Chatsworth Reflected

In a project like this where you are focusing on a particular place, it is easy to become involved in the very local aspects of what you are doing, so much so that you can forget to take note of the bigger picture. This is especially true at Chatsworth where I have remarked before, there is a painting everywhere you look. Big as it is, it’s still seductive to think of the manicured gardens and carefully landscaped parklands as separate from the world at large.

So in the first weeks I began to think about narrowing my area of study and began to concentrate on how water is used and presented at Chatsworth. This seemed a good way of always having a central focus and theme no matter what any individual painting may be about. This is great for the project but does it have any wider relevance? Maybe not.

I was thinking about this while all the flooding was happening around the country. The village where I live suffered quite badly and certain families here are still recovering weeks later. I started to think about what I was doing and if there was some way I could reflect this in my work. These were important events affecting the lives of people I know and here I am swanning about at Chatsworth, painting.

Now, my paintings are not overtly political or conceptual, in some ways they’re quite traditional -landscape, oil paint on canvas- but I like to think that they do have meaning and on a good day, that meaning goes beyond being just pictures of things. So without wanting to sound pompous (but quite possibly failing) what is the function of art? Mine in particular. I don’t want to step too far outside of the project or to impose trite meanings upon it but if I can’t comment in however small ways about the impact of the environment on our lives then I’m not sure it has a function. 

Pondering this, I was over there shortly after the heavy rain and walking by the Derwent River that flows through the estate. The river was higher and more swollen than I had ever seen it and thundering over the weir in a deluge of noise. I stood possibly slightly too close to the edge watching the smooth green black river on one side of the weir become a raging torrent on the other. I thought that if I fell in there, I would be swept away with no hope of swimming against it and either drown or be smashed on the rocky river bed. This was an embodiment of the awesome power of the natural world. Beautiful and fascinating, we can tame it in many ways but in the end it will always have the upper hand and a power over life and death which we are powerless against.