Black Monday

If we think about the “death of painting”, then there is nothing more embarrassing and old fashioned than landscape painting. I wanted to combine this idea with the use of the caravan as a metaphor for melancholia. The caravan transforms a region of wilderness into landscape whether it is urban or pastoral. It provides a mark of civilisation and passes a comment on our relationship with the environment; it can also represent nostalgia for holidays or weekends away from the urban environment.

I then painted 100 monochrome compositions of a solitary caravan in the landscape, using uniform materials and techniques. It quickly became apparent that some things didn’t work and detracted from the melancholic aura and these were photographed and then destroyed.

The 8 successful works were those that made the viewer aware that they are looking at a representation or ‘sign’ and they have registered its artificiality. These paintings work on two melancholic levels; a depiction of the metaphor for loss (the caravan) and the process of making the reality of loss artificial by inscribing the idea of the loss in a symbolic space.