I attended art school in the early 2000’s, majoring in the painting department. At that time art history was superimposed with art theory and as I remember ‘the sublime’ had a somewhat tardy image. It manipulated the pure natural image (landscape) to offer the viewer a sense of religious experience, awe and perhaps, the comfort from fear.

Nature did not get a say in the matter.

When we engage with nature it is difficult not to see it as sublime; we hike/drive/fly to look at it in a scenic manner. We promote the sense of the immense, the all mighty that appears as impenetrable even from the human.

We have stuffed it up a lot, and we are not honest about the reality of this. We may notice the human intervention in a subliminal way perhaps?

Thankfully reality exists in art where photography, film, theatre, painting and sculpture etc document the grubby outcome of human inhabitation. We pile all around us the slag heaps of occupation and exploitation: the roads, the paths, the powerlines, the dams, the mines, the dumps, the farms, the factories, the smoke stacks, the planes, and the existential rockets desperate to redefine us.

The paintings in ‘Subliminal Nature?’, have lead the way. To explain I painted a scene and then had to be honest to include the reality of human occupation, all the way from the skeletal path to the edifice.

nature is sublime
and today nature is sublime
us now and today nature is sublime
it whips us now and today nature is sublime
sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
treat nature like we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
we treat nature like we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime

Iain Cheesman
November 2024