Sholto Blissett
“My paintings aren’t pictures of landscapes; their paintings of the History of Landscape Painting, and a mirror held up to our damaging assumptions inherited from that history.”
Interview by Charlie Mills
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
Thinking about my background, it comes as no surprise that I’m doing what I’m doing today: the natural world, and the natural world as depicted in art, has always been central to my life and sense of self. Born and raised in a countryside village near Salisbury, I spent my childhood exploring the local area on walks with my siblings, or as I got older, exploring further afield on my bike. I’ve been fishing since I was a child too, starting on ponds and then becoming a member of the Salisbury and District Angling Club, a charity founded to protect the chalk streams of Wessex.
Another cornerstone of my background and self is my lifelong exposure to art. My parents took me to galleries and museums, and always had some exhibition catalogue lying about the house that I could flick through. Particularly formative ones included John Martin at the National Gallery, the Turner Collection at Tate Britain, and the catalogue of the Tate’s American Sublime 2002 exhibition. These introduced me to vast landscape paintings – and importantly, to vast imagined landscape paintings and the meanings they can carry. From all this exposure to seeing art, I began to draw and paint. I would always paint landscapes.
My interest in the natural world led me to study Geography at Durham University, followed by a Masters in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London.
A central question in your work is the human relationship to place and how we understand our position as subjects in relation to the natural landscape. Could you tell us a bit about where this interest came from, and how it has developed in your thoughts and artistic practice?
My engagement with the question about our sense of place within the landscape comes from a whole load of experiences, both personal and academic.
On a personal level, I’ve always been an outdoorsy kind of person, as I described in the previous answer. My sense of self is inextricably bound up with my place within landscape, local and large alike. So, my paintings have a bit of a personal element in them. I want to explore my relationship with natural landscape through paint: I have to observe it, respect it, try and capture it on the canvas.
On an academic level, and concerning “humankind’s relationship” more broadly, my exploration of the human/landscape relationship is one of critiquing – even criticising – European traditions which informed our ideas about that very relationship, namely Romanticism. At first, pre-university, I was simply agreeing with the ‘awe-inspiring’ nature of Nature that these poets and painters conveyed. But during my Geography degree, I was exposed to the ‘historiography of nature & landscape’, and became made aware of the falseness of the Romantic division between humans and nature – indeed, of the very construction of ‘Nature’. The idea of this division has had damaging effects on the environment: we’ve been treating nature as something outside us, as Other. But the truth is, we’re situated within it; our “relationship to” natural landscape is one of inextricable connection.
This exposure to academic critiques of the construction of ‘nature’ as ‘separate’ has led to developments in my artistic ideas & practice. Whilst when younger I may have aspired to emulate the iconic landscape artists – namely, Claude Lorraine – studying Geography made me think critically about the cultural constructions of ideas surrounding landscape and nature – that is, the construction of the very notions of ‘Landscape’ and ‘Nature’, made through artistic mediums. My work began to move away from the quasi-pastiches I’d been making as a child/teen, and towards creating self-referencing, self-reflective critiques of Landscape Painting in paint. I use traditional motifs and techniques – for instance, the Claudean pine trees “framing” the scene, and the use of repoussirs imposing a syntax on the painting – to draw attention to them, to prompt critiques of them. My paintings aren’t pictures of landscapes; their paintings of the History of Landscape Painting, and a mirror held up to our damaging assumptions inherited from that history.
Garden of Hubris XXII
Garden of Hubris XXVII
Garden of Hubris XIX
Particular to this relationship is the concept and history of Nature as something that exists outside of human culture or reason. It is a view that posits “wilderness” in contrast to urbanised development, folding the latter into progressive forms of human civilisation per se. To what extent does this idea of wilderness and the sublime impact how you think about your work?
My work is entirely based upon a critique of the Sublime. This notion, and the Romantic movement which developed it, produces a false image of “Nature” and “humankind” as separate, whereby “Nature” is an external, hostile entity but which “we” harbour the power to dominate. Think of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog. It is steeped in human arrogance, putting “Nature” as something “out there”, misty-mysterious, and even hostile. Friedrich’s Rukensfigur poses majestically above this scene. Although “Nature” is a dangerous “other” – this painting seems to say – it is viewable and containable from a lofty vantage point. But that’s not how it really is. I want my paintings to provoke a reflection upon this concept of the Sublime. Nature isn’t something awesome, awful, and “other”; we can’t look from a near-yet-removed precipice at it, for we are within it, together. Hence, my paintings place the manmade architectural features within the landscape by literally putting them within the painting, in the mid-ground & centre. This is not to suggest that humans are the centre of attention; rather, that we are subsumed by & should be working with to be part of the natural world. Indeed, despite the lavish architectural designs, “nature” is creeping in, as topiary.
Clearly there is a romantic influence in your work and a deep appreciation for the natural environment, architecture and landscape. Who are your key heroes and heroines, in visual arts but also in other disciplines such as literature?
In my formative years, I was undoubtedly influenced by Claude Lorraine and Turner, followed by the German Romantics, the Hudson River School. Later, the Surrealists; and in more recent years I have been inspired by contemporary artists including Ged Quinn, George Shaw, Mat Collishaw, Kehinde Wiley, and Emma Webster.
Despite, or because of, my critique of him: Caspar David Friedrich
Other influences include:
Constable
Robert MacFarlane
Yeats
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Hubert Robert
Garden of Hubris XXVII
You are currently showing your first exhibition at Hannah Barry Gallery in London until 13 August 2022. The exhibition is titled Ship of fools and comprises twelve paintings ranging from large to medium scale with a cohesive subject matter and vision. Together they present a dynamic visual language that is at once deeply rational, mystical and surreal. Could you tell us a bit about the ideas that went into these paintings and the show?
This was the first time I was showing a series of works produced concurrently, together, and according to a theme. I, therefore, had to think hard about how to make each painting unique yet unified with its fellow paintings, and how this could create an overarching effect of the exhibition that was more than the sum of its parts.
So this exhibition – these works, or rather, this collective work – straddled a tension between being discrete yet holistic. I wanted them to make sense to be shown together, yet remain individual and not insist upon a unifying narrative or ‘meaning’. The show’s overarching theme gave me a productive common origin from which to produce these paintings. Ship of Fools is a well-trodden, but far from exhausted allegory. This title immediately knits these paintings together whilst still granting scope for each to explore the theme in their own way, and for the viewer to maintain their interpretive space.
The title of this exhibition, as well as your recent body of work “The Garden of Hubris”, are both direct in their critical approach to our romantic desire for Nature, its avarice and material effects. To what extent do the histories of colonial expansion, extractive forms of capitalism or our impending climate breakdown serve as a subtext for your thoughts and works?
Histories of colonial expansion certainly inform my work. As W.J.T Mitchell wrote, ‘landscape’ is more a verb than a noun; it is something done to the land; it is the human effort to put the land into a comprehensible form. Topography and landscape painting were deeply connected during the early modern European imperial/colonial expansions, and landscape paintings were made to try and possess the land. “Here, we’ve painted it, we own it; this is what it looks like, this is what it contains”, is what colonial landscape painters, like Franz Jansz Post in Brazil, were saying. But that’s not really as it was. These landscapes were embellished; these landscapes (as paintings) were fabricated, rendered from a subjective eye with an agenda, put into a falsely but idealistically comprehensible manner. This blurring of lines between reality and fiction, between the natural world and the painted landscape
The climate crisis is also lurking in my mind when I paint. The very title of this series, Ship of Fools, connotes to the idea of a false Eden and the misinterpretation of our present moment through a lack of critical distance.
Garden of Hubris XIV
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?
Routine is key. I work five days a week, with regular working hours of 0900-1800 or so. I have a brief break in my studio for lunch. During this, I look out of the window along the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings, looking East towards the City appears small in the distance. The rooftop view leading to it is punctuated by treetops.
My studio is in West London in a disused office block leased out now by Bomb Factory Art Foundation. To get there, I cycle to the studio along the Thames for several miles. This gives me the chance to daily see and study water in its various moods and tones. This cycle also gives me a home/work divide, which I’m so grateful for. During lockdown, it was hard to have a designated space for my work, a space for me to be in and know “okay, I’m painting, let’s be productive”. So I’m very grateful to Bomb Factory for providing accessible studio space. This not only gives me a specific space for my work & and my “work mind”, but it also brings together hundreds of artists – both emerging and established – into a space to share support, ideas, techniques, advice, and debates.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I’m currently working on paintings that will be exhibited at Alexander Berggruen in New York in January 2023, this will include my largest-scale painting yet.
I will be giving a talk at Colnaghi in London in Late September 2022 about the relationship between my work and that of the French master Hubert Robert, my painting Ship of Fools II will be exhibited alongside two large-scale works by Robert at the gallery.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 03/11/22
