'Context' - A Blog
Loitering cows, a detail from a larger painting of Stampwell Farm, Buckinghamshire
A Figure from the Past in the Landscape
18/12/2020
How art mediates a link between the passing of time in a place
To see a figure from the past in the landscape is an arresting experience. I don’t mean really seeing a figure from the past, not actually ‘a ghost’.
I mean in the mind’s eye. It’s a bit like waiting and watching for something you expect and know will happen. When loved friends or relatives are expected at the door, and part of you has one eye out of the window anticipating their arrival, especially if they’re a little late, each time you go to look, you already have a half formed vision of their car there, of them walking down the drive. For each time you look and they’re not there yet, the drive seems more strange empty, than it would have been full of their presence.
It only takes, after all, the shortest amount of time, while you watch that space and then this vision of mind’s eye is made real, (‘here they are!’); the vision of the reality is separated from the reality itself by the merest passing of a few moments in time.
Perhaps if their arrival is a little more delayed, you’ll remember their last exit from the drive; the hugs as they got in the car, how you waved them until they passed out of site round the corner. All these images connected with the same point in space and strangely present, disconnected from the intervening passage of time that the rational mind understands them to be separated by.
The seemingly unassailable moments of time that spaces these moments apart becomes briefly assailable. The few moments that are to pass before the near certainty of their imminent arrival, and months since they last left the drive, all compressed for a moment into one place, which seems to contain all these moments.
This projection, or perhaps compression of events onto, or into a place, is an extendable process, given just a little more reflection. Look out at the drive a little longer and picture the previous owner waiting for someone in a similar manner. Go a little further, maybe there are the figures of the builders of the house pausing for tea in the shade of the tree, having just dug out the house’s foundations. With a little further reach, perhaps if your house is built where once was a field (and most of our houses were), perhaps you can picture the cows loitering by the hedge, flicking their tails lazily to ward off the summer flies. It seems like the longer you watch one place, the greater your reach to that spot’s connections through time becomes.
Perhaps this is part of the reason for the potency of, and our enduring appetite for, landscape art. It creates a moment of stillness in our connection with a place. Whether you love the sweeping ethereal qualities of a Turner-esque mist covered mountain, or the vibrant intimacy of Lucy Kemp-Welch’s muddy foregrounds, these and everything in them can give us, if we let them, that same moment of pause.
We take in the moment, but if we don’t move straight on to the next picture in the gallery? Turner’s mists might clear, Kemp Welch’s horses pass, we know what should happen next, the unassailable rules of the passing of time tell us it must be so. Yet there they still are, a moment of mist forever shrouding a mountain and a team of plough horses that will be forever crossing the ridge of the downs in the cold morning air.
I mean in the mind’s eye. It’s a bit like waiting and watching for something you expect and know will happen. When loved friends or relatives are expected at the door, and part of you has one eye out of the window anticipating their arrival, especially if they’re a little late, each time you go to look, you already have a half formed vision of their car there, of them walking down the drive. For each time you look and they’re not there yet, the drive seems more strange empty, than it would have been full of their presence.
It only takes, after all, the shortest amount of time, while you watch that space and then this vision of mind’s eye is made real, (‘here they are!’); the vision of the reality is separated from the reality itself by the merest passing of a few moments in time.
Perhaps if their arrival is a little more delayed, you’ll remember their last exit from the drive; the hugs as they got in the car, how you waved them until they passed out of site round the corner. All these images connected with the same point in space and strangely present, disconnected from the intervening passage of time that the rational mind understands them to be separated by.
The seemingly unassailable moments of time that spaces these moments apart becomes briefly assailable. The few moments that are to pass before the near certainty of their imminent arrival, and months since they last left the drive, all compressed for a moment into one place, which seems to contain all these moments.
This projection, or perhaps compression of events onto, or into a place, is an extendable process, given just a little more reflection. Look out at the drive a little longer and picture the previous owner waiting for someone in a similar manner. Go a little further, maybe there are the figures of the builders of the house pausing for tea in the shade of the tree, having just dug out the house’s foundations. With a little further reach, perhaps if your house is built where once was a field (and most of our houses were), perhaps you can picture the cows loitering by the hedge, flicking their tails lazily to ward off the summer flies. It seems like the longer you watch one place, the greater your reach to that spot’s connections through time becomes.
Perhaps this is part of the reason for the potency of, and our enduring appetite for, landscape art. It creates a moment of stillness in our connection with a place. Whether you love the sweeping ethereal qualities of a Turner-esque mist covered mountain, or the vibrant intimacy of Lucy Kemp-Welch’s muddy foregrounds, these and everything in them can give us, if we let them, that same moment of pause.
We take in the moment, but if we don’t move straight on to the next picture in the gallery? Turner’s mists might clear, Kemp Welch’s horses pass, we know what should happen next, the unassailable rules of the passing of time tell us it must be so. Yet there they still are, a moment of mist forever shrouding a mountain and a team of plough horses that will be forever crossing the ridge of the downs in the cold morning air.