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.
