British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery
- aphillipsarts
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Always a place I love to visit, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery brings together work by artists who regard landscape in a variety of ways, but always as more than mere scenery. In this article I will explore work by several artists with whom I feel a connection within my own experience of landscape, making art, and being in the world.
Landscape as presence
Paul Nash
Upon arriving at the exhibition rooms, Avebury - Landscape of the Megaliths by Paul Nash is amongst the first works to greet the visitor. In a similar way to how this image of the ritual landscape of Avebury invites one into a world that feels entirely natural and vitalised, yet somewhat outside of the mundane, perhaps we could consider the exhibition as a whole creating its own sense of sacred space.
In the environs of Avebury we have stone circles, long barrow's, numerous smaller burial mounds, an avenue of megaliths, the entrancing Silbury Hill, and ancient Ridgeway track. There is also the road cutting right through the site, a pub, shops, visitor centre, houses. Within the exhibition we see work that serves many different purposes, offering initiations into the landscape of Britain in its many guises; remote vastness, human scale fields, intimate worlds hidden within the thicket, the meeting of town and country, all thresholds of experience.
Samuel Palmer
I first encountered the work of Samuel Palmer when I was living in Kent, not too far from his beloved Shoreham, which I was able to visit on a couple of occasions. He referred to this area as his Valley of Vision, and in his work inspired by this place he evokes a rare magic. Palmer did not begin etching until 1850, around fifteen years after his renowned Shoreham period. The Rising Moon, and many other works, feature an amalgamation of Shoreham along with other places he visited such as Devon, and Italy. I really like this way of allowing the deeply powerful experiences of the places he loved to live on within him, and then to be conjured at will into entirely new forms.
Sometimes defined as 'visionary pastoral', I experience many of his works as having a profoundly spiritual quality that is not something so easily defined. There is a richness and depth that feels like it has come straight from the hedgerow, and invites one in to explore and know the image from inside. In his painting he often worked through a technique involving layers of glaze, which added to this sense of worlds within worlds.
In this related post I have written about Ithel Colquhoun, another British artist with an intense lived and embodied relationship to particular places.
Graham Sutherland
Presented in the same room as the Palmer etching, is a tiny watercolour by Graham Sutherland, titled Clapham Church, measuring just under 10cm square. Sutherland was associated with the pastoral etching revival of the 1920's, expressing an admiration for William Blake and Samuel Palmer amongst others. Clapham Church sits on the edge of Clapham Woods, near my hometown of Worthing, an area associated with various occult mysteries, and unexplained occurrences, including several deaths.
Sutherland's picture is certainly not sinister, but to me, perhaps influenced by knowing these associations (which took place long after the work was made in 1924), it does have a certain quality of 'the eerie' about it. In recent years the eeriness of the British countryside has become of renewed interest, and between folklore and horror lies the cinematic genre of folk horror. Rather than overtly present malevolence, there is often something approaching serenity from which arises an uncanny atmosphere of something not quite right. This picture sits quietly, easily missed, but when noticed really seems to communicate.
Eric Ravilious
In Eric Ravilious's painting of the Cerne Abbas Giant, we view the hillside chalk figure as we do in his Wilmington Giant, at a distance through wire fencing. For the recent popular re-emergence of all things folkloric within a particular strand of the British imagination, these enigmatic - can we call them grass etching's? - seem to encapsulate that mixture of mystery surrounding the really not quite so distant past, and our viewpoint which is almost entirely post-rural. I mean that in the sense of continued encroachment by the ways of modernity, which has been a prominent theme for poets, writers and artists in Ravilious's time, and before him Palmer who experienced the apex of the industrial revolution in the early 1800's. Even the rural is no longer 'rural' in the sense we once understood it.
No matter how much we may make wholehearted and genuine effort to imaging, engage and connect with the people, lore, and magical currents that created these figures, for us it is very often all looking back. Whereas - modern antiquarian Julian Cope is fond of reminding us - our ancestors from the distant past were "forward thinking mofo's!"
I visited Cerne Abbas for the first time just a few weeks before visiting this exhibition, so the locale was still fresh in my mind. When I walked into a village pub, conversation at the bar was (already) about whether a certain local person known to those regulars was, or was not, "a copper." As a stranger just come to town, this struck me as a moment eerily reminiscent of the Wicker Man.
Ivon Hitchens
Ivon Hitchens is an important artist to Pallant House, Sussex, and British art more generally. After his London studio was bombed during the Second World War, Hitchens and his wife moved to a location in deep country at the north side of the South Downs near Petworth. His preferred format was often a canvas where the width was double or more the height. This widescreen format he associated with music, in that we experience the painting more similarly to how we actually experience a place or landscape, attuning to the varied elements of the scene which then cohere in our minds, moving across rather than 'hearing' everything all at once, as a more square image might suggest.
To begin with I wasn't too interested in Hitchens's work when I first came across it a few years ago. But as I encountered it more frequently appearing in a landscape art context and my own connection to Sussex, I have really begun to develop a deep appreciation for the richness and vibrancy of his art. The wide canvas might suggest a sweeping vista, but in fact Hitchens lived in an area of wooded heathland, rarely incorporating the nearby hills within his vision. Working outside, with canvas sometimes very close to the ground, he would be peering through multiple layers of colour, texture, light, expressing the intricate beauty of a microcosm. Rather than choosing a single view, there may be multiple vanishing points, and hence different paths into the painting.
It is clear that this is a kind of writing, but there is no need (yet) to read it or make out exactly what it means. Instead you feel its resonance and breathe its air. It seems to shift in front of you as light shifts on water or leaves turn over in the wind. It has the first requirement of a work of art: it is alive. — C.Neve, Unquiet Landscape.
Norman Ackroyd
The North to my South, the stark monochromatic prints of Norman Ackroyd evoke a longing for the North, the distant mountains and seas so distinct from the heath and pond of Hitchens, and the South country in general. I attended an talk with him at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh, where he had a wonderful way of describing the process of the work in relation to being within the landscape, or often in his case the seascape.
In British Landscapes: A Sense of Place you will find a grouping of six small prints by the artist, whose presence brings perhaps the most striking contrast to the majority of other works in the exhibition. Often interested in the outliers, islands and coasts that seem always off the edge of the map, this work is an extremity of the exhibition. In our consideration of the gallery space as a ritual landscape in itself, this station takes one beyond, outwards, in contrast to the work by the likes of Palmer, Sutherland, and Hitchens which seems to draw powerfully into a previously hidden world. The vastness of sea, mountain, sky, in contrast to the meadow, tree, cottage or church.
In my own work the North has been a theme of longing and inspiration, in both a geographic and spiritual sense.
Landscape and The Living Imagination
Looking through the exhibition, I became increasingly aware that the artists whose work I return to most often are rarely concerned with landscape as topography alone. Whether Palmer's visionary pastoralism, Nash's sacred geography, Hitchens's immersion in the microcosm of place, or Ackroyd's evocation of remote edges, each approaches landscape as something living and participatory.
I am less interested in landscape as scenery than as presence; places that seem to possess a life, atmosphere, or intelligence of their own. Whether walking ancient sites, remote coastlines, woodland tracks, or the South Downs, I am often seeking the moment where landscape becomes something more than a location and begins to feel like a living encounter. The artists in this exhibition arrive at that threshold in very different ways, yet it is perhaps this quality that most connects their work. Landscape not merely observed, but entered into relationship with.
You can explore more of my landscape-inspired artwork on the main Art page.
Returning to British Landscapes: A Sense of Place
This is not an exhibition that reveals itself all at once. Many of these works ask for a slower pace of looking. Some seem almost inconspicuous at first encounter, before gradually establishing themselves in the imagination. As the exhibition continues through the year, I hope to return and spend time with other artists represented here.
Like landscape itself, this is an exhibition that rewards revisiting. What also comes to mind is an earlier reflection on the work of Anselm Kiefer, another artist whose work demonstrates how landscape can become a vessel for memory, myth, and cultural imagination.
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Psychotherapist, and Creative Mentor.
My art explores landscape and the Numinous, and can be viewed on the website, where original work is available to purchase.
I work with individuals as a Psychotherapist (HCPC registered) within the depth and transpersonal psychology traditions, specialising in work with artists and creatives, and those who value an explorative approach to therapy. Online sessions available in the UK.
As a Creative Mentor I work with artists in the UK and internationally, in one to one online sessions. Further details can be found on the website.
