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HEARTLAND

© Christopher Le Brun. All rights reserved, DACS 2023.

HEARTLAND 1986

Christopher Le Brun (1951 – )

Details

Dimension
178 X 167 CM
Media
OIL ON CANVAS
Accession number
P5446

Summary

Christopher Le Brun’s imagery is often mythological or heraldic, but his technique is clearly modernist. He resolves this apparent disjunction by ensuring that the image and the material qualities of the painting are given equal importance while they are being developed. In gradually arriving at these archetypal motifs through many reworkings of the entire surface of the painting, the artist has the greatest freedom in handling without finally losing the possibility of communication. The image that is finally produced and the material presence of the painting are one. The reference of the work is allowed a freedom without prejudice to its formalities. In reply to some questions about the interpretation of this work, the artist wrote ‘A continuing subject of my work is ‘appearance’ for itself, and one way in which I have tried to draw attention to this is by driving a wedge between my painting behaviour and method, and the ‘pseudo-subject’ of the motif which attends it … My position has been to twist the motif away from its home, or to estrange it from its setting…The title Heartland, should point to my thinking about something central, an image, a heart, an inevitability, or even, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, ‘the recognised home’, but still this should not bring us to patriotism, which would be too localised, with political and historical connotations unsuited to the timeless subjects I address. With this particular image I find myself looking at very early work. Wittenham Clumps is a stump-like hill in Oxfordshire. I saw it about twenty years ago, and this clump of trees is a familiar feature of the downlands. I remember quite clearly how it looked and how its shape re-appeared in my work at that time. I think it remains true of my work that I try always to epitomise the landscape and the field of painting (and here the painting itself becomes landscape). I like to think that the farmer who planted those trees had a sense of the old archetypes of this country or even had in mind perhaps a picture by Turner himself.'

Cries & Whispers New Works for the British Council Collection, The British Council 1988

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.