Page 14 - Art First: Bridget Macdonald: This Green Earth

She can also relate to ancient Chinese poetry, evocative of landscape and the seasons, as well
as to the Roman poet Virgil’s evocations of the rustic life in his Eclogues and Georgics. The influ-
ential tradition of pastoral poetry in Britain is a long one, including Milton and James Thom-
son’s hugely popular Seasons, first published in 1730. Nearer to her own experience, however,
is Words worth’sThe Prelude—his great poem about growing up in the Lake District and the way
he was shaped by that landscape; or the sublime melancholy of Lines written a few miles above
Tintern Abbey (1798), from which the title of this exhibition is taken. She also feels responsive
to the modern poet Seamus Heaney’s preoccupation with his early life on a farm in Ireland
in such poems as Diggingor Ted Hughes’s experiences farming in Devon in the 1970s and walk -
ing on northern Dartmoor. Recently she has been touched by the contemporary deaf poet
Josephine Dickinson’s Silence Fell, set in the remote Pennines landscape and telling of her six-
year marriage to a much older sheep farmer.

A synthesis of observed reality, memory and artistic or poetic source material is the basis
of Bridget’s practice, underlain with flashes of nostalgia, dispossession and loss. A case in point
is The Arcadian Shepherd, where the unfinished barren landscape with its wizened tree and
single sheep are dominated by an elderly gnarled figure in unkempt dress, contemporary yet
time less, immediately subverting the traditional literary and artistic connotations of Arcadia
as a clas sical utopia. However presented, the real landscape and its features are the essential sub-
ject matter of her work—the seasons (Two Seasons in Arcadia); the effects of weather and speed
on the terrain and sky (Rainy Country (Great Western) 1 and 2); and indigenous birds (Tree and
Magpie), along with cattle, sheep and horses. Even the long-established convention of the coun-
try house portrait finds itself subtly varied through her introduction of modern additions
including pylons in Spring Landscape.

This Green Earth demonstrates Bridget’s careful and creative assimilation of Old Master tradi-
tions with her own experiences and contemporary sensibilities. Just as there was a renewed

inter est in the works of Claude in the heyday of the Picturesque aesthetic, as witnessed by
Richard Earlom’s mezzotints of the Liber Veritatis (1776, Richard Earlom after Claude Lorrain,
pub lished by John Boydell, London), so Bridget’s vision uniquely relates the landscapes of the
past to those of the present day that we all know.
Paul Spencer-Longhurst
30 November 2015