distant landscapes (what might be suggested)

A few artists I think of when I think about landscape are Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Richard Long.

Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series adopted a format that evoked the outer space of his Californian studio as viewed through his studio window, all lines and layered spaces of human suburbia, its topology flattened; distant space made close through surface-driven abstract painting.

Mark Rothko produced some interesting and deceptively monochromatic works late in his career and are among my favourites of his. They appeared around the same time the Moon landings were broadcast on TV and like most Rothko paintings went untitled except for a description of the 'top' (as in, assumed) colours, which were 'black on grey'. Fittingly, most people who actually had a TV at the time were likely watching the Moon landings in black and white.

These paintings evoke a sense of distant spaces brought closer together, the Moon somehow pulled even closer to home than when viewed through the lens of then-new broadcast technology. We wonder at the meaning of it all, and how close these two spaces - the living room and the Moon - have become, while Rothko found a new muse just beyond the horizon.

When Richard Long came onto the scene in the mid-1960's with his A Line Made By Walking series, he took landscape painting outdoors and archived the experience through photographs and personal notes. We examine the landscape through another medium, at once distanced yet we can dwell vicariously though Long's own experience. We don't have to be there ourselves, just know that he was. There is a sense of wonder in these interventions in nature, pathways that trace straight lines across often huge distances on barely-altered land (and often with complete disregard for barriers, borders and other obstacles, both man-made and natural, not conforming to well-trodden paths). Through these works it's hard not to think about time and space and the marks we leave long after we're gone, and how we might reach beyond ourselves. His art is really just about being a person in a landscape and using the environment as material.

Like all good art, Long's land art signifies hits big. It is about the marks we all leave behind. When he began bringing more elements of his experiences into the gallery - painting on walls using dirt and soil that came from his walks and reusing other gathered materials like pieces of slate to create spaces in sculpture parks - we are confronted with the outside as a physical thing: land that has been captured and transformed and taken out of its original context. The land has been transported to us, and we are its intervention(-ists).

Perhaps this is also the future landscape of Rothko's distant, blurry, indistinct Moon: a surface topology altered by new pathways that come into focus when the next Richard 'Armstrong' Long moonwalks across its craters and valleys, drawing lines across a future-contemporary canvas whilst simultaneously referencing the past.