"I have never understood why more women did not paint
landscape," bemoaned Germaine Greer in The Guardian a couple of
years ago. Indeed, despite the number of Victorian women who
ventured out to make sketches in pencil and watercolour, very few
turned these into finished works.
Hannah Brown is a contemporary exception. Her current
exhibition, her second solo show since graduating with an MA in
Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2006, contains a
carefully hung selection of ten small-scale landscapes, oil on
plywood and oak, waxed rather than varnished, and each one
"typically English".
Working with views from the area of Devon - Uton - in which she
grew up, Brown seeks out untypical angles, often composed as if she
had stood with a vast expansive view, and then turned slightly
askance, so as to choose something less dramatic and more intimate.
All of her views contain water, albeit some more obviously than
others, and hedges and lines of trees also abound. Fences, signs of
humanity, and other "interferences" are edited out, however, as is
any hint of blue in the sky. Working from photographs, Brown alters
her pictures as she turns them into paintings, and introducing a
dull grey firmament is always her first task. The light and shadows
falling on and cast by the trees remain, however, giving the flat
and shiny works a strange and eerie feel, as if all were not quite
right. The lush greenness loses something of its viridity by being
flattened to such an extent, and the depth of field and horizon
melt away.
Nevertheless, there is an enchanting quality to Brown's
landscapes, echoed by the public response, since nearly all of the
works sold on the first night of the show. The limited edition
screenprint, pictured (the first Brown has ever made) is also
proving popular, being somewhat lighter and brighter than the
paintings, with the standard benday dot system providing four
layers of colour, layered over with extra yellow to give the look
of a Claude glass (a small, round, black mirror, commonly used by
amateur landscape artists, and named after the 17th century French
landscape painter, Claude Lorrain), and finished with a coat of
varnish.
The paintings are hung at a slightly lower level than is usual
for a gallery, to draw the viewers in, so they are engaged with the
work, and the relationship between them and the artwork is not
passive. "Landscapes, by their very nature, can comfortably recede
into scenery," explains Brown. "I try to not let this happen too
much, for the same reason as omitting all people and structures
from the images, I'd like the landscape itself to be the whole
focus and not act as a backdrop."
To return to Greer's argument, she proposes that the absence of
women landscape artists "has to do with authority, with the act of
throwing a frame around a feature of the seen world and detaching
it." But detaching it is precisely what Brown strives to do, and it
is this very act which makes her work so successful.
Hannah Brown: The Unseen Landscape
http://payneshurvell.com/
Until 17 November 2012
Anna McNay
https://sites.google.com/site/annamcnay/
http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/
twitter: @annamcnay
Image:
© and courtesy the artist (Hannah Brown)
Claude 6A
2012
Screenprint on somerset velvet
43.5 x 43.5cm
