Of Their Peculiar Light
Of their peculiar light
I keep one ray
To clarify the sight
To seek them by -
Emily Dickinson
Candida Stevens Gallery is proud to present Kerry Harding’s debut solo show, Edge of Day, a new body of work that puts the peculiarity of light at centre stage. Set against the back-drop of the rugged coastline of North Cornwall, these are the unique moments, often experienced at dawn and dusk, when clouds, landscape and sunlight combine to create fleeting encounters with the extraordinary and sublime. Manifestations of the artist’s memory and imagination, they are the views remembered long after their physical presence has vanished.
In Harding’s works, seemingly familiar scenes are distorted, their elements manipulated such that they cannot be pinpointed in reality. Instead, they exist hazily, some bleached by light and others cast in shadow; a single tree glows under the sun’s rays, a haloed rock floats on the water’s surface, a ploughed field shines on a blackened hill. At the very moment the landscape begins to come into focus, the view is disrupted once again; a tree painted in startling cobalt blue hovers on the surface; a white line cuts across the coastline, morphing from tree trunk to river to road. These are the moments of unpredictability that surprise and delight.
Working exclusively in oils, Harding plays with perspective using a variety of techniques. Leaves and clouds, painted with photorealistic precision, sit over freely applied washes of paint. Translucent layers expose ghostly imprints that have seeped through the canvas from the other side. Elsewhere, pigment soaks into sections of canvas rubbed bare to give an inky depth and almost velvety feel to the surface. In this way the works are suffused with a sculptural beauty that mirrors the landscape they represent.
Key to their creation, the paintings have often lived many lives. The canvases are repeatedly reworked, sometimes over several years, and bear the scars of being layered with paint, stripped and scraped numerous times. Centuries of erosion and deposition that have formed and continue to shape the coastline, are mirrored in this physical working and reworking of the surface. It is this process that gives the paintings their authenticity. They carry a history that draws the viewer in.
Poetic titles, given in honour of Emily Dickinson, pair beautifully with each work and provide the language to describe them. They remind us that they have been inspired by the startling moments felt when the sun sits low in the sky and enjoys playing tricks on its audience, sometimes dancing with the clouds as it works its way above the hills, sometimes ebbing away in a cloak of pink. These are the characteristics that root Harding’s practice in Romanticism and it is notable that she cites both Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840) and Gerhard Richter (German, 1932- ) as major influences on her work.
A key protagonist of the Romanticism movement, Friedrich sought to demonstrate that nature can elicit an emotional response in its viewer. The interaction of light on the landscape was key to the way he imbued his paintings with spiritual feeling, with dawn and dusk featuring prominently in his works. Whilst Harding’s works are free of the religious overtones present in the nineteenth century, it is this similar exploration of the extremes of light that gives her works their metaphysical quality. They are atmospheric, serene and disconcerting in equal measure, resonating most strongly in feeling above all else.
The direct influence of Friedrich on Harding’s practice is best demonstrated through comparison of Friedrich’s radical work The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810 and Harding’s An Island Soul to Sea, 2022. Composed in horizontal layers of land, blackened sea and a sky that turns from white cloud to blue, in Friedrich’s painting a solitary monk stands on a dune overlooking a vast expanse. In Harding’s version, the figure is replaced by a sparse row of pine trees, stooped forward against the wind as they project over the stark line of the horizon. Like the monk who becomes almost lost in the sea that he stands before, Harding’s trees are dwarfed by the clouds above them and, in both paintings, it is nature’s ability to overawe and overwhelm in its beauty and magnitude that is most strongly felt.
It was this question of nature’s beauty that saw Gerhard Richter, an artist whose sixty year career has spanned several mediums and genres, begin to produce hyperrealistic oil paintings of landscapes and seascapes in the late 1960s, through the replication of photographs. To him, this method of production became a means of abstracting the subject from the reality, reintroducing the beauty he felt had been lost in the autonomy of photography. Distinctly anachronistic within the art world at this time, he explained that he enjoyed the “subversive quality” of painting beautiful landscapes using this technique.
The idea that landscape painting can be subversive appeals strongly to Harding. Like Richter, her process relies heavily on the use of photography of her surrounding landscape and yet she does not seek to replicate real life. Instead, she looks to her photographs for reference, inspiration and reminders, selecting the elements that most appeal and disregarding those that do not. In this way, Harding manipulates photography just as she does her processes until she achieves that crucial “moment of enlightenment”. It is this distortion of reality that results in those moments of the uncanny and surreal. Far from the antiquated notions of classicism, the kitsch or the sentimental, what Harding aptly demonstrates in this latest body of work is that contemporary landscape painting can and should be viewed as a genre that continues to offer ample opportunity to challenge, engage and excite.
Isabella Joughin
