
I have just returned from a few days in my hometown Guisborough on the edge of the North York Moors national park. In many ways it is a beautiful area, the open heather moorland stretches for miles and recent legislation allows us to wander away from the paths and feel a great sense of freedom.
This landscape has been the subject of many of my paintings and numerous locations are still 'magical' to me, places haunted by memories of childhood. I used to think this was a wild and natural place teeming with wildlife, but then I was embedded in the culture. My father has always been a regular shooting man and the language of the gamekeeper informed opinion in our house. We often ate what he shot; rabbit, woodpigeon and occasionally pheasant or duck.
I always appreciated that the moors were used for the rearing of red grouse, there are shooting butts everywhere (places where wealthy men hide with guns awaiting the grouse which are driven towards them by local peasants known as 'beaters') and the heather is burnt regularly to keep conditions suitable for grouse to thrive.
Now at entrances to the moors there are intrusive new 'information' boards where it is claimed that these conditions are also good for a hand full of other species such as the curlew (rarely spotted, wonderful cry) and the merlin (never spotted). What is not mentioned is the active persecution of other species which might predate upon the grouse. You will never see a buzzard here, a legally protected bird now so common elsewhere, I have even seen them over Nottingham. This month
three gamekeepers from the area were convicted for laying poison traps to kill birds of prey, they were fined a few hundred pounds, moor owners will earn
£150 for every pair of grouse shot.
Unexamined too are the effects of lead shot sprinkled in abundance over this 'protected' flora and fauna and the huge heather fires lit between december and april. Not only do these choke the valleys and villages with thick smoke they must have a huge carbon footprint and are continually destroying other plants and food-chains. I await the reply from the
North York Moors park authority on this matter, but it looks a glaring anomaly to me. In all other areas we now recognize the urgency in limiting carbon emissions, why not here?
Why not let some of this vast grouse-farm return to the wild or even plant trees to offset the emissions. Let there be forests on the moor like at Birchover in Derbyshire. Let it become a wild place again to benefit the lives of the town-hunched folk rather than the tiny minority of super-rich from elsewhere. Let there actually be the biodiversity proclaimed on these notice boards rather than the destruction caused by this cruel and elitist victorian hobby.
This is what I see now when I visit. Yes the heather is lovely in august, but mostly its brown, gray or blackened. This is a spoiled landscape. No longer the wilderness of childhood.
Does this mean I like his work?
No, there is a deeper level of understanding, there is dirty wire under the polished gallery floorboards.
To fully understand his prominence one must be aware of the cold war context in which Mark Rothko rose to fame. American abstract expressionist painters were funded and promoted by the Farfield Foundation and the CIA during the 1950s. This promotion extended to the funding of art periodicals throughout Europe, in Britain the magazine 'Encounter' , unwittingly edited by Stephen Spender was funded by the CIA. Its mission was to position American art so it became favourably viewed by left-wing Europeans who (it was thought) might otherwise be swayed by the Soviet realism of the era. (not just tractors, read all about it in 'The Cultural Cold War' by Frances Stonor Saunders)
Abstract expressionism therefore is not prominent on merit but rather at the will of US foreign policy makers.
Such soft power is obvious enough in the output of Hollywood and the US music industry, and there is a healthy public awareness of this. Not so in art, this important perspective on the rise of US abstract painting is mysteriously ignored by the media.
It is assumed that large scale gestural painting is the very emblem of 'freedom' in art but I contest that this aesthetic is the deliberate drowning out of a language to replace it with a repetitive shout. A shout emanating from a suspicious place. These painting fail to communicate anything, there is no scope within their narrow vocabulary. Art as a vehicle for engaging a mass audience with important content has been replaced with a 'heroic' biography of an all american 'underdog' whose greatest preoccupation is the huge rectangular daub. Meanwhile your consciousness has been subtly altered in accordance with the aims of the CIA. 'Gard' bless the USA.