The focus of this practice-led research is the landscape of the South Downs National Park, examined through painting. The study will take the reader on a walk, through paintings, along the South Downs Way, walking from the seventeenth century through to today. In so doing it will examine land management and behavioural patterns through deep mapping and bricolage to identify sequences and models that have contemporary relevance, such as the impact and influence the picturesque has had on contemporary landscapes, considered through historical aesthetics bound up in pastoral paintings, used strategically to promote on-going ideals.
To frame the investigation, I employed the checkpoints for walkers found in the 2016 Official South Downs Way National Trail Guidebook to locate paintings that are now collected within the Digital-Art-Index (DAI) - a database of landscape paintings featuring the national park constructed as part of this research. This framework enabled me to demonstrate, through painting, a palimpsest of social history relevant to contemporary concerns. The visual analysis also led to a deconstruction of key components of these paintings and how a cultural response to landscape through painting is shaped by taste thereby influencing the way landscape is viewed and interpreted today.
To recognise detail and to structure my argument, I walked the 100-mile South Downs Way National Trail, along with other paths in the National Park. The slow acts of walking and painting brings to the attention detail, involving topography, weather, flora and fauna, nuances observed and sensed, informing preparatory work in the field and painting in the studio, as well as endorsing detail found in paintings in the DAI database.
The act of walking also established a theory concerning carparks performing as ancestral portals, with tributary processional-paths leading mourners to places where they can maintain a bond to the deceased. This is manifest by being able to anticipate when a carpark is close and can be witnessed by the increase in volume of people on the path. Demonstrating that few people walk far from their cars would suggest that a right to roam would not have a detrimental impact on the landscape. Landscape also affords a connection through death to the natural world, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, forming new arguments surrounding how and why ancient sites are being accessed and used today.
Throughout this investigation painting is foregrounded and analysed as a means of investigating the South Downs National Park landscape, offering ways to measure change, by catching sight of the past through historical paintings and texts, resulting in a contemporary body of work that is firmly rooted in the present, reflective of the past and combined with reimagining a future. The research establishes for the first time a link between a national park and paintings of the same landscape held in regional art collections, which brings to prominence the importance of ownership and access to public places, specifically footpaths and regional art galleries.
