more on Edward Corbett

Corbett’s paintings are abstract, but do have a certain resonance of nature/landscape. Occasionally there is a horizon line, but generally it’s something about his paintings’ expansiveness that echoes something of the western landscape.

Again I identify with this imperative. I feel continually inspired by nature and yet reluctant to retain any specifics. Just because the painting was based on a photo I took of wildflowers doesn’t mean it’s about wildflowers. And frequently I’m afraid that naming the source (when I can remember it) will deflate the viewer. As in a viewer says to me, This is a lovely painting, and I say, Yes it’s based on a crate of rotting apples, I found the way they had either retained some of their round form or decayed and softened away from it really interesting. Or if not disgusting the viewer in this way, something like telling the way a magic trick is done, like it might make the painting more mundane, as in the viewer says, This is a lovely painting, all these colors and the nuances of light, and then I say, Yes, it’s based on some stones in a creek.

So I want to avoid making the paintings this specific. Not necessarily grand in the way Corbett aimed to do, but to use painting to capture the sublime elegance of nature.

Here’s Landauer on Corbett:

He seems to have been especially fascinated by its primordial element, the inhuman image of eternal nature. Corbett insisted that his images not be understood as landscapes in the literal sense; rather, they were intended as poetic renditions of imagined or remembered experiences in nature

And here’s Corbett:

I have no intention or desire to illustrate the nature around me; my wish is to express some quality of experience in relation to nature, some quality of self-awareness, deriving perhaps, paradoxically from the responsiveness to a vastness and inhumanity of environment. The painting of a particular mountain in order to represent its geological uniqueness, or even its special beauty and grandeur, would not interest me . . . Rather than to choose the mountain or any other specific fact of nature, grand or small, as my subject in painting, I myself prefer to be chosen.

Corbett worked from memory rather thank photos as I do. Either way it’s about the aspects of nature that resonate with you than the specifics. I suppose that there are any number of landscape painters that might say the same, except that they also enjoy the challenge of trying to represent the local colors, at least some of the recognizable specifics of the moment. I very much enjoy the work of the Canadian figurative artist Heather Horton, but find it a bit confounding when she refers to rendering an awkward wall color behind a sitter. I think why not pretend that the wall was painted green instead of white, who would know.

So rather than painting scattered stones in a shallow creek as they are I start by trying to echo some of the naturally occurring aesthetics of that moment and then depart from them in order to enhance them in a more considered design. Hopefully anyway.