Roads, Buildings (Night) 2014
Carol Rhodes (1959 – )
Details
- Dimension
- 55.5 x 57.5 cm
- Media
- screenprint
- Accession number
- P8585
Summary
Carol Rhodes (born Edinburgh, 1959) is a painter whose work often depicts oblique landscapes, detached views of non-places presented in aerial perspective. Although the source material for her paintings is often Rhodes’ own drawings and her own and found photographs, the final works cannot be seen as literal descriptions of an actual landscape. Rather, as Tom Lubbock has put it, they can be regarded as ‘fictional views or fictional topographies’.
Rhodes spent her childhood in Bengal and was pleased to have an opportunity to investigate again the region’s topography. She has stated ‘My early experience of India (its colours, density of detail), and then the estrangement from it, has informed my work in incalculable ways, and yet I’ve never wanted to depict India directly. It was very relevant to be working there recently… but the visit still wasn’t about describing the immediate environment, even though there one lives right in the midst of ‘my kind’ of things, like reservoirs and factories – all the features of a country that is at the same time post-industrial and still industrial.’ The images that came out of Rhodes’ trip may not be specifically ‘of’ or ‘about’ India, but they arguably demonstrate most markedly the influences India has exerted across her career.
Glossary
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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.
