In Search of a Northern Aesthetic
by Paul Bloomer
This article first appeared in the 236th edition of the quarterly magazine New Shetlander.
The word “northern” is a relative term with many meanings that are both geographical and cultural. My journey as an artist has seen me move from the industrial Black Country of my birth to Shetland where I have lived for the last nine years. One of the things that unite the art I have produced in these very diverse places is that for a variety of reasons the work could be described as “Northern” in both outlook and content. From the perspective of the Black Country the term “North” has strong class connotations and my work from this area documents the strong working class culture that evolved around the heavy industry, but in Shetland I am starting to discover that it is predominantly the unique quality of the light that defines a “northern aesthetic”.
I was born and raised in the Black Country, a large heavily industrialised urban sprawl to the west of Birmingham. The following figures never fail to amaze me and paint a somewhat frightening picture of the massive scale of the industrialisation around the town of Dudley where I grew up: “ by 1860 within 5 miles of Dudley there were 441 collieries, 181 blast furnaces, 118 iron works, 79 rolling mills and 1500 puddling furnaces” (Raybould. Dr T. J. The Economic Emergence of the Black Country). By day, the area was said to be black with coal and smoke and by night it was described by various writers as a place akin to hell, with miles upon miles of furnace flames making foul the already melancholy air.
Although this industry declined through the twentieth century to be replaced by the manufacture of iron and steel based products the marks on the landscape and people were permanent. I never chose to be an artist; rather, it seems that art found me, and after four years labouring in an engineering factory I suddenly found myself drawing with a feverish intensity and against all advice in scrapping my “job for life” headed for Art College. After five years of dawn till dusk autobiographical drawings of the pubs, people and factories I knew so intimately I was offered a place at the Royal Academy in London to study painting for three years at post graduate level.
It was in the relative security of the predominantly upper class echelons of the R.A that I was able to see clearly the distinct “Northerness” of my art. This northern vision was in large part formed by my working class upbringing where in order for art to be understood and accepted it had to be accessible. The visual language I developed could be described as well drawn, tightly composed uncompromising subject matter with an emphasis on craftsmanship and psychological tension.
In 1997 I moved to Shetland and although I had never been this far north found myself in a strangely familiar landscape that somehow existed deep within my mind. Artistically every thing was different in Shetland and I had to struggle very hard to make any sense of a landscape that was to me akin to paradise rediscovered. I have no history here so was unable to comment with authority on the culture or people of Shetland so the narrative element of my work was the first thing to be challenged. The lack of verticals in the landscape of Shetland that had beforehand formed the framework of my urban compositions left me searching for strong shapes in the landscape to construct pictures and narratives around. Birds became strong players in my work with tight knit organic compositions and vague narratives built around them, but visual success with painting evaded me.
For five years in a disused telephone exchange near Reawick I made little other than woodcuts. The undisturbed isolation of this location meant that I could release the urban images that had been chasing me for years and it was this cathartic activity as well as the purchase of a croft house with large light lit studio in Bigton that proved the catalyst for the next phase in my Shetland work.
Anxiety had been building for years that my work was not doing justice to Shetland and I entered a period of artistic turmoil, based around the fact that my Black Country work had exhausted itself and with it a major source of my inspiration gone. Determined to make art about Shetland I engaged in a period of total immersion in the landscape, that saw me painting outside, night and day, snow and rain, wind or calm in a spirit of trying to forget every thing I had ever learnt about art and letting the landscape be my guide quite literally starting all over again. Working outside in Shetland shatters all preconceptions and my pictures get blasted by wind sand and sea and frozen in midnight ice, but the crucial ingredient that goes towards forming what I am loosely calling a “northern aesthetic” is the unique light of the northern hemisphere.
It is the effects of this light not only on the landscape but also and probably more significantly the effect of this light on the mind that is the defining feature of my painting at the moment. The long dark nights of northern winters breed melancholia and introspection and consequently the effect of any light or colour at this time of the year is magnified both visually and emotionally. In the winter nights I find my self seizing even the merest glimmer of light or colour into my paintings and in this work are the paradoxical ingredients of “pale darkness” and “dark light” that are characteristic ingredients of paintings right across the northern hemisphere. The unique light of the aurora also finds its way into my work and immediately sets it apart from that of my southern contemporaries. It is this absence of light in the winter season coupled with the long bright light of summer that not only creates the northern temperament but goes on to create the “northern aesthetic”.
The word “northern” is a relative term with many meanings that are both geographical and cultural. My journey as an artist has seen me move from the industrial Black Country of my birth to Shetland where I have lived for the last nine years. One of the things that unite the art I have produced in these very diverse places is that for a variety of reasons the work could be described as “Northern” in both outlook and content. From the perspective of the Black Country the term “North” has strong class connotations and my work from this area documents the strong working class culture that evolved around the heavy industry, but in Shetland I am starting to discover that it is predominantly the unique quality of the light that defines a “northern aesthetic”.
I was born and raised in the Black Country, a large heavily industrialised urban sprawl to the west of Birmingham. The following figures never fail to amaze me and paint a somewhat frightening picture of the massive scale of the industrialisation around the town of Dudley where I grew up: “ by 1860 within 5 miles of Dudley there were 441 collieries, 181 blast furnaces, 118 iron works, 79 rolling mills and 1500 puddling furnaces” (Raybould. Dr T. J. The Economic Emergence of the Black Country). By day, the area was said to be black with coal and smoke and by night it was described by various writers as a place akin to hell, with miles upon miles of furnace flames making foul the already melancholy air.
Although this industry declined through the twentieth century to be replaced by the manufacture of iron and steel based products the marks on the landscape and people were permanent. I never chose to be an artist; rather, it seems that art found me, and after four years labouring in an engineering factory I suddenly found myself drawing with a feverish intensity and against all advice in scrapping my “job for life” headed for Art College. After five years of dawn till dusk autobiographical drawings of the pubs, people and factories I knew so intimately I was offered a place at the Royal Academy in London to study painting for three years at post graduate level.
It was in the relative security of the predominantly upper class echelons of the R.A that I was able to see clearly the distinct “Northerness” of my art. This northern vision was in large part formed by my working class upbringing where in order for art to be understood and accepted it had to be accessible. The visual language I developed could be described as well drawn, tightly composed uncompromising subject matter with an emphasis on craftsmanship and psychological tension.
In 1997 I moved to Shetland and although I had never been this far north found myself in a strangely familiar landscape that somehow existed deep within my mind. Artistically every thing was different in Shetland and I had to struggle very hard to make any sense of a landscape that was to me akin to paradise rediscovered. I have no history here so was unable to comment with authority on the culture or people of Shetland so the narrative element of my work was the first thing to be challenged. The lack of verticals in the landscape of Shetland that had beforehand formed the framework of my urban compositions left me searching for strong shapes in the landscape to construct pictures and narratives around. Birds became strong players in my work with tight knit organic compositions and vague narratives built around them, but visual success with painting evaded me.
For five years in a disused telephone exchange near Reawick I made little other than woodcuts. The undisturbed isolation of this location meant that I could release the urban images that had been chasing me for years and it was this cathartic activity as well as the purchase of a croft house with large light lit studio in Bigton that proved the catalyst for the next phase in my Shetland work.
Anxiety had been building for years that my work was not doing justice to Shetland and I entered a period of artistic turmoil, based around the fact that my Black Country work had exhausted itself and with it a major source of my inspiration gone. Determined to make art about Shetland I engaged in a period of total immersion in the landscape, that saw me painting outside, night and day, snow and rain, wind or calm in a spirit of trying to forget every thing I had ever learnt about art and letting the landscape be my guide quite literally starting all over again. Working outside in Shetland shatters all preconceptions and my pictures get blasted by wind sand and sea and frozen in midnight ice, but the crucial ingredient that goes towards forming what I am loosely calling a “northern aesthetic” is the unique light of the northern hemisphere.
It is the effects of this light not only on the landscape but also and probably more significantly the effect of this light on the mind that is the defining feature of my painting at the moment. The long dark nights of northern winters breed melancholia and introspection and consequently the effect of any light or colour at this time of the year is magnified both visually and emotionally. In the winter nights I find my self seizing even the merest glimmer of light or colour into my paintings and in this work are the paradoxical ingredients of “pale darkness” and “dark light” that are characteristic ingredients of paintings right across the northern hemisphere. The unique light of the aurora also finds its way into my work and immediately sets it apart from that of my southern contemporaries. It is this absence of light in the winter season coupled with the long bright light of summer that not only creates the northern temperament but goes on to create the “northern aesthetic”.
