I've been really enjoying all my research about Cezanne and Neil Bousfield. Neil's dedication to his pursuit of making work about place is so strong, it's really inspired me and I have so much more to think about in my work as a result.
Investigating him alongside Cezanne has been really fascinating as Cezanne's work wasn't explicitly about 'place' but the more I learn about him and his work the more I think it really is a celebration of Provence and particularly the Mont Sainte-Victoire. The fact that he would alter details and rearrange perspective to give the essence of the place and how he felt about it rather than an exact representation of what he was seeing is particularly fascinating. Apparently the mountain's size is exaggerated in almost all the images he made of it.
Neil has identified a specific area to focus his work on from Walcott down to the village that I visit, Winterton - it's the length of the sea wall; it disappears under the sand just before Winterton. This could seem like a really narrow focus yet there seem to be other projects that pop up here and there often prompted by Neil's lecturing job at the University of East Anglia. He took part in a project about mapping the broads and said that he found the even though it was an area only a few mile away from him he didn't feel as connected to it. He recently made some work inspired by the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. He said he's been going there with students for about 10 years and it's taken that long for him to feel familiar enough with it to consider making any work inspired by it.
The fact that both artists have a specific area that they focus on and yet retain the freedom to make other work is very encouraging. It would be very easy to make some very strict rules about what I am and am not 'allowed' to do in my work. I decided for the duration of the masters degree to limit the place I would make work about to the Swinley Forest, but this was mainly a practical consideration as I had already identified the fact that I need to feel a connection to a place to want to make work about it. I'd like to make some more work about Winterton and the surrounding area at some point in the future, although the fact that Neil does such a fascinating, highly skilled and thorough job already is slightly off-putting!
The main difference I have noticed between the two artists is that Neil seems very outward looking in his images. He's exploring a place, collecting the history and stories of others and adding his experience and thoughts to all of that and communicating the facts of sea level rise and its impact on his home. Cezanne seems much more interested in his own experience of Provence, his images are more about what he sees and how he feels about what he is seeing rather than any sort of communication of the history of other people. Maybe this is just what I see though, and possibly that Neil is more explicit in his communication and that I understand his context better due to living at the same time and having a little knowledge about his place and its stories makes his work more easy for me to understand.
Having spoken to Neil about all the different angles he has and is exploring in his work it made me go back to some of the research I had done about the forest. The fact that always stands out for me is that 10,000 tonnes of timber are supplied from the forest every year. That seems like a huge amount! They started harvesting an area that we walk in regularly last year and I have lots of pictures and sketches made of the process. At one point it looked like a war zone, it reminded me what they used to say about France becoming a sea of mud during WW1. The level of destruction was shocking, from fairly dense forest to mud scattered with branches, covered in the tracks of huge machines, and it was so quick, a matter of a week or so for a huge area. The there were piles and piles of the stripped tree trunks, many of them bearing the wounds of the machine that cut them down. What also fascinated me was the spray paint marking their final destiny. Some had a measurement which I presume was to do with girth, others were destines for biomass or chipping.
I didn't quite know how to express what I felt about it. I didn't want to make an image of the destruction - I want my work to be filled with joy not sadness, but somehow I want to explore the reality of a managed forest. The print I have made for GROTTO is my first attempt.
This has tracks, a cleared area and two log piles, but I don't think it a depressing image. Having managed to make ten good prints from these lithographic poly plates I am quite keen to explore this further. With a little more time I think I could add some orange to these monochrome colours and look more deeply at the marks and how they describe the elements to improve on this. I would like to spend the second year of the MA really exploring the 10,000 tonnes theme and end up with a sculptural piece and lots of more traditional prints on this theme.