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HEARTWOOD

© Courtesy of the Artist

HEARTWOOD 1989

Jeffrey Dennis (1958 – )

Details

Dimension
228 X 213 CM
Media
OIL ON CANVAS (SIX PANELS)
Accession number
P5893

Summary

There is a strongly English, verbal and narrative, wit to Dennis’s painting where scale is played with, reducing the figures to characters whose story intrigues and eludes. The greenness of Dennis’s country is vivid, beyond the natural, and the landscape made from peas. The artist wrote of this work ‘For a landscape, one might choose peas or beans, flowers or a stained wall. But it is important that the chosen surface be a sturdy trampoline for the figures and images that will populate it. Even in our imagination. Gravity can only temporarily defied. The source of some of the imagery in my paintings is a rather inconsequential photographic diary I accumulate. However mundane, something photographed seems to acquire instant generality (infinitely reproducible). To re-paint it is to re-particularise it; to recognise it again, with difficulty.

New Voices New Works from the British Council Collection, The British Council 1992

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.