FROM ASHMORE PARK TO WEDNESFIELD: THE JET BENCH

© The Artist

FROM ASHMORE PARK TO WEDNESFIELD: THE JET BENCH 1998

David Rayson (1966 – )

Details

Dimension
75 X 122 CM
Media
ACRYLIC ON BOARD
Accession number
P7131

Summary

David Rayson made a series of paintings of a canal walk from the Ashmore Park estate in Wolverhampton towards Wednesfield. These were painted from the memory of a very particular landscape: the hinterland of an industrial city in the West Midlands. The painting focuses on a well-used bench, which for some reason the artist remembered as a significant element in the scene. The dreary image of litter strewn pathways, neglected urban vegetation and industrial warehousing are filtered through memories of childhood and appear oddly sanitised, interpreted in a flat hyper-real style. Every detail is meticulously registered, every colour is distinct and clear – from the blades of grass and chewing gum wrappers in the foreground to the distant but entirely legible signage on the superstore warehouse in the background. There is a democracy in the degree of emphasis placed on each. There is no sense that any of these features represents a blot on the landscape – they each form part of it.

Landscape, The British Council 2000

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.