Barbara Howey interviews Amanda Ansell.
BH: I am interested in the process of layering – ‘laying down surfaces’, ‘adding to’, and ‘painting over’. You talk of what ‘lies beneath’, ‘surface’, and ‘background’. A sense of depth like the water that is so much part of your interests. What do you think this means in terms of your work? What idea of depth are you trying to convey?
AA: Surface is something which I have always been interested in and it can be many things. It can be shiny and deceptive and what lies underneath can be turmoil or something that is unknown and then there’s surfacing where things can be brewing up or rising from underneath and coming to touch. There’s also the feeling that what is on top is now and immediate and what is below is what has gone, or perhaps the origin of what is now.
BH: You have previously mentioned the term Romanticism in relation to your interest in landscape as a response to the technological and digital preoccupations of our time. So in what terms do you think we can talk about Romanticism now because the word has changed so much since its origins in the 18th Century? There are so many things about the contemporary world that are abhorrent or antagonistic to the notion of “pristine wilderness”; our landscape is under pressure in all sorts of ways, from farming technologies, global warming to building projects, etc… So where does that leave us as artists in terms of the Romantic tradition? How can we commune with nature when it is under such stress?
AA: It doesn’t help that people are obsessed with looking at pristine and charming images of idyllic landscapes. For example, people put an image tag into their search engine, perhaps you put in ‘Constable Country’, you get a beautiful image, photographic images, someone’s holiday snaps, and you’re automatically transported there and that is not the reality of the place. It’s also the fact that if these distinguished places are not bought up by the wealthy, they become preserved, they have a cordon around them and then they aren’t those special, off-the-map places anymore. I don’t think having landscape paintings that are beautiful is sufficient. This isn’t enough for people to wake up and see that a particular place is worth protecting. For contemporary landscape painting, if it just becomes a depiction, it will only say this is the place, where do you belong, what is your position, do you know this place? Whereas for me, paintings that relate to the landscape have to say something more and ask, how do we inhabit a place? What do you get from the landscape, how does it feel and what is the significance of the place? It’s not that image tag on Google; so the sensory thing is really important to me and then the fact that I’ve got the feeling that something is unsettled alongside this in my work – it is subtle, but that is my way of saying it. It is not obvious, but it is there.
BH: So what do you wish to convey through colour?
AA: What I’m trying to do is absorb the landscape around me into the act of painting, the stuff of paint, and my process of overpainting. I do have rules when I start a body of work. So for this series, I am using analogous colours from dark blue through to lime green-yellow, with some greys and browns thrown in. I selected these colours because they speak of the landscape outside my studio window and therefore have the potential to describe the sensory moments. Then all those other formal things; I am free to practice without thinking ‘now what colour should I use next’?
BH: I think it is quite important for artists to have their own set of rules otherwise we can become distracted and lose focus. In terms of your use of gestural marks do you have a system of procedures that you use? They seem quite organised gestures, quite poised in their relationship to one another. One overlaying gesture is reliant on the gestural mark beneath, that is, you respond to what is underneath; it doesn’t appear to be a random procedure?
AA: The ones underneath are quite random and the layers build up to the fixed formation on top. The composition is linked to the quick doodles I make. I know within a little what kind of form I’m going to paint over the top, so I think about that when I begin the layering. I almost practice what that is going to look like. But the layers also become random around these practice runs.