Insidious Lassitude

Susan Lincoln lives on a smallholding near Penrith on the outskirts of the Lake District. As far as I can see - though it may just be a romantic imagining - her painting studio is in a farmyard outbuilding that is a brimming menagerie of goats, sheep, horses and parakeets, and overlooks a few rolling acres of Eden Valley arable land and rough pasture. Her paintings are vibrant acrylic depictions of the rural life of nostalgia, the naïve style giving the imagery a fairytale quality. Her’s is an oneiric world where warm breezes caress cotton grass, starry skies give consonant glint to blue pools, and moonlight casts relief on a fecund land where shepherds, woodcutters, and fishermen are lone figures threshing a subsistence that is overseen by ethereal white horses, savant owls, and other equanimous creatures.

The images are familiar - the lone figure tending the land and living self-sufficiently is well-used iconography - but the connotations of such images are no less vital because they are well-rehearsed. It’d be interesting to contrast her depiction of the motif with those from the past to see the way that the nuance and significance of the imagery have changed and are different for an artist today. The inferred ideologies may be similar to those presented before - Lincoln’s fisherman looks a lot like Thoreau might’ve at Walden, for example - but artists make art which reflects the cultural climate particular to the time and society they’re working in. Lincoln, for instance, makes a decision to not depict the M6 tearing through the Eden valley, or a Foot and Mouth riddled countryside, or derelict farms, or the flooded holiday homes of people from Salford. All doubtless excellent fodder for art. But she chooses instead to paint something other than what is there, something which is really a reverie or a fantasy. All art is selective, and the way she selects and paints is different to the way that, say, Grant Wood paints a reverie of what was there when he dragged his easel up a hill next to his house. Wood wasn’t ostensibly painting what was like Lincoln is, but his paintings are likewise imbued with nostalgia and they work a similar set of emotions in the viewer - this is not now, this is what is not. And like Lincoln, this is accentuated by his flat semi-naïve storybook style.

I use Grant Wood as an example because a postcard I have here of Lincoln’s recent ‘Around the Tarn’ reminds me of Wood’s ‘Stone City’ painting from the 1930s. As well as the stylistic, and compositional and tonal resemblance, the two images perhaps make telling resonance of each other and the cultural and societal mise en scène.      

Wood’s painting could be seen to engage with the issues presented by post-industrialisation America, and prophesise the issues of the direction of progress of the country. At the same time it is has a nostalgic reverence for the small town agrarianism and regional farming of early 20^th century mid-America. Wood has said that he wanted to paint things the way they were when he was a child - the way he perceived them as a child, or even just the way he retrospectively imagined he had perceived them. This manifested itself aesthetically with the stylised faux-naïveté of the Plasticine hills and lollypop trees, but can also be read in the painting’s rhetoric and subtext. The image seems a simple one of rustic American painterly charm - an uncontested storybook narrative - but there are tensions within the frame that are an interesting comparison to Lincoln’s painting.

‘Around the Tarn’ is, as the title suggests, an image with a central anchor; the lines of roads and pathways lead to the tarn in the middle of the frame, the hills enclose it, even the trees lean into the centre of the picture, and the animals crane towards it too. This is a self-contained settlement. There is no suggestion of any relationship to the outside world; there is no of suggestion of any outside world. The only road that heads to the horizon leads to a house, and this has the effect of terminating the road in a destination and dissolving the sense that there is something over the horizon that the road could lead to. This is the valley as the known world, with the universe unknown, not relevant and only hypothetical. Everything needed for life is here in the valley-world - water, food, sunlight, shelter - and no roads have been built to accommodate the notion of leaving here or moving on from now.

‘Stone City’, on the other hand, has a tension between the self-contained valley-world and the outside world. It is perhaps an image of innocence thwarted or rescinded. Wood makes a central anchor of the houses and barns cosseted by the hills, but he then disturbs this by draping through it a seductively curvy road which leads the eye through the countryside of the distance and out of the frame unchallenged by the horizon. As it makes its way to the horizon it reveals other settlements on the periphery of the frame, and suggests that this is not the enclosed world it first appears. With these other farms comes the question of boundaries - this land doesn’t all belong to the inhabitants of Stone City, some of this arable landscape must be being used by some other people. The implication is that there must be many valleys like this one, and they all must be joined together. The road goes past the house on the horizon, it doesn’t terminate at the door like it does in Lincoln’s image, it’s left unrestricted over the receding plains. Rather than the distinct horizon and terminated road of ‘Around the Tarn’, Wood’s world is edgeless and uncertain. Trees funnel us over the horizon into possibility; but with moving comes leaving, with distance comes melancholy and the blue edgelessness of distance.

There is too the sense of passing through which emphasises the melancholy of this open horizon. All the windmills in ‘Stone City’ are powered by a west wind; they face left to right - the direction of progress. On the road Wood places a man on a galloping horse with the wind at his back. The figure is about to cross the modern industrial-looking bridge which separates the dark, enclosed, wooded left hand side and bottom of the picture from the light and open right hand side and top of the picture. He travels from the dark to the light, the past to the future, the bottom to the top, the restricted to the unbound. Interestingly too, the pattern of the light and dark areas are vaguely reminiscent of a Taijitu yin-yang symbol - though an inverted one. The rounded interlocking of the Taijitu is something which can also often be perceived in the harmonious lines of the knolls and sweeping pathways common to Lincoln’s paintings.

Despite the contented centred-community of houses, there is only one human figure in ‘Around the Tarn’: walking in the centre of the frame, his dungarees and sun hat mark him as a man-of-the-land. This man walks in the opposite direction to Wood’s figure - from right to left, or the direction of regression. From her studio in the 21^st century Lincoln paints images of the past as a simpler time, a time of greater certainty when the world beyond the horizon was unknown and insignificant. The man and dog represent a fantasy of walking back into that valley-world - disconnecting the telegraph poles, uninventing the inventions, unthinking the thoughts, unbridging the river, and redeeming innocence. 

Wood’s image is a more ambivalent one. The progress is founded on the past - the windmills that power the future are driven by the winds of the past. It is an image of a settlement relocated from the centre of the agrarian self-contained map, to a settlement which is perhaps on the hinterland of the new world but is still of founding economic importance to it. It could be seen as an image of the ambiguities of the self and the community in a national - or international - capitalist society. Amongst the cocks and the cows are telegraph poles. Bisected by the left edge of the frame and disappearing from sight is a large building that looks like it could be a church. The right hand edge of the frame is bounded by an advertising billboard half-shaded by a tree and positioned just after the road turns and begins its snake to the distance. A small path treads left to right from another church to the billboard. From behind the shade of nature and religion, agrarianism and regionalism, the billboard peers as a representation of the outside world (by its very nature it advertises something other, something that is not here) encroaching on the local. The economics of a new America are the turn in the road.

The M6 is a road with very few turns. It connects the industrial north of England to the economic centre in the south. Directions and signposts to everywhere are everywhere along this ‘Backbone of Britain’ as it moves a constant flow of traffic between named places. It’s possibly even visible from Lincoln’s smallholding-studio-farmyard as she paints a recognisable nameless place from back down the road in the Eden valley-world of a romantic imagining.