THE SOUND OF YOUNG SCOTLAND PART 2 VOL 2

© Courtesy the artist

THE SOUND OF YOUNG SCOTLAND PART 2 VOL 2 1999

Ross Sinclair (1966 – )

Details

Dimension
DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
Media
VIDEO INSTALLATION
Accession number
P7192

Summary

Sinclair’s work is concerned with dispelling myths, examining popular notions of Scottish culture, and attempting to reclaim from them what is ‘real’. In the video the artist sits in the idyllic Scottish landscape of the Isle of Eigg, with his tattooed back to the camera displaying the words ‘Real Life’ and singing a medley of traditional Scottish songs, mostly referring to the love of the homeland. This is at once an affectionate homage to the genuine beauty of the Scottish landscape and, in his Friedrichian pose and the compositional structure, to the Romantic landscape tradition.

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.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.