GRAHAM CROWLEY

“I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful” Leon Trotsky

 

When the opportunity arises Hannah exhibits her sculpture alongside her paintings. This is not because of a similarity of appearance, as clearly none exists, but a common sense of intention. This is because there’s a strong conceptual element to all her work which co-exists alongside a sense of what it is to be english. Her paintings aren’t simply about english identity, they’re forged by it.

One of the legacies of conceptualism for painting has been an opportunity to rethink and reclaim ‘first order meaning’. This has lent a new legitimacy to experience and challenged the dominance of ‘second order meaning’, or the necessity to quote from previous art, which had become a wearisome cornerstone of postmodernism. The legacy of conceptual art is what’s come to be known as post-conceptual painting.

“I don’t like cricket,…” Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc

Iconoclasm, shock and confrontation have long been rendered obsolete as they’ve become institutionally  orthodox and routine; fit only for the pages of the Daily Mail. Instead they’ve being replaced by an art that is characterised by reflection, empathy and a general sense of humanity, reflecting a shift in social values.

Post-conceptual painting doesn’t have to ‘look like modern art’ to be noteworthy. Terms like radical have no meaningful place in contemporary discourse. Post conceptual painting is a significant part of that discourse. In the 1990’s terms such as avant garde were appropriated as a trim options on entry level Mercedes and Picasso became a Citroen.

“Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and you die” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hannah has long been an admirer of 18th and 19th century romantic landscape painters like Alexander Camale and Johan Christian Dahl. But due to her recent work, she now has begun to reevaluate the work of Samuel Palmer, Ivon Hitchens, Giorgio Morandi and Graham Sutherland amongst others.

There’s a subtle and sophisticated sense of the political about all of Hannah’s work. Her’s are paintings that acknowledge the influence of the BBC, the National Trust, public service announcements and redbrick polytechnics. This sentiment is reflected through the music of the contemporary label Ghost Box with albums such as Other Channels by The Advisory Circle and The Belbury Tales by Belbury Poly. It evokes the England of Pressburger and Powell. A world that seems to have evaporated, only to exist in the imagination.

“He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well” John Clare

But Hannah’s England isn’t without it’s ‘skeletons’. She is aware of the difficulty in referencing english culture without slipping into cliches or nostalgia. She can’t bear to listen to ‘The Archers’. I sympathise, as the strained and contrived sense of what it is to be english is too painful to bear.

Morandi is particularly relevant in this context as his small undemonstrative landscape paintings are the epitome of the intimate, the reflective and the undramatic. It’s this sense of the almost generic and uncelebrated aspect of his subject matter that fascinates Hannah. It’s what Michel Foucault has termed a heterotopia; a conflation of many locations, time and memory. Another aspect of Hannah’s paintings is a sense of luminosity which is brought about by ‘old school’ glazing. Glazing can lend luminosity to a painting and luminosity is synonymous with a sense of light, air and ultimately life.

“There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity” Ludwig Wittgenstein

These paintings are a clearly a synthesis of the english landscape tradition and contemporary anxieties. But in spite of Hannah’s paintings being executed with great precision they’re far from photographic or mimetic. Their exquisite appearance is located in the actual painting as object and not in any apparent or illusory sense of reality.  These paintings are very much their own object, compact, solid and shiny. In order to make paintings of this precision it’s necessary to concentrate on the task in hand, so a self-conscious sense of rhetoric is almost untenable. Which means there’s no embellishment or meretricious bravura; a kind of narrative minimalism and  emotional restraint.

“Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow” Don Van Vliet

When we think of these paintings it appears as if we’ve taken a B road and ended up somewhere between Ambridge and Midwich. It’s probably spring, the sky is a dismal grey and appears almost absent. There’s a  sense of quiet menace. I’m getting the feeling that it’s probably a good place to bury a body. They’re finely judged and culturally specific. It’s painting that references the notion of the indigenous. There’s much that we can’t see, but can imagine. Its the familiar rendered unfamiliar.

There’s a sense of being out of time. As there’s no signage, no fencing, no litter and no sign of human presence except the fact that it’s a field, some trees and maybe a hedgerow, all of which appear tended and mown. Welcome to Heterotopia.

Hannah’s paintings also demonstrate an awareness of conventions and cliches that govern the idealised and domesticated references to landscape as reflected in ornaments and paintings, all commonly found in the post war home. Think Sylvac and Wade; Rowland Hilder and Julian Trevelyan.

There’s also what can only be described as an intellectual efficiency about Hannah’s work. Her audience will immediately understand the references and the signification. Shades of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space combined with the finesse, the reserve and sensibility of Austen.

“In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness” Samuel Beckett