JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
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Windsor Great Park Observations: Spring 2020
As the Coronavirus Lockdown restrictions have been eased this spring, trips to the park have become essential, and this space once has again assumed its role as an “Observation Laboratory”… Fellow artist Camila Aguais and I have made Wednesday afternoons our appointed time for drawing, painting, and photographing in Windsor Great Park. The weather has been glorious and our observations have yielded much to reflect upon…
Interspersed among these collected images are words by Paul Vanderbilt and W.G. Sebald.
"I walk the landscape to learn something, maybe something about my own limitations. I see what I see, but I know there is something more. In the physical, topographical fact, there are very likely all the prejudices about what a landscape is supposed to be; there is bias from literature, from the build-up of conventional images, from a rehearsing of names, compounding fragments of data. There is still something more, ephemeral and not exactly knowledge, susceptible to romantic notions but nonetheless an invitation to participate.”
- Paul Vanderbilt
from Between the Landscape and its Other
Camila Aguais working with gouache near the Bishopsgate entrance to Windsor Great Park, May, 2020.
"The starting point of any characterisation of a landscape is the scale: How big is it in reference to oneself? What is the reach from side to side? Is the distance out of measure? Out of mind? How is all of this, whatever the scale, perhaps unified as intricate detail, perceived as a totality? We have somehow to hold it, to feel both its general outer shape and the textures of its parts. The frame is like our hand…”
- Paul Vanderbilt
Watercolour in process, the Deer Park, early May 2020.
"I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?”
- W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
“Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.”
- W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
John Smalley
"The most enriching experience is to come upon meaning unexpectedly, realising in an artist’s form the very characterising structure we had needed without having thought
to ask for it.”
- Paul Vanderbilt
Camila Aguais
John Smalley
Camila Aguais
"The mainspring of every work of art, including landscape design, is rearrangement, wherein lies the freshness of creation. The transformation is not necessarily of position or even of shape. It is more musical than that and often involves a time factor. What was immobile stirs with some excitement... An inner order forms within the chaos. That which was lost and negligible is reorganised into identity and being… “
- Paul Vanderbilt
John Smalley
"That which happened is thus accepted as being so, but another probability was never clear enough to happen and it lay across the earth without a word.”
- Paul Vanderbilt
"There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.”
- W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
