RICHARD GILBERT & CONRAD CLARKE
Private View: Friday 2nd June, 5-8pm

Richard Gilbert and Conrad Clarkes’ whose paths first crossed in 2006 as Art teacher and student, now find themselves to be both painters both fascinated by trees and the more intricate details of a landscape. However, here they have focused on paths and tracks. Paths as a subject are a natural common ground for artists since English landscape painting often centers on a pathway. Moreover, since the Industrial Revolution, the path offers a refuge from the rising tide of housing, Retail Park and motor traffic in the diminishing landscape of an overpopulated island.

One of the joys of this genre is to create space that the eye can navigate and wandering in that fiction can but return us to the present, delighted and rejuvenated. Both Clarke and Gilbert use the path as a device to invite the eye back into the picture’s space. Landscapes do not necessarily have to proceed from a fixed viewpoint as in ‘the world as seen from here’ and both create compositions from multiple viewpoints, often sifting associated imagery, experiences and memory. Beneath the modern infrastructure, paths, actual or imagined, define the English countryside. Tracks by humans and animals are richly varied – they might be ‘desire lines’, hunter’s tracks, routes to water, hidden holloway’s or ancient trackways linking hilltop encampments. The paths featured here are likewise varied, some are local to Gloucestershire or Herefordshire and some further afield.  Some paths follow historic boundaries, some stride across hills, cross waste ground or delve into thickets.

Clarke has a site-specific approach and wanders a route of botanical interest, trending towards the intimate details and plants encountered, as opposed to taking in the bigger landscape.  ‘I was keen to find an effective way to combine the two scales … more of a botanical wandering than a journey from A to B with a nice view.  In this new work, I have managed to capture an image of a path or track, yet with a concentration on the diversity of plants and textures, you might come across. Tall grasses, gorse bushes, harebells, birds foot trefoil, heath bedstraw and bilberry for instance’.

For Gilbert the intention is to make a ‘slow’ portrait of a landscape, to suggest the sense of a pathway receding in time. ‘Strip away the roads and what you have left are paths and tracks that in some cases go back to prehistory. If you want to walk with the ghosts of prehistoric folk, walk the drover’s roads or ridgeway tracks based on ancient ways. Animal tracks are the meandering feelers that follow the logic of the landscape, like fungal tendrils exploring the terrain, following its contours.  Paths might follow the lines of least resistance like tiny roots branching out into the land, whereas human tracks are the limbs or trunks’.

Walking itself has a long cultural history from medieval pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English romantics to modern long distance walkers and contemporary travel writing. Walking and painting are indeed complementary activities since on one level; both are a means to trace a line in the landscape - in the words of Paul Klee 'to take a line for a walk'. Tracing the surface of the earth become traced patterns of experience in both activities. Painting landscapes might resemble slow walking; repeatedly going over the same ground where one is walking only to stand still in order to picture the place. In this venture, painting as with walking might set out on the path to follow an idea, but often becomes a negotiation with the terrain of the beautiful little awkwardness of our landscape.