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GLOUCESTER GATE, REGENTS PARK, AUTUMN 1980

© Estate of Adrian Berg. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2015.

GLOUCESTER GATE, REGENTS PARK, AUTUMN 1980 1980

Adrian Berg (1929 – 2011)

Details

Dimension
96.5 X 96.5 CM
Media
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
Accession number
P4169

Summary

This painting is of Regent’s Park seen from the artist’s studio in nearby Gloucester Gate, the various perspectives describe the views from differing windows and from the balcony. In 1981 Berg said of his work that he paints ‘in the English landscape tradition. I paint landscape because what I see outside sometimes looks unimaginably beautiful. I do so in what I am calling the English tradition because native practice is at its best when it is consistent in what it rejects and what it requires. It rejects authority or example, and it rejects logicality or method. It requires that the artist look until he can form a view then proceed by trial and error until he has given a convincing account of it.’

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.