• HOLLOW POND: HANNAH BROWN

    by Dr.Susan Owens
     
     
  • John Constable used to grumble that his art was ‘to be found under every hedge and in every lane, and...

    Hollow Pond 4, 2023, Oil on linen, 100 x 90 cm, 39 3/8 x 35 3/8 in

     

    John Constable used to grumble that his art was ‘to be found under every hedge and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up’. The son of a gentleman farmer, he was brought up to notice details other landscape painters overlooked. He was painting in an age in which it was thought proper to generalise – and distinctly improper to be too specific about muddy lanes and scrubby banks. Constable loved Thomas Gainsborough’s pictures passionately, but would never have painted a feathery approximation of foliage in the way his predecessor did. Instead, he looked hard at leaves, and noticed how the sunlight made them blaze white and how their pale green undersides were flipped up by the breeze.  
     
    Constable was among the first artists to paint place rather than landscape. Unlike his contemporary J. M. W. Turner he rarely travelled in search of scenery, but sketched where he happened to be, at home or visiting friends, choosing places he knew intimately or loved for their associations. ‘I should paint my own places best’, Constable once wrote to a friend. Fair enough, you think. But what he adds is so unexpectedly emotional it makes you look up from the page in surprise: ‘Painting’, he continues, ‘is but another word for feeling’. 
  • Today his legacy of emotional investment in place is stronger than it has ever been. The lockdowns brought by COVID-19...

    Hollow Pond 1 (detail), 2022-23, Oil on linen, 150 x 200 cm, 59 x 78 3/4 in




    Today his legacy of emotional investment in place is stronger than it has ever been. The lockdowns brought by COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 changed the course of landscape art in the UK. Artists set aside ironic framing strategies developed to negotiate Britain’s ‘landscape tradition’ and looked afresh at the natural world on their doorsteps. Landscape painting became truly relevant again. Artists, like the rest of us, found a new emotional value in their surroundings when the pace of life was slowed and movements limited. Places that we had hardly noticed or failed to appreciate became familiar. We paid attention. 
     
    Hannah Brown, a leading artist in this return to landscape painting, is someone with a profound sense of place. She paints only places she knows: those close to her home, those she has experienced over time. One might even say that a place chooses her, and insists that she visits it and considers it from every angle, in every season and all weathers. Among the places to have importuned her in this way is Hollow Pond in east London, a tree-lined lake in a fragment of Epping Forest that was once ancient wood pasture and later became a Royal Forest. London has grown up around it on all sides and yet this sliver of wilderness has kept its great open skies and bristles with its own distinctive atmosphere. 
  • One of the first things that strikes you about Brown’s paintings is their unexpected viewpoints: often low or obscure, they...
    Day for Dusk (Hollow Pond) 2, 2023, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 100 x 90 cm, 39 3/8 x 35 3/8 in
    One of the first things that strikes you about Brown’s paintings is their unexpected viewpoints: often low or obscure, they create a sense of expectation, mystery and excitement. Vistas can tell you a lot about an artist. At the end of the 17th century there was a fashion for breathtaking bird’s-eye-views of newly built estates, high-octane images that boasted loudly of ownership. A century later, artists such as John Robert Cozens took us to hilltops to dazzle us with the magnificence of the Roman campagna as it faded into the hazy distance. The only people then who looked closely at plant growth were farmers, hedgers and ditchers. Things changed after Constable. In the 19th century artists became fascinated by the details of the undergrowth and buried their noses so deeply in it that, in their pictures, the sky often disappears completely. 
     
    Think of John Everett Millais and his masterpiece Ophelia (Tate). In the summer of 1851 he lugged his canvas and painting equipment to the river bank itself because he wanted to get the scrubby willow, dog roses and forget-me-nots exactly right – defying the hostile attentions of insects, a bull and a pair of beady-eyed swans who got in the way and refused to budge. Or consider Richard Dadd and the Victorian fairy-painters who set their unsettling dramas in among the daisy stalks. For me, place-painting comes alive in the work of these visionaries and obsessives. Theirs is the soil in which Brown’s art is rooted. And, to quote Ariel in The Tempest, it is both rich and strange. 
  • 'Her Hollow Pond paintings brim with elusive meanings and suggest both beginnings and endings, joy and melancholy'
  • In some of Brown’s paintings of Hollow Pond we find ourselves at eye-level with hedges, or with our faces close...
    Hollow Pond 6, 2023, Oil on linen, 130 x 180 cm, 51 1/8 x 70 7/8 in

    In some of Brown’s paintings of Hollow Pond we find ourselves at eye-level with hedges, or with our faces close to an overgrown bank. In her pictures foliage can obscure our view disconcertingly. That is, until we realise that foliage is the view and discover how absorbing these landscapes-in-miniature are. Other paintings have the air of offering conventional vistas over the lake towards distant banks through the filter of overhanging trees, and yet even here we notice something odd about the viewpoint – a hesitancy, perhaps, a sense of hanging back. Are we about to step out of the shadows – or duck down lower? Brown’s paintings of Hollow Pond propose a new, more intimate relationship with the natural world: we are no longer lords of all we survey. In fact, they present viewpoints that we might not have had since we were children fossicking in the turf, making dens and hiding. 

  • Brown is a master of detail. She paints each leaf, whether flourishing or turning brown, with loving attention. Like Constable, she is a painter of the overlooked and the marginal; she honours the trees and hedges, leaves and branches of nowhere in particular with her close attention. But her paintings are about much more than detail. Each reverberates with a sense of enchantment, though whether benign or disturbing is hard to say. What is visible of sky glows with the kind of evocative, evanescent light that comes only at dawn or dusk. Her Hollow Pond paintings brim with elusive meanings and suggest both beginnings and endings, joy and melancholy. Empty of people, they are stage-sets before the play begins – or after it has ended. 
     
    At first they reminded me of a picture in the Victoria and Albert Museum I adored as a teenager: Disappointed Love by the Irish artist Francis Danby, painted in 1821. It shows a heartbroken young woman sitting on the bank of a lake with her head in her hands, her white dress shining out against sinister dark foliage. Details elaborate her story: a portrait miniature of a young man lies on the grass next to her, and she has torn up a letter and thrown it into the dark water. These days, though, I can see its limitations: Danby has grasped us by the elbow and, indicating this or that detail, regaled us with the whole sad tale. Brown, by contrast, refuses to be drawn. Her kind of detail does not give the game away. The subtle ambiguities of her paintings awaken our curiosity and ignite our imaginations: they pull us in and compel us to keep on looking. 
     
    So how do we experience the natural world today, no longer in lockdown but against daily reports of ever-higher temperatures, floods and wild fires? In an oblique and lyrical way, Brown addresses the question by valuing the local landscape, however scrubby and marginal. By connecting with nature, finding in it a source not only of anxiety but also of joy. By falling in love with hedgerows and leafy banks and communicating it through paint. Painting, after all, is but another word for feeling. 

     

    Susan Owens

    August 2023

  • Hannah Brown was born in 1977 in Salisbury, England. She completed her BA in fine arts at Central St Martins...

    all photographs by Peter Mallet

     

    Hannah Brown was born in 1977 in Salisbury, England. She completed her BA in fine arts at Central St Martins in 1999 and her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2006.
     
    Recent major exhibitions include 'I Stood Still' 2022 (Frestonian Gallery, London) ‘This Muddy Eden’ 2020 (two person SHOW with Christopher Orr, Broadway Gallery, curated by Kristan Day) and ‘Before Long’ 2019 (Union Gallery, London). In 2021 she was featured in the John Moores Painting Prize and in 2020 in the exhibition ‘The Green Fuse’ at Frestonian Gallery. Her work is held in private collections in the UK, USA, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Korea and U.A.E among others, and has been acquired for the permanent collections of the State Art Collection of, Ireland, Dublin; the V&A Museum, Londo and The Xiao Museum, Rizhao, China.
    She lives and works in London.