Could I invent dioramas, not based on real landscape views, but based on memory, and inventing my own landscapes from things I’ve seen and am interested in in the landscape. Let’s try! Drawing.
Today I made this cardboard sculpture of Zennor Quoit.
This is the site I have based this sculpture on:
Making the sculpture feels important, significant somehow. I plan to photograph this sculpture, with and without the torch lighting, I’m not sure yet which one, and then paint that.
I was looking through the sketches I did of Zennor Quoit in a tiny A6 sketchbook in charcoal. The drawings are waaay better than photos for bringing back a memory and allowing me to access that time. I need to start drawing more. I wish I had done more drawing on the rest of the walk, that would require being less ambitious with distance, which I can do.
It feels funny to be painting such a charged site. I don’t know if I should. I think so, be brave!
I also went to the Tate today. I looked at the paintings by Peter Lanyon and saw a confidence and trust in his materials, andin chance, that inspired me to be more of the same. I also saw work by Barbara Hepworth in an exhibition and discovered her personal life and other pursuits other than the sculptures she made that are very famous. I loved her interests and thought I should read more about her.
I am excited to find a line between abstraction and landscape painting in this Zennor Quoit thing. I kind of want to paint it in the colour of cardboard. It’s such a fun way to abstract the landscape. With a literal cardboard model of it. Rather than the abstraction coming from my head, the painting process, it’s coming from, I guess a still life, classing a diorama as a still-life. I like how the process of abstraction comes from these series of translations between the landscape and the finished artwork:
Me in landscape on walk > drawing of landscape done on site > diorama of site > photograph of diorama > painting of photograph
Georgina Harris 