Paintings by Susan Morland in 5 salons with digital prints proofed by the artist
Imagined landscapes – places of encounter for people, animals, plants, simple life forms, particles, spirals, toys. The landscapes exist in a world of immanence, a world where every possibility is alive in nature. There are 5 salons to visit: (i) My art is to communicate. (ii) I explore with paint. (iii) I call myself a pantheist. (iv) The age of ecology. (v) I am a Romantic.
Romantic ideals
Art of the Romantic era had an emotional connection with nature: the beauty of nature, nature’s power, nature in movement and infinite. Nature was the medium through which ideals became desired – peace, wisdom, love, justice freedom – ideals that are famously to be found in the poems of William Wordsworth. Art of the Romantic era opposed the pessimistic tendency and travelled outside the boundaries of convention. The unimprison’d mind may yet have scope to range among her own, her thoughts, her images, her high desires – Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’.
Wordsworth’s poetry connects back to the time when Susan Morland was growing up. During World War II Susan Morland’s school was evacuated from Liverpool to Rydal Hall in the Lake District near to Rydal Mount, the Wordsworth family home. There could have been no greater contrast between wartime Liverpool, with the air raids and the blackout, and the Lake District, where children could walk freely on the open fells or go skating on a frozen lake in winter.
Susan Morland’s paintings inherit from the era of Romanticism. The paintings create a space of fluidity and lightness through vision from the unconscious. Mundane things join with the unknown. Intense colour reveals immanence, and brushstrokes describe organic energy.