The Landscape Interrupted (2017–2019) chapter 28 from The Works

Learning to see

"Sometimes a landscape changes you long before you begin to paint it."

The mountain gave me everything I had been longing for.

Silence.

Space.

Distance.

From my caravan I looked across rolling hills that stretched all the way to the horizon.

The light changed from hour to hour.

The seasons unfolded slowly.

Life became wonderfully uncomplicated.

Yet there was one thing I could not ignore.

Electricity pylons.

They crossed the landscape in every direction.

At first, I hated them.

They seemed completely out of place.

A human interruption imposed upon an ancient landscape.

Every morning they were still there.

Every evening they remained.

Eventually I realised that they were not disturbing the landscape.

They had become part of it.

The problem was not the pylons.

The problem was the way I was looking at them.

So I began to paint them.

Not as engineering.

Not as symbols of technology.

But as lines.

Structures.

Rhythms crossing space.

Slowly they became something else.

Sometimes they resembled trees.

Sometimes cathedrals.

Sometimes bridges suspended in the sky.

Sometimes they felt like enormous drawings floating across the landscape.

Looking back, I realise they were connected to everything I had done before.

The geometry of the Fourth Dimension.

The labyrinth.

The circles.

The collages.

The invisible structures that had always fascinated me.

Without knowing it, I had simply found another language for the same questions.

The pylons taught me something unexpected.

Beauty does not always arrive in beautiful forms.

Sometimes it appears only after we stop resisting what is in front of us.

Looking back, I realise I wasn't painting electricity pylons at all.

I was painting acceptance.

"The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return." Laozi (inspired)