Review: Jan Inglis, The Library Gallery, University of Warwick, 10-28 June 2002
'Landscapes are culture before they are nature', writes Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory,'constructions of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock'. Jan Inglis' exhibition is a wonderful example of the way we make - or rather shape - what we see. Landscape is not an objective reality, to be flatly recorded or reproduced. Rather, it is the product of a dynamic conversation between aesthetic preconceptions - the planes, colours, and lines embedded in cultural memory, both collective and personal - and a natural world which reflects back those expectations but also subtly adapts, alters, and revises them in the process. Jan Inglis' series of abstracted seascapes is presented on eighteen square panels, their uniformity suggesting both sameness and difference as they respond to the ever-changing relationship between otherwise fixed elements: sea and land. All the paintings are meditations on colour.
Their largely pastel tones are never insipid, however, being brought to life by splashes of finely judged complementaries - singing yellows and vermilions. As one would expect, there is a strong emphasis on horizontality. Lines are sometimes clearly pronounced, sometimes more suggestively hinted at by gradations of colour or shifts in tone. But the soothing recession of horizontals or parallels - confirming all our visual expectations of sky, sea, and sand - are in turn disturbed by disconcerting diagonals or lines askew. Sometimes oblique splashes suggest driving rain on a windswept beach; sometimes the marks are less obviously 'readable', evidently designed to disorientate the eye and save it from visual cliche. For me, two panels in particular stood out. Number 5, 'Shimmering Sea', sandwiches its image between two Rothko-esque planes of graded colour, and brilliantly combines a sense of stillness (sparkles of light, the impression of vertical reflections in the water) with movement (lapping waves seem to flow towards the viewer). In number 14, 'Summer Sands', layers of thin, almost transparent paint build up to produce an extraordinary glow, radiating the sense of hot sun on sand. We are not quite sure whether the background is sea or sky, but the image strongly communicates that it doesn't matter, the scene overall powerfully evoking the lazy, hazy impression of sleepy, late-summer ennui.
Painting in thinned oils on uprimed board, Jan Inglis beautifully achieves that elusive object - the illusion of spontaneity. The paintings seem immediate and unworked. Downplaying the opacity of oils, she chooses instead to exploit their capacity for transparency and limpidity. There are moments when oil almost becomes water, and here the artist has perfectly created the effect she is aiming for: a marriage between medium and subject-matter.
copyright Catherine Bates 2002