ON THE EDGE OF FURY: A LANDSCAPE FOR OUR TIME

On The Edge of Fury: A Landscape for Our Time Oil on linen 30 x 40 cm 2020

PROCESS

On The Edge of Fury: A Landscape for Our Time just happened! I am actually working on another painting Machine Unreadable, nearly completed. I started to prepare a new canvas so that it would be ready to work on next week. But, I could not stop - and - On The Edge of Fury: A Landscape for Our Time is the result. This type of thing happens reasonably often, especially when there is a lot to think about. And, at the moment, with COVID-19, there is a huge amount to think about - and worry about. This kind of rapid creation also happens when I've worked intensively for some time. It's like a release valve. I consider it a normal part of the creative process, a kind of waxing and waning of intensity. 

TURMOIL - VIRUS

I wanted to create an image of turmoil, to reflect the effects of a world changed by virus. As I was pushing the paint around with a brush, pouring paint from a container and tipping the stretcher up and down to make the paint drip and flow, I suddenly thought of my childhood landscape. I've written about this landscape before [please see images below for links]. I grew up on my parent's grain farm on the flat naturally treeless black-soil Pirrinuan Plain, outside Dalby, on the fertile Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia. As we danced with endless horizons and relentless skies, distance consumed us. In stormy weather the sky seemed to overtake the landscape. With nothing to obstruct our view we could see where lightning struck the Earth, we could watch clouds rolling wildly and strips of rain pouring on parched soil many kilometers away. The unobstructed flat horizon and the unfolding distance revealed everything. 

HORIZONS

As I was playing with the paint, I suddenly painted a horizontal line across the painting. This is the flat horizon of my childhood, the marker of distance that made me who I am. The painting felt right, it spoke to me about how landscape informs us, if we a willing to watch, listen, smell and feel. With my painting, a tension between calmness and calamity offered a way to think about the effects of the virus. The flat foreground could, on the one hand, be a future of calm reflection about much needed societal change, but, on the other hand, it could also be the past. It's certainly not the present! The sky tumbles uncontrolled, maybe not only reflecting the present, but also a possible future. The flat horizon seems to suggest we have a choice about how this future might expand before us. 

The tension between land and sky is exposed in the nakedness of the flat landscape terrain - no hills, no trees, no houses. The storm, a metaphor, appears ominously ready to devour the calmness. Would this mean a future foreclosed? However, the storm is equally exposed, its fury obviously raw and hot. The flat exposed horizon demands attention, possibly offering hope as it holds the fury back, giving us some time. The horizon is a metaphor for the world to meet the fury of nature in honest and compassionate ways. Are we brave enough? I think we need to be.

Life depends on it.

Cheers,

Kahryn

*Below are some images of the Pirrinuan Plain, plus three other stormy paintings!

Me with my brothers Wilfred and Douglas, many years ago. The sky is stormy, although not wildly so. We had some very welcome rain.

 Me in 2015 on a trip back to Dalby and the Pirrinuan Plain. Note the flat horizon, and the rich black soil. Cotton, mainly dryland, is now farmed in the district. It was not a crop grown during my childhood. Back then it was mainly wheat, corn, sorghum.

A very old photo of the Pirrinuan Plain. Probably taken in the 1930s-1940s by my grandfather.

 Night Time Electrical Storm [Across the Flat Plain] Oil on linen 55 x 80 cm 2012

Stormy Weather, Where? Oil on linen 120 x 150 cm 2013

Storm Oil on linen 85 x 150 cm 2012

FIRE AND FLOOD: EXTREMUS

Fire and Flood: Extremus Gouache on paper 56 x 76 cm 2017

PLANETARY HOME

I have painted another image that speaks to our planetary home's current environmental dilemmas - extreme weather events, environmental degradation, pollution and more. What is not consumed by fire and heat will be subsumed by flooding waters - maybe? 

The type of landscape is unclear - it appears to be both sky and land, cosmic even. Is the fire a sign of earthly remnants burning off their last signs of existence? Is the flood the spilling of cosmic tears? Are we looking through tears down onto a landscape or up through them to an endless sky? Maybe the fire and the flood are ghostly essences, reminders that a planet once existed? 

But, maybe the fire and flood are signs of new life, a cauldron of possibility? Maybe fire, water and unseen forces are stirring universal alchemic processes that bring forth new possibilities? These new possibilities - material or spiritual...

INSPIRATION
Apart from thinking about our planet and its future, and therefore humanity's future, this painting was inspired by recent devastating floods here in Queensland, Australia, in the aftermath of super-Cyclone Debbie. I have personally experienced rising waters in four floods, one in Dalby where I grew up, two in Goondiwindi where I lived for eighteen years and one in Brisbane during the 2011 floods. Fortunately none caused major losses. However, I do know what it is like to be an island, completely cut off, snakes seeking the same high ground you are on, the dankness of mud as the waters recede...

The painting is also inspired by memories of the massive fires my father and other farmers lit to burn off crop stubble. This practice was stopped at some stage and farmers then started to plough stubble back into the soil. However, I still have vivid childhood memories of fires that covered whole paddocks. Flames leaped into the air, into darkening skies. These flames seemed to lick at the stars, teasing them. Dusk and at night were the safest times for the farmers to set fire to stubble...the air is still then. 

The dark night skies of my childhood are the entry points for my cosmic travelling - imagined in my paintings. 

RECENT NEWS

The Center for the Study of the Drone, Bard College, New York conducted an interview with me about my dronescapes. The interviewer is Maggie Barnett.  Portfolio: Dronescapes by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

Cheers,

Kathryn

MY LANDSCAPE AND SPAGETTIFICATION

 My Landscape Gouache and watercolour on paper 30 x 42 cm 2015

ME/YOU
Here's me, in the painting above, with my arms and legs stretched across a landscape, that could be read as an aerial view of the Australian outback...after some rain!

Or, it could be read as a cosmic view with me floating in an endless space....my arms and legs stretched to the edges of time and the universe.

Or, maybe I am in the process of spagettification as I enter the event horizon at the entrance of a black hole where gravity is so dense that time stops.

But maybe it's just a shadow of me where light is playing tricks with my body?

And, here's another possibility, it could be a posthuman me...my body simulated with some kind of code, so that 'I' feel like 'I' have a body...except the code may not have worked because 'I' am a stretched version of a human body, not really what the 'source code' ie: the real me looked like?

But, this figure does not have to be me. It could be you! It could be anyone or all of us. 

FLYING BRIDES
In the past I have painted many images of figures floating or flying above a landscape and even in space. Here's an example below, Living With Distance. A bride floats above the Earth, her veil sweeping across the atmosphere as if forming clouds. This painting plays with the word distance in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. I painted a number of flying brides a few years ago. You can see more HERE

Living With Distance Oil on linen 120 x 160 [diptych] 2001 - 2002

OUT NEAR THE MOON

And, the painting below is called When I Was A Child I Dreamt I could Fly. In this painting I am not merely flying above a known landscape, I am flying out near the Moon! Here's a link to a previous post called School Holidays where I write more about this painting. Yes, I actually did dream I could fly...and sometimes I was not asleep!

Actually, I've painted a few paintings where the Moon features...and with floating/flying human figures too. Here's a link to a post I wrote called Moon

When I Was A Child I Dreamt I Could Fly oil on linen 80 x 120 cm 2003

REFLECTING ON MY PRACTICE AND CHILDHOOD LANDSCAPE

I have found writing this post to be very useful. Actually concentrating on a theme like flying has helped me see how my current work links with my previous work. It's not so surprising that I have gravitated towards cosmic landscapes and an interest in how humanity will navigate the future in this universe. 

I also am very aware of the influence of landscape, especially the distance in the Australian landscape AND especially the distance of my childhood landscape...the flat treeless Pirrinuan Plain, between Dalby and Jimbour, Queensland, Australia. It really provided the space for many launches!

REMINDER 

ADELAIDE

THURSDAY FEB 4 at 6 PM

Hosted by Southern Hemisphere Space Program 

at the University of South Australia
in conjunction with the International Space University, Strasbourg, France. 

'Space and Popular Culture'

Panel discussion 

With me, under-water performance artist and Everest mountaineer Sarah-Jane Pell and comedian and Mars One candidate Josh Richards with facilitator, space archaeologist Dr. Alice Gorman.

All the details and registration HERE

Cheers,

Kathryn

www.kathrynbrimblecombe-fox.com