have seen while walking. I use a camera as a notebook to quickly capture an image to work from, and then the process takes over as the demands of the painting go beyond the source data. The snow series and woodlands in this collection are examples where the only intention was to portray the landscape as I perceived it sensually. What I hope to convey is the still point that Eliot alludes to, to see within the flux of the living something that approaches timelessness.
Mirrorpool in a Birch Wood
1 Mirrorpool in a Birch Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 89 x 130 cm
2 Radiant River, High Summer, 2023 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm
3 Radiant River, Early Winter, 2023 oil on linen, 89 x 116 cm
4 Dawn in Torlum Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm
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After the Storm
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5 After the Storm, 2023 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm
6 Apokalypsis (study 1), 2023 oil on board, 22 x 26 cm
7 Apokalypsis (study 2), 2023 oil on board, 31 x 39 cm
8 Apokalypsis, 2022 oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm
9 Sentinel, Firth of Clyde, 2023 oil on paper, 30 x 30 cm
10 Sundown on Torlum Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 61 x 92 cm
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The Soft Silence of Snow
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11 Lovers’ Walk, Winter, 2023 acrylic on paper, 19 x 28 cm
12 Footprints in the Snow, 2021 oil on board, 38 x 54 cm
13 The Edge of the Woods, 2023 oil on board, 47 x 67 cm
14 Laggan Hill, Winter, 2023 oil on board, 47 x 67 cm
15 The Soft Silence of Snow, 2022 oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm
16 Last Light, Glen Turret, 2021 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm
17 Homeward at Dusk, 2023 oil on board, 99 x 150 cm
18 The Pitch, Aardvreck, 2023 oil on linen, 65 x 92 cm
19 Low Cloud, Greenloaning, 2023 oil on board, 47 x 68 cm
20 Cocoon Land, 2021 oil on board, 38 x 54 cm
21 Trees in Fog, 2021 oil on board, 38 x 54 cm
22 Dying Embers, 2023 oil on board, 38 x 54 cm
23 Woodshed Lane on Laggan Hill, 2022 oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm
24 Towards Twilight, 2022 oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm
25 Winter Dawn in Torlum Wood, 2023 oil on board, 38 x 59 cm
26 Boundary, 2023 oil on board, 31 x 38 cm
Dark Sea
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27 Dark Sea, Tunisia, 2023 oil on linen, 89 x 116 cm
28 Dark Sea 2, 2023 ink and acrylic on paper, 31.5 x 45 cm
29 Dark Sea 3, 2023 ink and acrylic on paper, 31.5 x 45 cm
30 Dark Sea 1, 2023 ink and acrylic on paper, 31.5 x 45 cm
31 Dark Sea 4, 2023 ink and acrylic on paper, 31.5 x 45 cm
32 Night Crossing, 2023 oil on linen, 80 x 60 cm
Philip Braham (b.1959)
biography
awards and residencies
1959
Born in Glasgow
2009
1976-80
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. DA (Painting)
Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award for lens-based work
2003
1980-81
Royal Academy of Fine Art, The Hague, Holland
Friends of the Royal Scottish Academy Research Bursary
1994
1981-82
University of California at Los Angeles, Visiting Artist
Guthrie Award, Royal Scottish Academy
1989
Scottish Arts Council Award
2000
0.5 FTE Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, DJCAD, University of Dundee
1985
Educational Institute of Scotland Award
2013
Programme Director for Art & Philosophy; DJCAD, University of Dundee
1981
Greenshields Award
1980
British Council Scholarship
2021
Elected to the Royal Scottish Academy
selected solo exhibitions 2024
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
2003
BCA Gallery, London
2021
Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Perth
2000
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
BCA Gallery, London
2018
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
1999
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
2016
Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow
1998
Galleri Christian Dam, Oslo
2014
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
1997
BCA Gallery, London
2011
Raab Gallery, Berlin
1995
Raab Boukamel Gallery, London
Union Gallery, Edinburgh
1994
Galleri Christian Dam, Copenhagen
2010
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
2006
Osborne Samuel, London
2005
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Raab Boukamel Gallery, London 1993
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
public collections Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum
Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh
BBC London
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
Chichester University Collections
Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh
Contemporary Art Society, London
Stirling University Collections
Educational Institute of Scotland
Sunderland Art Gallery
Life Association of Scotland
The City Art Centre, Edinburgh
Lillie Art Gallery, Glasgow
The Fleming Collection, London
McManus Art Gallery, Dundee
The Richard Demarco Archive, Edinburgh
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
University of Dundee Collections
Perth Museum and Art Gallery
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition: Philip Braham Prescient Nature 8 February - 2 March 2024 Exhibition can be viewed online at: scottish-gallery.co.uk/prescient-nature ISBN: 978 1 912900 80 0 Printed by PurePrint Group Designed and produced by The Scottish Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyrightholders and of the publishers. Front cover: Mirrorpool in a Birch Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 89 x 130 cm (Cat. 1) Inside front cover: Last Light, Glen Turret, 2021 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm (Cat. 16) Inside back cover: Dawn in Torlum Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm (Cat. 4) Page 1: Philip Braham on Ben A’an