ESSAY - KATE REEVES EDWARDS, 2020
Anthony Garratt’s paintings inspire a desire to climb into the landscape he has created. They are about paths, views, vistas that permeate into the distance. They promote emotional journeys into the spaces he has created, the artist stating that ‘they are atmospheres rather than paintings.’ In his ‘Veranda’ series, Garratt creates fictional viewing platforms, ripe for the viewer to metaphorically step onto, to admire the landscape he has created beyond.
His paintings, although presenting a landscape to be accessed, are not comfortable. He relishes the challenging nature of the sublime, finding a beauty in a feeling of jeopardy, reminding us that we are not in control of the landscape.
Garratt finds this vulnerability intensely important in his relation to the natural world. As a keen environmentalist, he wants to remind his viewer of the feeling of the sublime intrinsic to the human experience. He says of the modern world: ‘the sublime is becoming less obvious as life is becoming easier. It isn’t a comfort or feeling of ease, it is a feeling of challenge and motivation’.
Indeed, the moody expanses, the dramatic chiaroscuro, and the saturated colour palette promote a dualism between the ominous and the exciting. His work quickens the heart-rate and fills the viewer with a desire to get out there.
Garratt changes his method and materials depending on the subject matter he is portraying.
Currently, with his ‘California’ and ‘Veranda’ series’, he is working spontaneously with spray paint to characterise the slickness of an empty road, the clean divergence between elevated human space and the tumult of the landscape below. ‘It is a cinematic medium’, he explains, ‘spray paint dictates something fast-paced, garish, human-looking’. Although the artist’s initial administration is quick, the last details are applied measuredly with a more analysed application. This allows his paintings to have an air of excitement, of impulsiveness, along
with crisp details of mark-making that draw the viewer through the surface.
His paintings promote a sense of positive isolation within a difficult landscape. The landscapes which inspire him are always deserted, quiet, bleak, sequestered. Garrat sees that true wilderness is becoming scarce in our modern world, so a sense of internal and external quietness within space is what is engendered within his work, as a kind of remedy. His landscapes are specific, often taken from plein-air studies, yet they pertain to a memory of place that is ubiquitous. They generate a feeling of anamnesis: an attachment to a past
landscape which he presents to you, beautifully, welcoming you into a place once forgotten. KATE REEVES EDWARDS. 2020