Empty places

In my last blog post I talked about how disability can impose restrictions on how a landscape is seen and said I would say more about this in connection with Edward Burra, the subject of a current retrospective at Tate Britain. The wall captions explain all this clearly: 

By the 1960s, Burra's already frail health had begun to decline making travelling abroad difficult. Instead, he embarked on driving tours of Britain with his sister Anne. 

Burra observed fields, mountains and valleys as passing impressions through his car window. His attention was also caught by smog-belching power stations and collieries as well as newly built motorways, which had become a common feature of Britain's changing landscapes. His sister would stop periodically so he could study the view intensely. Burra's friend Billy Chappell sometimes joined them. Chappell was struck by the artist's uncanny memory and eye for detail: 

It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted by some especially splendid spread of hills, moorland, and deep valleys. He sat very still and his face appeared completely impassive... I do not remember Edward ever making any sort of note: not even the faintest scribble; yet weeks, even months later, the shapes, the tones, the actual atmosphere; and the colour of the clouded skies looming above those moors, hills, and valleys he had looked at so intently, would appear on paper. 

The painting below actually resembles the view from a car window. Here and in other late landscapes Burra makes use of the properties of watercolour - the way that road shades from dark blue to white is really beautiful. Earlier work could at first be mistaken for oil or acrylic, but for health reasons he mostly used watercolours throughout his career. As a Guardian article about an earlier Burra show at Pallant House explains, 'a lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and a debilitating blood disease meant that he was never able to use an easel in the conventional way. Instead he opted to sit, working mostly in unfashionable watercolour on thick paper laid flat on a table.' 

Edward Burra, English Countryside, 1965-67

Laura Cumming's review of the current exhibition expresses a preference for these late landscapes over his pre-war scenes of 'seedy nightclubs'. But Burra's vision of England can be pretty bleak and depressing. Christopher Neve writes vividly about this in Unquiet Landscape (1990), so I will end here by quoting him. 

Beginning in 1965, Burra was driven on regular car journeys around England by his sister Anne. It was she who chose where to stop. They went to empty places where he could see a long way, in East Anglia, on the Yorkshire moors and in the Welsh borders. He sat wherever she chose and watched impassively from lay-bys, just as he had watched human antics through the fumes of nightclubs, memorizing the faces of waiters so that a long time later he could make accurate and compelling pictures from what he had seen. 

Was it disenchantment with people that led him repeatedly to paint these empty places, or a fascinated disenchantment with the places themselves? He seemed to dread them. They swell, stretch, curve, crease. Bruised clouds stack over them and break open. Floods and fields make their puddles of watercolour. Trees are abruptly lit up in negative as if by a nuclear blast. Rock outcrops are swollen with disease. Chasms dwarf. Bile-yellow and a punishing green can hardly contain themselves. It is as though Cotman were reborn specifically to see England in its worst light...