1. Even in Arcadia ... nostalgia
Introduction
The painting Et in Arcadia lego is one from a series of paintings
called England’s Favourite Landscape that has occupied me for
over a decade. The paintings in this series appear to be of the
ubiquitous personal and aesthetic geography of the rural/urban
littoral that seems to have become the favoured landscape of
contemporary painters and photographers. Artists seem to be
drawn by the inherent picturesqueness, the roughness and
irregularity, of the abandoned, derelict and the unplanned spaces
that have dropped off the radar of, or are ignored by, the
planners and developers alike - a virtuous subject matter, now
politically as well as aesthetically, for the artist. I admit I like these
places, yet as subject matter for artwork there is this surfeit. So
rather than go hunting for these already ‘turned over’ sites I
make my own miniature three dimensional model landscapes in
the studio.
The models, diorama, are built as low-tech follies mixing the real
and experienced landscape with references to historic and
contemporary English landscape ideologies, design and use. The
camera is then used as mediator to frame and capture the views
via the photographic print. This is not to ennoble or question the
role of the photograph but rather to facilitate painting, in a photo-
real manner, with least distortion or subjectivity. The painting
becomes a point of technical default where the ‘pleasing’ brush
mark is removed as much as possible, along with any Romantic
notions of the painterly landscape and that which may draw
attention to the painted surface and avoid certain styles that tend
to deflect audiences from perhaps unpalatable truths behind the
image and which are more likely to induce sentimentality and
nostalgia in the viewer.
Whenever one examines the politics and ideologies of landscape
the word picturesque inevitably appears. It is now a much
misunderstood term but still offers much academic debate. The
evolving of the ‘picturesque landscape’ in the 18th
and early 19th
centuries was economically as well as aesthetically derived. The
debate on what did, or didn’t, constitute the picturesque was
acted out more in writing by the end of the 18th
century. The idea
of a picturesque landscape became exemplified, wrongly, as
those created by Lancelot Brown. His name, conjoined with the
word picturesque, has now been co-opted by numerous
landscaped sites around England for attracting the tourist and
their spending power. In his Modern Painters John Ruskin uses
the phrase ‘heartless’ picturesque, of making virtuous the
observation of poor or low subject matter. This is not a
condemnation of the picturesque as such by Ruskin; he is really
criticizing the ‘disinterested’ artist and any ‘lack of comprehension
of the pathos and character hidden beneath’ the subject matter
being considered. This implies that the dignity and any moral
worth of the subject depicted increases with the artist’s sympathy
for the subject – human or otherwise.
Et in Arcadia lego
This painting started as a playful use of Lego bricks to create
the usual plinth for public art. The question was ‘what to put on
the plinth?’ My plinth however looked more akin to a tomb; a
basic block of masonry showing the ravages of time. Following
a visit to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Dunsyre I was
interested in his militarization of horticulture which included
renderings in stone and print of German World War 2 military
vehicles – the panzer – in Arcadia.
In playing with the idea of the tomb/plinth in landscape
painting and contemporary public art it seemed an obvious
gambit to place a 1/72nd
model kit of a German World War Two
tank-killer, known as a Jagdpanther, atop my plinth. Adding
model makers’ foliage seemed to indicate its abandonment and
impotence, as did the haphazard scrawl of the unseen graffiti
artist. The graffiti artist then turned his attention to the plinth,
adding the ‘death’s head’ and the tag ‘lego’.
The stylized death’s head, a modern take on the usual
memento mori found on such features, is a piece of actual
street artwork appropriated by this artist. The ‘lego’ is a
playful pun on the Danish building material well known to
children of all ages as well as making the ego – the “I am”
from Poussins’s Arcadian Shepherds, now lego – “I read”,
depending on one’s viewpoint. The tomb in my Arcadia
becomes a broader contextual presence, one of understanding
and interpretation alongside those usual contemplations of
mortality.

2. In Nicolas Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds of 1637 three
shepherds and a shepherdess seem to have stumbled upon the
tomb of a person unknown.
They are intrigued by the enigmatic carved inscription Et in
Arcadia ego. It is a motif that was used earlier by Poussin in
his first Arcadian Shepherds of circa 1630 in combination with
a death’s head atop the tomb. The possibility of death – the
tomb and death’s head – is allied to the potential loss of
Arcadia and turned into “a vision of a paradise lost” invoking
a blurred “feeling of soft, elegiac nostalgia”1
In my version two figures, both apparently turned to stone, one
in rather a leprous condition – the ravages of time, contemplate
the work of the unseen artist. The arm of the crouching figure
provides a counter to the canon of the panzer. My tank appears
to fend off the sale of Arcadia, its canon points towards the
signage for the usual exciting development opportunity. It is a
billboard for a new luxury housing development called Elysian
Fields.
The Elysian Fields is an actual housing development in
Northampton that refers, without any irony, to the landscape
feature at nearby Stowe House landscape garden in
1
Erwin & Gerda Panofsky “The Tomb in Arcady at the Fin – de –
Siècle” in “Erwin Panofsky – die späten Jahre”. 1968
Buckinghamshire. This Elysian Fields is for luxury family housing,
evinced by an image of a happy family. The Elysian Fields is itself
a reference from Virgil’s Classical prose, The Aeniad, where dead
heroes go in the afterlife. Stowe’s Elysian Fields was created
during the early 18th
Century; a shallow declivity between
woodland with bits of Neo-Classical architecture and stone
scattered along the way – was meant to invoke through poetic
and mythic meaning some kind of republican Roman virtus.
Apprehended intellectually as well as viscerally the visitor would
be imbued with ideals for an “imaginary Rome anew”2
- a pro
Patria whilst still maintaining the aristocratic hierarchies and
privileges. It was meant to reflect a new political stance by the
Whig owner, a political landscape that had to be read rather than
experienced and depended on a prior arcane knowledge of such
symbolism.
My signage, plinth and figures were set on a low cost, low tech
cardboard landscape that was then digitally photographed from
various viewpoints. This was achieved by placing the model
landscape atop a wheelie bin in the back garden and shooting
against the sky as background. It was then a matter of
previewing the outcomes to find a best composition with
foreground and background foliage blurred whilst keeping the
main feature in sharp focus.
So in my English Arcadia one nation’s culture and identity and
history is defined by the importing of another’s mythology.
2
Alexander Pope 1716 Collected Poems: Alexander Pope
Everyman’s Library for J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd 1924 “Epistle to Mr
Jervas”