ARCTIC DREAMS

James Trevelyan

 

I have never been to the Arctic.

 

The works in this exhibition are not pictures of the arctic but rather

these are pictures about the Arctic; or at least how I imagine the Actic to be. I did look at images of the Arctic but I wanted to capture a projected feeling or essence of the place; Its haunting beauty and ethereal magnificence.

 

To some degree they are imaginative inventions that may or may not come somewhat close to representation. To me they are abstractions that create a ‘sense’ of reality. They are also paintings that are as much about the formal language of art: (color, texture, shape and structure etc.)  as they are about an image. I use a process of spontaneous image generation where the image is intuited through random collage processes into a semblance of a landscape.

 

In 1925, R.G. Collingwood stated that”art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination”. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century artists had in fact been obsessed with the source of art coming from the internal rather than the external. The father of modern abstraction Wassily Kandinsky stated that art  had to come from an “inner necessity”. Andre Breton took this idea further by tapping into a reality  beyond waking reality: that of a sur-reality; of dreams and the imagination.

 

I was also influenced by a book that I read over 20 years ago by Barry Lopez titled Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. He wrote, “the imagination occupies a space between physical form and spiritual longing” and that we “project our longings into our perception “of the landscape.

At the same time I was also greatly influenced by the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard and his work On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

 

As dreams, or reveries, these works are invented and idealized.

I also see the arctic as an endangered landscape. Global warming, pollution and geo-political tensions have placed the arctic in a precarious position of irreversible transformation. The pristine serenity and magisterial place I have imagined may not even exist today and most certainly will not in the future if these pressures and changes continue to mount.

 

My dream may turn out to be, in reality, a nightmare.

Let us hope not.

 

Please feel free to release yourself from the grip of temporal reality and slip into a suspended world of feeling and sensation.