Just one day to go before this weekend's Garden Party show at the PITT Project Space. here are a few words about what I've been up to.
The
Nu School of Contemporary Landscape Painting (NuCON) draws inspiration from the
Microsoft screensaver depicting a somewhat nondescript hill, possibly somewhere
in the United State of America.
For
some kids, hardwired into online status recognition, their head in the cloud in
some inner city urban ghetto this might be the first hill they ever see; Mount
Para for the digital age, the meeting point where nature impinges on a virtual
world. For the older, casual browser however, this green unpleasant mound might
have become the point at which, the laptop having pinged into life they are
forced into a decision, to choose between googling leisure wear and/or an evening browsing t&a through dead eyes, glass of Merlot in one hand, unresponsive mouse in the other.
This
is a conventionally sexual hill, a gently undulating yet threateningly tilting
tit or belly, the latest in a line that links the Rokeby Venus’s arse, Courbet’s Origin
of the World and Andrew Wyeth’s Christine’s
World, minus house, barn and girl. It might even be called Depilation Valley,
shorn as it is of trees, shrubs, not a bush in sight. Nothing to spoil the view:
everything revealed, all concealed.
We
wonder what is the other side of it, what lurks just out of sight to the right,
over the brow of the hill, those hills in the distance, menacing, inviting. Silent.
How
did this seemingly ordinary image become arguably the most recognisable
landscape in the world; more famous than a Constable hedgerow, Turner Wheat field
or Stubbs’ pony, in leafy arbours languidly resting?
Where is 'The Playboy Mansion'? Is this related?!
ReplyDeleteThe shape of the hill in the 'Playboy' paintings is based on the same shape as the Microsoft (it was Microsoft and not Apple?). The bunnies were chosen to balance out the chalk men who were hunting them, plus I liked the titles and wanted pictures to go with them. These reperesent the paring (or even dumbing down) of landscape to a single main curve with a smaller one in the bottom right corner to give depth.
ReplyDeleteHope that helps!