Details

Object type

painting

Title

Land Levels and Rises

Artist/Maker

Carol Rhodes maker

Place Associated

Scotland, Glasgow (place of manufacture)

Date

2010

Materials

oil on board

Dimensions

overall: 400 mm x 440 mm

Description

Carol Rhodes was known for her small-scale paintings depicting - from an aerial perspective - encounters between nature and human settlement. Rhodes worked from aerial photographs in old school geography books and other practical or scientific books. She was not interested in the accurate depictions of landscape for her sources and used individual details from photographs to build up her compositions

Rhodes began each work with a drawing where she planned her composition creating what she called the ‘skeleton’. Buildings were drawn and stripped back. Roads wove in and out and were joined abstractly in her work. From these drawings she worked on the paintings and there was always a drawing for each painting, but not always a painting for each drawing. The final paintings were often very different from the original drawings and it is through the act of painting that the work was realised.

Carol Rhodes’ paintings emerge from a long history of landscape painting and question our understanding of the real and the fiction by their composition, perspective and tendency towards abstraction. She referred to the paintings as ‘fictional syntheses’ - syntheses of the source material as well as memories. Her works have a familiarity but are fictional renderings of spaces at the ‘edge lands’ – somewhere that is not somewhere, between one place and another. The edges of towns, suburban areas with airports, quarries, and industrial sites are common in her landscapes. They are devoid of figures and on closer inspection fine detail.

Land Levels and Rises is an excellent example of where her work tended towards the abstraction and only fleeting references to buildings or roads. Suggestions of materials, nature and form are only just made but we understand them through our experience of landscape not through the depiction of it.

Credit Line/Donor

Purchased with grant aid from the National Fund for Acquisitions

ID Number

3771

Location

In storage