Our Fundamental Home: The Landscapes of Patrick Cullen In looking at the works presented in this catalogue, and in the exhibition that it accompanies, it should be clear that Patrick Cullen is an artist of versatility. This becomes obvious on discovering the two searching self-portraits, painted at the ages of 50 [1] and 70 [2], which sit among the landscapes. However, it is in closely examining the landscapes themselves that his range reveals itself most profoundly. 2
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Patently, there is a geographical span, from the allotments of North London to the heights of Annapurna, and Patrick Cullen’s initial encounter with a place has often marked a new stage in the development of his art, as his paintings and drawings of Tuscany, India and Nepal divulge. Nevertheless, it is his ability to discern variety within a place, and then to articulate it so sensitively over repeated visits, that is particularly telling.
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Patrick Cullen is acutely aware of the many and subtle changes that occur, both over a day and across the seasons, to the land itself, to the light and weather that a ect it, and to the lives of the people who inhabit and cultivate it. This awareness is informed by his belief that ‘the countryside, the outdoors, the earth itself all represent our fundamental home, where as a species we evolved and as individuals we will eventually return’. It is also in uenced by his concern ‘to capture something elusive and fragile and now perhaps increasingly under threat by human destructive activity’*. His landscapes certainly succeed in capturing the subtlety and delicacy of the environment, and, partly inspired by the example of that modern French master, Pierre Bonnard, do so in an intense and often joyful way, so celebrating as well as scrutinising ‘our fundamental home’. Patrick Cullen was already an established artist when, at the close of the 1980s, he visited Tuscany, and responded wholeheartedly to its terrain. While its agricultural pattern and implied human presence suggested to him a large-scale version of the London allotments that he had been painting, it o ered him much that he had failed to #nd in England. Its undulating geography of high hills and broad plains allowed his eye greater freedom to roam, and provided it with an endless wealth of visual stimulants – formal, textural, tonal. Its timeless, traditional character also appealed to him, and brought to mind the elements of nature glimpsed in the backgrounds of many a Renaissance masterpiece. As a result, Patrick Cullen has returned frequently to the area between Florence and Siena, and has engaged constantly with it – by walking, looking and then sketching – in order to express his deep feelings about landscape. He has visited at various times of year in order to appreciate the distinct qualities of each season, and has particularly enjoyed the contrasting palettes of spring and autumn [32 & 33]. Equally attuned to the shorter diurnal rounds, he has revisited motifs at di erent hours of the day, such as vines both early in the morning [23] and late in the afternoon [38]. He has also been keen to record the e ects of changes to the weather, from the saturation of strong sunshine [28], through the soft veil of a mist [25], to heavy rain draining a scene of bright colour [43]. 32
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