Ripley Whiteside, «After Thomas Gainsborough's River Landscape», 2025
[texte en français à venir]
« After Arcadia revisits the genre of pastoral landscape painting through a gauzy distortion. I am curious about this genre’s contribution to the idea of nature as a place of idyllic interspecies harmony. Moreover, I am interested in its finitude. Themes of bucolic pastoralism, notably those made in the wake of Claude Lorrain’s extraordinary influence, seem to have exhausted themselves by the end of the 19th century. These idealized views combined and recombined motifs that evoke Arcadia, the land of Pan in ancient Greece: long vistas framed by large trees, glimpses of water with boats, shepherds and livestock, mythological figures, and always a trace of civilization, often in the form of architectural capriccios. What can these pleasant scenes that fictionalize ecological harmony tell us about present-day relationships between ourselves and our environment?
The paintings are made with watercolor on panels treated with absorbent ground. Flat sheets of styrofoam are laid on the surface of the panel while the watercolor is wet, and removed after drying to create the spongy distortions. The surface is then sprayed with an acrylic fixative and varnished with cold wax medium. » - RW
