And this, too, shall pass away 4
I love the still power of a painting, but I always saw one series of paintings, in particular, as owing a lot to a filmic vision, and I’ve really valued looking again at the series in light of moving image, digital reworking and a new audience.
In 2007 I wrote a proposal for a series of paintings inspired by the stations of the cross. The series was commissioned by the David Roberts Art Foundation and completed in 2009.
I intended to follow the conceptual themes of the stations rather than their literal content: the traditional object of the stations is to help the faithful make a spiritual pilgrimage of prayer to the chief scenes of Christ’s suffering and death and the function of these reworked stations was to act as an arena for meditative contemplation on an ideal or way of being.
I wanted to draw parallels between the Christian story – particularly the Protestant wilderness myth - and that of the American pioneers, our most recent and accessible story of man being thrown back into nature. The paintings were to examine the spiritual value increasingly accorded to nature and the wilderness, and the mythology of the frontiersman that has become bound up with it.
The enduring appeal of the frontier mythology is riddled with contradiction, as it was historically: while the Native American existence was coded as ‘Edenic’, this natural state was the object of both desire and destruction by the encroaching Europeans.
This confusion was given voice more recently in the sentimental idealising of Ted Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’. Kaczynski’s thesis on ‘Industrial Society and its Future’ was an extreme and yet it was typical in the way that it looked to nature, or rather ‘wild nature’ to cure society’s ills. Through his bombing campaign, he wished to accelerate the progression of history to a purer society of individuals at one with nature.
As the fourteen images took shape, I found that they were becoming more and more bleak and the idea of some kind of apocalyptic version of our future return to a wilderness lifestyle was becoming central. On considering that “… in the late twentieth century and early twenty first century we have had the opportunity, previously enjoyed only by means of theology and fiction to see after the end of our civilisation - to see in a strange prospective retrospect what the end of the world would actually look like: it would look like a Nazi death camp, or an atomic explosion, or an ecological or urban wasteland” (After the End James Berger), it seemed to me, as it did to Ted Kaczynski that a return to the wilderness must involve some sort of unravelling.
Enthused by Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, I began to see the series as a thought and feeling experiment – bleak and exhilarating… suggesting the terror when encountering something horrific, and the concurrent brief feeling of appreciation for what we take for granted on a daily basis. As in ‘The Road’, and as a new father, I found myself increasingly aware of an underlying fear as to whether I would be capable of protecting my children should anything threaten them or the society we lived in that protected us from random violence and deprivation.
I wanted to explore this fear and possible inadequacy in the face of hardship by moving the viewer round the paintings like a ‘camera eye’ around the transgressive beauty in the centre… moving around as if with a hand held camera – the first person perspective used to heighten suspense and the meditative arena of the stations as a frightening short film.
