| Winter edition 2007/2008 | Into The Woods, 'Printmaking Today' Artist Louise Cattrell talked to Anna Wilkinson, Director of 'Northern Print' during Cattrell's exhibition 'Sylvan' in Northern Print's Newcastle gallery -> read article |
| 3 November 2000 | British Landscape Artists Arrive To Paint The Island, Katherine Wiley, in Vineyard Gazette, Martha's Vineyard |
| 27 December 1999 | Class of 99 - The Artist, Laura Cumming, in The Observer |
| 22 January 1999 | Coastal Skies, in Eastbourne Herald |
| February 1999 | Louise Cattrell, Julian Freeman, in Galleries UK |
| 19 February 1999 | East And South-East Previews, in Art Review |
| April 1999 | Exhibition Diary, Sarah Howells, in World of Interiors |
| 17-23 August 1998 | God¹s Eye/View, Wayne Burrows, in The Big Issue in the North |
| 14 August 1998 | English Perspective with a Scottish Accent, Ian Soutar, in Sheffield Telegraph |
| 30 April 1998 | Coastal Scenes on View, James Marley, in Berwick Gazette |
| 15 April 1998 | The Arts Come to Life, Wilma Patterson, in The Herald |
| April 1998 | Coast, catalogue essay by Laura Cumming ->read article |
| October 1996 | Louise Cattrell: Fruitmarket Gallery, Giles Sutherland, in The Scotsman |
| October 1996 | Louise Cattrell: Fruitmarket Gallery, in The Herald |
| September 1996 | Whitechapel Open, Andrew Cross, in Art Monthly |
| 1995 | Place and Space in the Paintings of Louise Cattrell,
catalogue essay by Tony Godfrey for the Exhibition LOUISE CATTRELL 1995 ORIEL 31, Newtown, Powys ->read article |
| 3 July - 1 August 1993 | 'CAULD BLEW THE BITTER BITING NORTH' Paintings by Louise Cattrell, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries by Colin Wiggins ->read article |
| 10-17 August 1992 | Post Decadence: Café Gallery, Mark Curragh, in Time Out |
| 12-19 August 1992 | Artists Choice: Flowers East, David Lillington, in Time Out |
| 1991 | Essay for ' Private Landscape ' an exhibition of
paintings and watercolours. Café Gallery, Southwark, London -> read article |
| 21 October 1985 | Scottish Artists/SSA, Edward Gage, in The Scotsman |
| 19 January 1985 | Impressive Exhibitions at Gallery, Guy Eades, in Peterborough Evening Telegraph |
INTO THE WOODS
Interview with Director Anna Wilkinson of Northern Print and artist
Louise Cattrell.
'Printmaking Today', Winter edition 2007/8
ANNA WILKINSON
One of the pleasures of working at Northern Print is seeing artists’
work develop. I’m fascinated to see how they approach print and how
it relates to their main working practice. I remember you arrived as a painter
intending to make etchings. Why did this process interest you?
LOUISE CATTRELL
One of my aims, when doing the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship1, was to make
etchings.
Drawing had become increasingly important to me and in etching it’s
inherent. Etching has always given me control over drawing and clarity of
line. The directness of drawing into wax on the plate, combined with its portability,
gives it immediacy. Black and white provides for the ultimate manipulation
of tone and contrast; carbon black Gutenberg ink on radiant white Somerset
paper lends a particular directness to the Arboretum series.
AW
I like the idea that Arboretum is a cumulative series worked on over time.
Like an arboretum, it is perhaps better termed a ‘collection’.
Do you draw in this way or is this particular to print?
LC
Drawings and prints have a separate timescale to paint. They are made in intense
concentrated periods, often with a long gap between. I find sitting to draw
very different from standing and walking back and forth when painting. I don’t
set out to make series although images often become pairs. Arboretum is an
ongoing collection of etchings of trees started on a residency in Switzerland2
in 2003. They chart places I have lived and worked; currently, they number
seven with the aim of twelve. The trees are drawn from direct observation
and form a distilled memory of Switzerland, France, Wales and England.
AW
Your work develops slowly, both in the making and for the viewer. It reveals
itself over time and I feel you never reach the end of getting to know a piece
of your work. Does this ‘slowness’ define it?
LC
On an Artists’ Access to Art College scheme at Coventry3, I made a series
of monochrome monotypes entitled: Nightsounds. The connection between painting
and monotype is close. When painting, I build up the image slowly and with
oil paint change is always possible.
What I found with Nightsounds was a natural timescale of between forty-five
minutes and an hour to make the image; after that, it failed; there were a
lot of failures.
AW
I remember first seeing your black and white monotypes and was struck by the
subtlety and quality of space you achieved on a small scale with minimal materials.
That seems a contrast to the joyous colour monotypes now. You have a very
personal sensibility towards colour. I hear you use oil paints for your monotypes.
Is this so that you can continue working with colours that are familiar to
you from painting?
LC
Sylvan – the monotypes – is a new departure. In contrast to the
monochrome nature and intimate scale of the etchings, the opportunity of using
an Admiralty map press at Wolverhampton University, AA2A scheme4, has made
me refocus the scale of my work and brought colour into it, the colour being
artists’ oil paint, in particular, a mesmerising cobalt turquoise. From
observing form from afar in the etchings, the monotypes reflect the experience
of looking up into tree, wood and sky. Prior to working on Sylvan, I had begun
with black and white. I couldn’t get the qualities I wanted any more
in m o n o c h rome, so brought my paints to the workshop.
Everyone has their own colour palette; making monotypes disrupted and freed
me from the knowledge I’ve gained from using these colours in paintings.
AW
The digital prints are a completely new departure about which you were initially
uneasy. For me, it’s about making sure people know what they are buying.
What are your thoughts?
LC
I think many artists are uneasy with the implications of digital printing.
I had one of the Sylvan images printed digitally for a personal occasion.
It was printed on a heavy Fine Art etch 100% acid free paper using Hewlett
Packard’s six-cartridge Vivera inks system. The results were unnervingly
accurate, the quality of both paper and colour replication convincing. Therefore
the decision was made to reproduce the Sylvan monotypes on a different scale
from the originals in a small edition. This is an experiment that will be
interesting to monitor. I feel the digital print works very well within the
show and it’s made me aware of the potential for manipulation of scale.
AW
We’re looking forward to having you back at Northern Print to deliver
monotype masterclasses. You clearly enjoy the dynamics of an open-access print
studio. Is it a welcome change from your painting studio?
LC
Working in a studio is solitary, so I enjoy working with other artists. I’ve
had many opportunities to explore print. During my time at Duncan of Jordanstone,
Dundee5, printmaking was important. Since then, I’ve worked in print
facilities in London, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Ireland, Switzerland and, in
particular, at Northern Print and Leicester Print Workshop. They have always
aided and supported me with rare generosity in developing an image.
AW
Exhibitions are always a good marker for artists, a moment in time to reflect
on recent work and to look forward to whatever this leads on to. What’s
next for you?
LC
Seeing the work together for the first time in the new, beautifully lit, Northern
Print gallery has given me a different context and sequence in which to view
the work.
What it has made me think of is new possibilities in paint, which no doubt
will in turn feed back into print. I’m looking forward to working on
the monotype masterclass and will be working in Switzerland this autumn.
Sylvan was shown at Northern Print from 13 July to 2 September. Cattrell’s
digital print
Sylvan 2 is included in Northern Print’s exhibition, A Year in Printmaking,
on show now until 12 January 2008,which features new prints made since the
studio relocated to Newcastle in November 2006. Other prints by Cattrell can
be viewed on request at Northern Print.
She also has work in various public and private collections including Reuters;
the Scottish
Arts Council; and the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London.
Notes
Contact:
Northern Print, Stepney Bank, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 2NP, UK
Tel:+44 (0)191 261 7000.www.northernprint.org.uk www.louisecattrell.com
Article reproduced here by permission of Printmaking Today, www.printmakingtoday.co.uk
COAST
catalogue essay by LAURA CUMMING
APRIL 1998
Walk into a room hung with Louise Cattrell's paintings and the visible world
suddenly expands into infinity. Her pictures glow on the wall like miraculous
windows, revealing the great air beyond, the endless ocean of the sky, the
measureless vapours of the sea.
Like a window, they frame the landscape. But where a window can only offer
a small fragment of reality, these canvases invite you into a boundless space
that is limited neither by perspective nor geography. They have their origin
in the real world,in Scotland especially ,but what Cattrell saw in certain
places passes through the double filter of imagination and memory to become
what you see now :exhilarating adventures through the atmosphere, conducted
entirely in paint.
Stand in front of one of Cattrell's airy expanses, so vast, so ethereal, and
you feel the thrilling rush of being flung into the void like a bird taking
flight. Often, you have no idea where you stand as viewer in relation to the
sky. Are you looking up at it, or down upon it as though from a high mountain
top? Are you airborne within it like a plane or a cloud? The conventions of
landscape painting have all but been abolished to create this mysterious sensation
of aerial freedom.
In Lammas, for example, there is no horizon line by which to navigate the
eye. There is no sense of far or middle distance, or of height from the ground.
The air looms up close, rippling with sudden lights and vapours, partially
concealing dense clouds beyond. The sky has clearings and forests like the
unseen earth below it, pools of moisture and spots of peachy warmth. The paint
is so delicately nuanced as to convey all these possibilites at once the onset
of dawn or dusk, of rain,of wind, of climatic tumult. The surprise is in the
picture's title - for the Quarter Day of Lammas falls on the first of August.
Louise Cattrell painted this vision of the sublime in a cold narrow studio
in the East End of London. Since 1980 when she left her native Scotland to
study at the Royal College of Art, she has been recollecting the wide landscapes
of her early life in the most cramped and over-crowded city in Britain. There,
in a grid of buildings so tight you can see no more than an inch or two of
sky above you, she creates these images of open infinity.
Cattrell was born in Glasgow in 1957 and spent much of her childhood in Dumfries.
Her family took holidays in the West of Scotland. There are hints of these
places in the titles of her pictures - Craig ,which refers to the rocky volcanic
crag of Ailsa Craig, Ben An, the mountain outside Glasgow. But she is not
standing in front of them as she paints - these are blue remembered hills.
Unlike the Impressionists, who took their easels out in the open air to capture
the fleeting play of light upon form, Cattrell is confined to the studio,
the chamber of the mind. Her art embodies a lingering memory, not a transient
image. When you remember a landscape, you remember your presence within it
- how you got there, what it felt like underfoot, whether you felt chilly
or hot. So her paintings also incorporate the sensation of being there, of
feeling the soft drizzle or the faint breeze in the Lammas air.
In Crawick, painted in 1996 in her Stratford East studio, veils of moisture
drift through the landscape. This is an evocation of a particular Dumfries
glen, though not the sheep, the bracken or the witch's stone that Cattrell
might have seen there. What she paints is the rather eery passage through
which she walks, not quite able to discern the exit or the distance to the
mist - shrouded hill beyond. This is Crawick, but it is also Cattrell's memory
of the walk through Crawick, hardly looking at the ground beneath her as she
makes her way through the thick, damp air.
In this still and spectral painting, vapour and substance flow into one another
until it becomes hard to tell where the landscape meets the sky. There are
no visible lines, no obvious brushmarks. Cattrell uses the softest badger-hair
brushes, which leave no trace of themselves behind. Slowly and patiently she
applies washes of oil to the canvas, thin veils of colour so transparent they
could almost be watercolour. Her paint imitates the translucence of misty
air.
In 1995, Louise Cattrell took this self-effacement to its extreme with a work
called Muir. There were no visible marks in the picture at all; the ghostly
paint seemed to have materialised on the canvas from nowhere. But for its
title - a geographic tip-off- this could be seen as an abstract work celebrating
the voluptuous beauty of paint, not place. The picture was scaled to the painter's
own height and arm-span, but there was no other evidence of her physical presence.
Since then, drawing has crept back into her paintings, which are now so huge
they embrace and engulf you.
All pictures must succeed both at a distance and in close-up, especially those
on a grand scale. Walk up to the enormous Martinmas and you see how minutely
she animates the wild blue yonder with a hundred other colours. This is very
much how the eighteenth century Scottish poet James Thomson saw the heavens:
'the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.'
Stand back from the canvas, on the other hand, and you experience that heady
sense of scudding vastness as when you lie on your back staring up at the
sky.
In Berwick-upon-Tweed, where Louise Cattrell has recently had an artist's
residency, the sky vaults high over a city perched above the bright river
as it meets the sea. In a series of spectacularly beautiful paintings, Cattrell
has married these elements so you cannot distinguish the water from the air.
She is still working in the studio, but released from London, the coastal
light and colour surge through her paintings with new freedom.
In Storm, a flurry of gull-white brushmarks and squalls of dark oil orchestrate
some high drama at sea-or is it the sky? There are passages of liquid blue,
but also airy veils of powdery pink. Where the shipwreck would be in a conventional
picture is a vortex of motion instead, the fracas of fast-changing elements.
Cattrell needs no boat or deluge or wave: this is a storm of paint.
It is hard enough for an artist to make material the insubstantial - spume,
fog, wind, vapour.
Cattrell achieves all these things without even securing them around a central
motif. Like Cézanne, she thinks in paint, considering the whole surface above
the component parts. Like him, she is fascinated by the way a single mark
can skew a picture.
When Cézanne finally finished a portrait of his dealer Vollard, after more
than a hundred sittings, Vollard asked why two little spots on his left hadn't
been painted in. Cézanne replied that 'if he had just put something there
haphazardly, he would have had to have started the whole painting again beginning
with that spot.'
Cattrell takes as much painstaking care to balance every brushmark. The rust-red
ribs emerging from the mist in Sandstell float audaciously off-centre near
the top of the canvas - a spit of rock, perhaps, in the kingdom of the air.
The painting is choreographed around this ambiguity, which is also embodied
in the title. A stell may be a supporting framework, a plantation ar a deep
pool where the net-fishing takes place. Sandstell, of course, may equally
be a remembered place.
Every painter faces the paradoxical challenge of representing the three-dimensional
world on a two-dimensional canvas. Louise Cattrell goes further, introducing
a glimpse of infinity into her art. This is supremely the case in Hallowstell,
one of the finest works to come from her residency at Berwick.
Here, she makes the colours soar: Lemon Yellow, Violet Grey, Baroque Red swirl
and glide on the canvas, a rhetoric of effects that suggest ocean, sky and
radiant space. There is no foreground, no background, no apparent limit bar
the canvas edge. Like Turner lashed to the ship's mast or Cézanne clambering
up the baked rock of Mont St. Victoire, Cattrell conveys the adventure of
being there herself within this billowing expanse, not watching as from some
safe vantage point miles away.
In this, Louise Cattrell has collapsed the old tradition of landscape painting,
in which the viewer stands with the artist examining the scene from a distance.
You share the vitality of her imagination as she recreates her sensations
in the sinuous flow of richly hued paint. The result is exhilarating. To stand
in front of this work of art is to be breathtaken and uplifted, as though
at the summit of a mountain climb.
'PRIVATE LANDSCAPE'
Essay by Felicity Lunn for an exhibition of paintings and watercolours at
Café Gallery, Southwalk, London
1991
Sea and sky are consistently explored in Louise Cattrell's work. The large
oils made in 1990 depict the passage of water, either flowing darkly between
the sentry line of stumps in Ferry or winding as both stream and path in Plantation:
Euachan. The sea in Ferry is as deliberately staged as the wisp of white fabric
caught on the post, the whole creating a dramatic tableau, a single moment
seized.
Plantation: Euachan is more ambivalent, the literal and the abstract merging
in the layering of trees and in the indistinguishability of water and earth
in the foreground. In the more recent oils water has given way to sky, which
occupies most of the canvas in some and in others forms an infinite horizon
from the mysterious meeting of sea and sky Ferry describes the passage of
water;in these later paintings the composition leads the viewer to approach
the edge of the hill or the side of a rock The source of drama, breaking through
the clouds or silhouetting structures.
Louise Cattrell's paintings are about memory, not the recollection of a particular
event or place but the process or remembering. It is only through the act
of painting, the artist has
explained, that it is possible for her to become familiar with what is being
painted. Her landscapes are largely isolated places which hover between the
absence of people and the trace of a spiritual presence. In the most recent
oils the technique has become tighter, the impasto of earlier works giving
way to a smoother layering of the paint and restricted palette of blues and
yellows.
The paintings are at once lyrical and intense, the technique focussing the viewer on their intangibility and the impression that place is memory. Although inspired by the artist's childhood in rural Scotland, her work avoids self-indulgence by sharing the very human sense of loss, of the inability to recapture the past straightforwardly.
Felicity Lunn 1991 copyright
'CAULD BLEW THE BITTER BITING NORTH'
Paintings by Louise Cattrell
Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries
3 July - 1 August 1993
The five most recent of Louise Cattrell's new paintings are identical in scale, and share the same palette of a delicately muted grey, touched only with the merest hints of other colours. Common to each painting is a sense of understatement and together they represent a culmination of her last four years of work. No mark is hurried or rushed, there is no aggression in the execution, no sense of anything other than gentleness and peace. The paint is thin, yet occasionally it manages to retain a kind of texture that is almost, but not quite, bold enough to be called' impasto', that gives a sense of the personality behind their execution.
This delicacy of surface helps to define them as 'modern' paintings, objects which have an autonomous existence in their own right. They could easily be looked at and enjoyed as abstract paintings. This would however, be to miss the true meaning of these paintings, because they are uncompromisingly figurative, each canvas referring to a concrete physical experience that is to do in the first place with looking at landscape, but ultimately with more than just looking. The success of the work is that it uses visual experience as a starting point to guide us on our way towards sensing that landscape.
There is an anecdote that was told of the great English landscape painter,
JMW Turner,
by a woman who shared a carriage with him. On speeding across a bridge during
a torrential rainstorm, Turner insisted on leaning out of the window, urging
his reluctant co-passenger to do likewise. The result was his now celebrated
Rain, Steam, and Speed, which was recognised much later by the incredulous
woman, who having shared the experience with Turner, was fully aware that
his painting was not simply about things seen, but about sensations, of what
it felt to be rushing through space with your eyes tightly shut, with the
cold rain driving against your face, the wind whipping through your hair.
Similarily, although Louise's paintings have their origins in visual experience,
of the perception of mist and fog, of sky and space, unless sealed up in a
transparent cocoon,
no one who experiences a landscape will do so only visually. One will use
other senses to feel the landscape, feel its texture and temperature, its
air and its moisture. One will hear the breeze blowing and things moving,
maybe one will even achieve that exhilaration that comes of sitting down to
rest at the end of a long walk through particularly beautiful though arduous
country.
Louise's paintings evoke these sensations in the viewer. She is a Scottish artist, with a deep sense of belonging to a particular landscape, the landscape of the Scottish west, the coast of Dumfriesshire that can be hard and rocky, or generously undulating and rich. What she has portrayed in these canvases is the sense of watching the landscape reveal itself, as the layers of the grey early morning mist melt slowly away.
These five paintings, and the equally delicate smaller works in the series, have a vaporous feel to them that hints of coolness, freshness and moisture. On further contemplation solid forms occasionally give hints of their existence through the mist, but nothing more. Maybe rocks, maybe trees, it is not possible to say, as Louise uses paint to define form in a way that hovers on that knife-edge between the abstract and figurative.
Sometimes the titles are helpful, Ben An for instance, refers to the mountain of that name, or rather to a particular experience of that mountain. It is certainly therefore a landscape painting, but without a specific viewpoint. Space creates itself through the subtle modulation of the greys, applied with different degrees of translucence, ranging from the diaphanous to the solid.
Craig has areas of flat brushmarks that seem to skid or scrape across the surface. They absorb the light rather than reflect it and provide dead, stark areas with a lifeless energy that hints at granite hardness. Other passages of the painting seem lighter and fluffier, like clouds, or transparent like mist.
These paintings may seem to be deliberately limited in their means of expression, but different kinds of brushstroke, different consistencies of paint and hints of other colours combine to create surprising varieties of effect. At first the paintings may look totally grey, but gradually they will reveal their shapes and spaces, in the same way we can watch the sun burn off the mist that initially shrouds and obscures a Scottish mountain range.
Paintings slightly earlier in date, Ferry and Storm of Glass, have stronger physical references. Ground is represented, and elements that hint at a human presence. A sense of the mysterious resonates in these paintings, with features such as the strange monument seen in Ferry, evoking the same kind of echoes of long-vanished people that can be strongly felt at those neolithic sites with their ancient grey stones, that are spread so frequently throughout the West of Scotland.
Storm of Glass is painted in a similar key, with a similar low viewpoint, as an outcrop of rocks lead into the distance, apparently out to sea. The stillness is absolute. Neither a ripple in the water, nor a hint of a breeze is allowed to disturb the almost eerie sense of the tranquility. It is a painting that shares the same kind of Romantic symbolism, and a sense of a world that is not touchable, that is seen in an artist like Caspar David Friedrich.
Similarly with The Man who made the journey to Granada and Plantation Euachan,
both pictures with an earthier tonality that glow with a a warmth that brings
a sense of richness and optimism. Whether, like the most recent work in this
exhibition, about air,
sky and space or like these two works, filled with the resonances of life
and human activity, these paintings are about the landscape and the artist's
personal responses and enjoyment of it, an enjoyment that she allows us to
share.
Copyright Colin Wiggins
Education Department
The National Gallery, London
PLACE AND SPACE IN THE PAINTINGS OF
LOUISE CATTRELL
Catalogue essay for the Exhibition LOUISE CATTRELL
1995 ORIEL 31, Newtown, Powys
Can we imagine them? Can we know these paintings as landscapes? Our initial reaction is that they are abstract paintings of great beauty, distinguished by sensitive brushwork, which are vaguely reminiscent of Chinese ink paintings. But their titles suggest landscape: Gaze, Forest, Ben An, Winter. We look again, and some memories are evoked: in Gaze the water sliding back over the beach, a certain quality of light on the East Anglian coast where we lose our sense of distance, where we are no longer looking at its atmospheric condition, but are immersed in it; in Craig mountains appearing as the morning mist drifts and disperses. It is like a scene from one of Leni Rienfenstahl's mountain films or like the passage in Wordsworth's Prelude where he talks of walking on a Summer's night towards the top of Snowdon when all around was a 'dripping mist/low hung and thick'. Oppressed by the claustrophobia this gave him, he and his companions did not talk but sank into private thoughts as they trudged upwards. He talks of the exertion, of the silence, of the mountain's desolation. He is leading the group…
When at my feet the ground appear'd to brighten
And with a step or two seem'd brighter still:
Nor had I time to ask the course of this,
For instantly a Light upon the turf
Fell like a flash; I look'd about, and lo !
The Moon stood naked in the Heavens, at height
Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself on a huge sea of mist
Which, meek and silent, rested at my feet:
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still Ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves,
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes
Into the sea, the real Sea, that seem'd
To dwindle, and give up its majesty
Usurp'd upon as far as sight could reach. 1
After this classic epiphany of the romantic sublime Wordsworth meditates on
it as a revelation of the imagination and of the unity of all things. It is
one of those moments
when nature and the individual consciousness merge. It is, as I shall argue
below, one of those moments when place and space become temporarily one.
What gender is this moon?
Traditionally in English poetry she is female, but here one is not so sure.
Potentially, if we follow the metaphor, it is, either way, traumatic: a person
[mother, father?] naked and immense hangs above one. The whole passage [and
I have only quoted one sentence] is surprisingly full of metaphors which serve
to strengthen, but confuse, the experience.
The key metaphor is the way the landscape is seen in terms of the human body:
'naked', 'back', 'tongue', and later, 'breathtaking-place', 'homeless', 'voice',
and so on. The landscape becomes a mirror image of the body at the same time
as the body is absorbed into the landscape. As the human body is, with very
rare exceptions, always either male or female, it is not irrelevant to ask
what gender the land is here. Unless, that is, we are prepared to say that
the sublime is beyond gender. But if the sublime is beyond gender, we may
ask, why is there such a paucity of female artists interested in it - or certainly
until recently? What makes the sublime so curious is that in it the urge to
master, the urge to control - which is normally a key drive in landscape art
- goes into abeyance. Wordsworth willingly, triumphantly allows the moon [male
or female] to master him. But perhaps master is not the correct word. This
is a scene beyond mastery; although in that Wordsworth might feel powerless,
his very sense of identity uncertain, he is subsequently more certain, empowered.
Is this an equivalent to the experience we have in seeing the recent paintings of Louise Cattrell? Her earlier paintings had very clear references to the Scottish landscape, although they were always transmuted in a very romantic way, emphasising tone above colour, more concerned with stimmung, or atmosphere, than topographic exactitude. They were obviously, like the current paintings, landscape experiences recollected in tranquillity. Or, perhaps, more properly, we should say, experiences of being in the landscape recreated in the activity of painting. The paintings do not represent a landscape, or illustrate a narrative of being in the landscape, but make a new experience that is to some extent equivalent. The gaze is made flesh. The wind, the cold, the memories, the fell of boot on mulch… all these things are somehow implied, but never stated, in the colour and substance of paint.
A painting that is indicative of her shift from the earlier paintings, where there is still some vestige of topography, to the later, is the 1991 painting Burnmouth, in the lower foreground of which is established a shore with perhaps a muddy spit and a dark hill with a sea wall or road on it, and just beyond is a line that seems to indicate the horizon. Above that, and occupying at least four fifths of the canvas, is the sky, and then…it becomes cloud, like a piece of baroque drapery, takes us up into the sky, and then…it becomes hard to maintain this description of the painting as a landscape; they are sky colours, but the forms, or the hints of form do not seem right. There seems to be a vertical line, a little like a horizon upended, running down the sky. We are becoming very aware that we are looking at brushings and scrapings and blotchings of paint. We look back at the foreground and we become uncertain about that. Could not that hill be, in fact, a humble pile of mud and seaweed? We are unsure of scale in the foreground as we are of orientation in the background. We are a little disorientated, unsure of how we stand in relation to this painting. Although the painting and our seeing in it is pleasurable, that pleasure is distinctly bitter-sweet.
Let us retrace again the way we experience one of these new paintings; at first glance [as we walk towards it] we are aware of the painting as a painting; a rectangle of canvas against the wall; then we see it as a colour sensation, then [we are probably by now standing in front of the painting] we start to read the painting [a place] as a space: the variations in tone and hue, the suggestions of a foreground and a background. We have, via the eyes, entered the space of the painting. We feel, perhaps, a little uncertain, a little vertiginous, although - and this is crucial - we are being seduced by the subtle changes in tone and density. Our eyes want to penetrate the veil or film of mist, is that a rock face, or a mountain we see in Craig - it is reminiscent of how when we fly above the Alps we look down and see the mountains breaking through the shifting clouds.
It is a signal characteristic of the larger paintings that we always seem to be above, looking down. Jay Appleton has suggested in his book The Experience of Landscape that landscape art, or representation of landscape generally, is witness to two drives: that for prospects and that for refuges.[2] He suggests that this relates to our genetic memories of pre-urban life when we instinctively sought prospects or viewpoints [such as the top of a hill or ridge] to locate game, and refuges [such as groves or caves} in which to hide from predators or inclement weather. Insofar as the viewer, like Cattrell, is set upon a prospect, these would be about control, mastery, mapping that which is laid out before one whereas all this is nebulous, so misty, so partial. The nebulous cannot be mastered, cannot be mapped.
Is this then an attempt, as the American artist Roni Horn says, to go where the pronouns no longer detain her, where things are no longer determined by gender differences? Horn writes at the end of an essay about her personal experience of looking at the Icelandic landscape and watching a person row a kayak to shore:
' I look back on the grassy shore, grinning. I peer up at the clouds and
squint, first the
right eye, then the left, the sun darts back and froth in the sky. As the
sun jumps my
anger returns; pronouns detain me. They make me small and eventless. I want
to get
rid of them.
I've been built into a sixties suburban style ranch home like a dishwasher and it's been mistaken for my life. I want a language without pronouns. I want to come, direct and complete, without pronoun. Yes I do. I want to come before gender. Yes, yes I do.'[3]
Landscape art is not an art form associated with women; in the traditional stereotype the boys paint the landscape and the girls paint the still life, just as in the myth of the Wild West the boys tame the wild landscape and the girls stay at home, bake apple pie and maintain an inner space - a place for the boys to return to.
A landscape art made by women is a new thing.
Cattrell's work is about place and space and the problem of their relationship. I am in a space [this room, this forest, this valley], but I am at a place, [ the ground I stand on, my chair, my body, my house][4]. But a place is also a space; my body encloses a space. Is it a fiction, and a maleficent one, to define place and space as opposites? It seems to me that her paintings are about allowing us to experience space and place together. A painting, traditionally is a place that creates the illusion of a space. It is normally to be construed as a fictive window that we look through.
Cattrell's earlier paintings had recognisable geographic or topographic features
or even something that acted clearly as an understudy for the figure: a bit
of drapery or a post.
Such placebo figures specify a place. They establish the foreground and hence
the place from where we look. If we know the place we stand on then we can
begin to know and map the landscape before us. Or, as Archimedes said, "Give
me a fulcrum and I can move the world." All these certain things have
been withdrawn now and the place is therefore, by default, the space we inhabit
as we look at or into the painting. Or is it the place she inhabited as she
moved back and forth to the unfinished painting?
In Plato's Timaeus place is catagorised as being that which is experienced by the body, space as that apprehended intellectually. [5]Aristotle, who was not much interested in space, defines place as the inner surface of that which contains the body. This, I suppose is normally the atmosphere; in the landscape we are especially aware of this for the wind feels us, it demarcates the place we are. Place in everyday usage is contiguous with identity: I am of a place, you are at a place, but 'we' are in a space.
Since Descartes however, the concepts of Space and Time have tended to take precedence over a consideration of Place. Consciousness is seen as an experience of space and time. Descartes conflates space and matter, hence putting the void out of court, and in a rather cavalier manner he designates place as being, effectively, a mere misapprehension of space.
Although Cattrell's paintings seem to show a placeless space, they are in fact a reintegration of space as place. They are a practical refutation of Descartes' privileging of space over place. The quiddity of the painting, the metaphor of paint as skin, as body which is implicit to her work, the way the forms seem to move towards us into the space between that place [the painting} and this place [the viewer - all these intimate the presence and knowability of place- internal and external.[6]
There is a seduction here, but it is not, except by analogy, a sexual one. In a recent conversation with the New York painter and critic Mathew Weinstein he said to me that a painting is unique among art forms for its ability to give the sense of a human presence. Think of how we may call this painting, like the actual person, a ' Weinstein' , a 'Cattrell'. We can be seduced by a painting, just as we can by a person. However when I commented that I thought one of his paintings was beautiful he disagreed. 'No', he said, 'you can call a person beautiful, but not a painting'.
I disagree with him. The problem is, of course, with the way in idealist philosophy The Beautiful and The Good have been transformed into ideal forms. We cannot sustain a belief in such ideal forms anymore, and hence feel uncomfortable with the words as concepts. However in the patois of everyday language 'beautiful' still exists and it is an act of repression not to use it.
Artists other than Weinstein have been edging back however towards using the
word. The Swiss - American painter Michael Biberstein remarks that, 'Art is
concerned with ideal states. The beautiful was a word that was taboo in the
last thirty or forty years…and I agree, it's time to re-establish the
term. It's one of the terms, or a mode of thinking, which was lost during
those eighty years of iconoclasm but which is of crucial importance. The sublime
has to do with beauty, but with overwhelming proportions and with an unspoken
danger- the fear of death'.[7]
The American writer David Hickey in the closing moments of a conference was
asked in the closing moments of a conference what he thought would be the
key term for the nineties. On the spur of the moment he responded 'Beauty'.
His book The Invisible Dragon[8] was an attempt to explore that possibility.
Beauty for Hickey is the signature of the contract between the image and the
beholder. Interestingly, in the terms of our preceding discussion, he points
out that subsequent to the late Renaissance the work of art has increasingly
been praised in masculine terms regarded now as implicitly effeminate, it
is perhaps easier for a female artist like Cattrell to break this repression
and make paintings which contain both presence and beauty. Beauty for Hickey
is not an idealist end in itself, but that which makes things possible for
us to be ourselves.
We have wandered into rather abstract or theoretical areas: however it all
seems pertinent to our understanding of Cattrell's paintings and our use of
them. That the paintings can support a discourse explains why they are not
just pleasant, lyrical, abstracted landscapes.
I would like to conclude by reiterating Biberstein's point that these paintings
are to do with a sense of mortality, but only within a wider sense of the
human consciousness, where space is, however momentarily, understood as place.
This is an inner geography as much as an outer one. Most importantly this
sense of human consciousness and place is conveyed with beauty and delight.
Tony Godfrey 1995
Translated into Welsh by Eirwyn Pierce Jones
Footnotes:
1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 version Book XIII, 1, 36-51
2. Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, London and New York, 1975
3. Roni Horn, To Place: Pooling Waters. Verlag der buchandling Walther Konig
1994 Volume 2. P.61
4 Of course we can see houses and rooms both as spaces and places, It depends
on one's viewpoint. The problem in philosophy seems to be conceptualising
an external place outside of the body and its particular and self-evident
place.
5 See Timaeus 52-53. This is part of Plato's anaylsis of the physical world
into three parts. The true forms that underlie everything; the copies of those
forms which we believe we experience and which are in constant flux, that
which 'comes into existence in and vanishes from a particular place'; space
which we know exists but only by reason, furthermore we can only experience
it as though in a dream. A good discussion of the varied history of place
and space in Western philosophy is to be found in 'Retrieving the Difference
between Place and Space’ by Edward S. Casey, in Architecture, Space,
Painting, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, 1992, p.54-57.
6 In this they are a little like Mark Rothko's paintings where, if the viewer
is patient, the central monolithic forms will begin to hover in front of the
painting. In so doing they reverse the traditional landscape picture where
we are invited into a perspectivally constructed space.
7 Michael Biberstein interviewed by Jiri Svetska in Exhibition catalogue Michael
Biberstein: Paintings. Dusseldorf Kunstverein. 1990.
8 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Art Issues Press,
Los Angeles. 1993.
Bibliography
| 1998 | Louise Cattrell: Coast, Laura Cumming |
| 1998 | Louise Cattrell, Rachel Withers, in Modern Painters |
| 1996 | Louise Cattrell, Amanda Hogg & Leo Smith (Eds.), Fruitmarket Art Gallery - video |
| 1995 | Louise Cattrell, Tony Godfrey, Oriel 31 |
| 1992 | Recent Paintings: Louise Cattrell, Colin Wiggins,
in The Green Book, Vol. lll |
