☰ Jonathan Thomson Art

Landscape

There is sensuality and sexuality everywhere all around, if only you care to look.

In 2022 I visited Uluru / Kata Tjuta in Central Australia and it was a revelation to me. The forms of these landscapes speak to the geological forces of folding that helped to create them over millions of years but they are also imbued with a sense of the humanity of the custodians of this land who have treasured it and everything that it represents for millennia. They are also some of the most explicitly erotic landscapes anywhere in the world. I responded to this landscape with a series of small sculptures in metal and in papier mache that I view as maquettes for much larger works.

A number of my sculptures draw on the traditional Chinese style of painting known as Shan Shui which uses brush and ink to depict mountain and water landscapes. The technical basis of brush and ink and its calligraphic finesse helped me to develop an abstract sculptural language that combines the inorganic forms of mountains and rivers with references to the human form.

Clouds control the fall of light and the chiaroscuro of the landscape as they partially or wholly obscure the sun. In nature, light and shadow never stand still. Cloud formations are the ideal subject for an investigation into the relationship between the objective and subjective. Who has not ever looked and found figures in the clouds?

The one place we cannot look is directly at the sun. Van Gogh understood this and so represented the sun in his paintings and more particularly in his drawings as a series of cross-hatched lines emanating from a void. I have translated this idea into a fully three dimensional form that can be fabricated to any size in acrylic or metal.