Pembrokeshire landscape
Graham Sutherland's
art (1903-1980) is rooted in what he termed the 'reservoirs of
the mind'. From this notional mental charge emerged all kinds of emotions and
impressions whereby natural forms were amplified and transubstantiated as
paraphrases of the unity of earth and people. In particular, through swirls of thread
and colour in his Great Tapestry in Coventry Cathedral we are transported to the
deeply cut rocky estuaries and bays of Pembrokeshire where he painted, turning
landscapes, rocks and branches of trees and scrub into ambiguous mysteries of
nature.
In this sense Sutherland's
great tapestry is a notional inventory of ideas about our
being a special chemical entity in a Universe where we are part of nature in
everything we do, from painting a house, to offering a prayer. There is therefore a
window into the tapestry for everyone.
Sutherland painted
what he saw and responded to what he sensed. He demands
that the viewer enter into his metamorphic world. The drift of his images is
challenging, their purpose being conveyed in oblique and apparent discord. The linear
is distorted, the individual components denied their actual identity. Nothing is
straightforward; all is fractured, coloured and placed. It is as though the motif has
been stripped, stirred and poured, and then reassembled without any reference to
the original structure. Sutherland's genius was based on the real, but that reality he
broke into pieces and then cunningly reassembled, distorting each aspect, thus
achieving a marvel of fluid form.
A meditation on Southerland's
Great Tapestry may be found at:
http://users.aol.com/corixus
He is a strong influence
on Nicholaas Oswald Roos who extracts similar metaphors
from the landscapes of Namibia.
