Art by Andrew Phillips 
Landscapes of the Numinous

​Working in a variety of mediums including pastel, ink, graphite, acrylic, and oil, my paintings and mixed-media drawings explore landscape and the Numinous. Situated between the contemporary and the devotional, the work describes an immediacy of personal experience, and reverence for the Earth's varied forms and places as living presences. In the vastness of their physicality, mountainous forms move us into a sense of deep time far beyond the span of our own human bodies. For me, this points toward the mystical origin of our true essence in silence, and that within us we contain eternity.

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Such places have been a source of lifelong fascination to me, both in terms of encounters with awe and wonder, as well as the cultural and spiritual significance that they embody. Featuring in wisdom traditions, myth, and folklore around the world, these most striking of earthly expressions are often considered to be transformative and liminal places, where the natural and ‘supernatural’ meet. Existing at the threshold of the unknown, they are the abode of divine beings, entrances into the otherworld, or intimately connected with the ancestral history of a community. They are often considered to be not only the dwelling places of the sacred, but revered as entities in themselves. My art explores that liminality by using forms that may feel familiar and relatable as a ‘place’, whilst simultaneously suggesting something more enigmatic at the edge of our senses.

 

The ink and pastel works have a closer relationship to the physicality of landscape, and to both a symbolic and geographic sense of North. Ink is applied in flowing lines or small marks using a dip pen, whilst the pastel is crumbled and smoothed into the paper using my fingers. The tiny marks in ink or graphite build the mountain as if stone by stone. Paintings tend more towards the intangible and mystical aspect, concerned with making visible an ‘inner’ light, rather than capturing the natural light of place. I often paint gesturally into a wet glaze, or work in small triangles to build up an image that glows from within. 

 

In repeatedly creating these forms I am expressing something of my felt sense about certain familiar terrestrial landscapes, but it is never an attempt to depict them as they appear. Additionally I am using these kinds of landscape forms in an associative way, as a visual language through which to explore and describe aspects of mystical or esoteric experience and thought. In this sense my work is as much about giving form to the formless, and connects to the idea or belief in immanence, that all material form (including the Earth) is an expression of divine presence.

 

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Many of the artists whose work inspires or informs my own also explore this relationship between the spiritual and nature/landscape, or the immaterial and physical form.

 

Contemporary examples include Italian painter Agostino Arrivabene, the music and poetry of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, and the varied work of Anselm Keifer.  Other influential artists in this thematic area from past eras would be Cecil Collins, Samuel Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, and Nicholas Roerich.

 

In terms of those who focus more exclusively on landscape and perhaps its emotional resonance or formal qualities, I admire the likes of  Joan Eardley, Ivon Hitchens, Norman Ackroyd, and Pedr Balke.

 

Work by numerous writers, poets, thinkers, researchers, magicians or mystics also provide vital inspiration. Peter Kingsley, Carl Jung, John Moriarty, Don Domanski, to name but a few, as well as many more 'occult' influences. Certain aspects of a current resurgence in interest for the ancient landscapes of Britain, its folkloric customs and magic, are also in tune with my own sense of these isles, and my love of walking through it.          
 

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"By looking beyond the reductionism of 'just materiality', we can begin to understand something of the earth's desires as it communicates to us through the landscapes it has devised to speak its language."

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"That Nature has devised a way to offer these signs and open these channels should be no surprise, for it has also fine-tuned the equipment required to perceive them." 

P.Prudence - Figured Stones, Exploring the lithic imaginary, p120, p149

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"The light of nature, the lumen naturae, is a light with a fiery longing to enkindle."

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"It is an "invisible" light: Now it follows that in the invisible alone hath man his wisdom, his art, from the light of nature. Man is a “prophet of the natural light.”  

C.G.Jung -  Collected Works 8  p391​​​