Kerry Harding - Artist Statement
Rejecting any notion of traditional landscape painting, my experimental and physical approach to oil painting has provided a unique language through which I can express my intimate relationship with a section of rugged coastline in North Cornwall that has served as the backdrop to my life and sole source of artistic inspiration for almost twenty years. Through close and prolonged observation of this section of sea, land and sky, of how they interact with each other and respond to the cycles of weather and season that pass, I have developed a profound understanding of the landscape around me that I am compelled to communicate in paint.
In my works, seemingly familiar features - the curve of a headland, the silhouette of a windswept tree, the movement of clouds and ripples of waves created by the wind - are distorted, their placement manipulated and layered to create scenes that cannot be pinpointed in reality. By deliberately accentuating these moments of natural beauty, I encourage the viewer to have a heightened awareness of the landscape that extends beyond the scenery itself and to consider how our perceptions of nature and its beauty are shaped by these individual elements.
As a studio-based painter, central to my practice is my process of reworking my canvases, some several years old, which bear the scars of being painted and stripped back numerous times. Examining existing markings, I will rotate, flip or resize the fabric until I find the starting point for a new work; something that connects with a memory of the landscape that I want to articulate in paint. In many ways, my practice can be seen to mirror the formation of the landscape itself, the continuous weathering and evolution of this Atlantic coastline reflected in my physical reworking of the canvases, such that the paintings contain a history and authenticity of their own.
Referring to my own catalogue of photographs, I will choose elements of the landscape to replicate in oils with hyperrealistic detail to be juxtaposed with sections created at random - a wash of colour created by bleaching an older section of paint, for example - reflecting the ways in which each single view of the landscape is, in fact, affected by the multiple chance interactions between weather, seasons and time of day, to create transient moments of light, form and colour. By drawing viewers into these landscapes of altered perspective, I encourage people to appreciate the extent to which this coastline’s beauty is owed to its formation over time, the layers of history contained within, and an acknowledgement of its enduring presence that extends far beyond our own, fleeting existence in the world."
