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Paintings/
All your landscapes map onto mine
As it could be (2), acrylic on canvas, 26 x 26 cm
As it could be (3), acrylic on canvas, 20 x 28 cm
As it could be (5), acrylic on canvas, 15 x 19.5 cm
Maps will do as memory does and change the outline, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 28 cm
As it could be (8), acrylic on canvas, 22.5 x 30 cm
A series of recent paintings which take as their starting point connections between eighteenth/nineteenth-century landscape painting and landscape gardening where landscape painting has influenced the physical alteration of landscape. Previous work which isolated small pieces of landscape – fragmented views – led to Humphrey Repton’s (1752-1818) landscape designs and red books. His delicate watercolours of gardens required the reader to lift a flap to reveal his new design for the garden (as it could be) – alternating present and proposed scenes to hide any ‘objectionable part of the view’.
‘Your drawing is a very wonderful transformation. I would not have recognised my own garden but for your ingenious book – is it not? – look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither a spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch.’ (Lady Croom to Richard Noakes, ‘landskip architect’) – Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993 (Faber and Faber)
‘Your drawing is a very wonderful transformation. I would not have recognised my own garden but for your ingenious book – is it not? – look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither a spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch.’ (Lady Croom to Richard Noakes, ‘landskip architect’) – Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993 (Faber and Faber)