Page 9 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

or a rope bridge that hangs above it. The valley begins to resemble a quarry, a place from
which building material has been extracted. The lines cross each other with no obvious
spatial logic you can discern, and lead uncertainly beyond the space defined by one-

point perspec tive. The illogicality is not blatant: we are presented here with a settled

land scape, familiar, ancient and ordinary, but one which contemporary perspective
cannot simply resolve. I began by saying that this is close to pastoral, but it is also imme -
di ately contemporary in its envisioning of how one place is necessarily and uncertainly

connected with others. It embodies a duality: a contained and indeed sheltered land - [ ]
scape that is ambiguously connected to spaces sensed as outside it. In this way, each
new encounter extends into a process of picturing the shared future of the planet, rather
than looking back at its past−though it is a vital part of the artist’s tact and thought -

ful ness that the associations spread out from the image, and are not the result of an
imposed programme.

An obvious partner to it is waterstair, which movingly and memorably makes some kind

of representation of a landscape that is being irrigated. It is difficult to interpret how
these straight lines fit the assumed contours of the land, or with what we know about
how water behaves. The contrast of blurring and sharpness in the marks throws in other
levels of uncertainty. However, the illogicality is, again, not the final point. There is a hope -

fulness in the constructive effort here that needs to be acknowledged, alongside the
visual contradictions. Rod Mengham has described the painter Laura Owens as denying
the landscape tradition of ‘natura naturata, nature recast by man’s desires: a California
of the mind’ and ‘preferring the possibilities inherent in the concept of natura naturans,

the concept of a nature still unfinished and developing in a way that is unpredictable and

waterstair, , graphite and oil on paper, x

cm