Exhibition
Richard Billingham - Constable
5 May 2007 – 16 Jun 2007
Address
- The Town Hall Galleries
- Cornhill
- Ipswich
- IP1 1DH
- United Kingdom
About
Over the past year Billingham has been exploring his personal interest in 'Constable Country' to produce an ongoing series of photographic studies - contemporary interpretations - of the environment that became the favoured subject of the Romantic painter.Constable , presents the initial stage of a larger body of work in progress, which Visual Arts Ipswich intend to develop in collaboration with the artist and firstsite in Colchester. This latest group of landscapes explored by Billingham, who has also made landscape photographs around the Black Country and Norfolk, not only reflects the 18 th century painter's choice of subject matter but also his attitude to picture making and his determination to represent the natural environment in its truest form.
Constable rejected the formal 'picturesque' rendering of nature adopted by his contemporaries such as Gainsborough, and instead set about capturing 'informally' the effects of changing light on the landscape and cloud formations across the sky. Billingham similarly resolves to convey effects of light and movement, and the drama of the landscape through the non-precious use of disposable and cheap 35 mm cameras from charity shops. Through this process he is able to generate images that exist as direct (preliminary) studies for possible future works, a method comparable to Constable who produced sketches to test compositions in advance.
