Missing image

© The Artist

SPRING 1998

Chad McCail (1961 – )

Details

Dimension
242.4 X 242.4 CM
Media
GRAPHITE ON PAPER
Accession number
P7250

Summary

Chad McCail’s large drawing functions as a zoom shot from an aerial perspective of an urban area. Every centimetre is drawn with such intense detail that individual narratives in different sections of the whole are visible, producing not just an accurate recording of every geographical and architectural detail but also a schematic representation of an account of insurrection by the citizens of a cruel totalitarian regime. Amidst the extreme order of the housing estate and its adjacent factory and Obedience Testing Centre, the new season referred to in the title appears to have prompted an apocalyptic uprising. As control is seized in each locality, it seems that the citizenry will only achieve freedom from tyranny when they have gained dominance of the land, the most powerful of commodities. From a perspective once believed to have been God’s alone, until the 14th century when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux and saw the world from above, we focus on a landscape revealing a familiar tale of contested power and territory.

The artist and Simon Yuill have further developed the drawing into a web based ‘discovery’. www.spring-alpha.org

Landscape, The British Council 2000

Glossary

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • 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.