Contact: stubbs.jonathan@gmail.com
My work has three principal concerns: landscape, power and monument; explored within the tradition of landscape painting. These three lines of enquiry, probing our changing relationship with landscape, and its documentation through painting, provide an entry point for consideration of the mortal and immortal, finite and infinite, physical and metaphysical; contemplating mystery, absence, silence, solitude and death.
These considerations gained initial inspiration from my investigation into the Romantic Movement and ideals that gripped Europe in the early Nineteenth Century, especially the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Further influences include contemporary painters Nigel Cooke, Tomory Dodge and Daniel Richter; Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky; the work of Anselm Kiefer; and literary influences Moby Dick, A Brave New World and Haruki Murakami. These impart to my work their handling of significant subjects; notably, an embrace of mystery and the parallel discourse of humanity and eternality.
Our understanding of and relationship to landscape has changed dramatically over the last two hundred years, leading to a psychological shift in humanity’s positioning in relation to landscape. Friedrich and the Romantics led a call to re examine landscape through the eyes of the sublime and consider its proximity to
the divine. According to the pre-eminent Romantic philosopher Immanuel Kant, evocation of the sublime through landscape relies on the subject being overcome by wonder, beauty and terror at the scale, intricacy and mystery of nature (Kant, 1799). Since that movement a colossal expansion has taken place in the human challenge and influence on landscape. Alain de Botton states; ‘Nature no longer terrifies us, we terrify ourselves’ (de Botton, 2011).
This stark increase in humanity’s latent control has magnified the power struggle we experience with landscape. Does nature reign over us, or do we rule over it? This tussle for dominance is mirrored in the natural cycle of growth and decay and the rise and fall of empires and civilizations.
Time and again, humanity has sought to outmaneuver its inevitable demise by forging a monument to its legacy. We are in awe of our own impression on landscape, one that outlasts us, bringing us closer to immortality.
These three parallel considerations, landscape, power and monument, translate to my paintings in several ways. The Longest Night, Mother and The Language Barrier are appropriated from Friedrich landscapes. Within the illusion of the painted surface, paint crystals and pigment have gradually possessed these landscapes, covering
the rocks, foliage and figures, indicating an external influence beyond the original maker. In the Nantucket series, the works are set in an environment symbolic of the struggle between man and nature; Nantucket was the first major whaling port, now it is populated by the holiday mansions and boating houses of celebrities and the wealthy elite. Through Two Towers, The Miner and Always Believe in Gold, I have begun to explore varying manifestations of monuments, constructed of paint; the monuments imply an attempt to stake a claim on the landscape, challenging its authority. The earlier Monster series is a narrative struggle between the landscape and an active destroyer; a creature that consumes paint as sustenance, reducing the landscape to the raw material from which it was made.
For the next major stage in my work, I intend to examine humanity’s position in relation to the eternal or universal, and consider how this could act as an anchor for the rapidly changing dialogue we are experiencing with the landscape.
References:
Kant, Immanuel, 1799. Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
de Botton, Alain, 2011. ‘Has our relationship with nature changed?’ BBC Online, 21 January.