Jan Wynants // Early use of negative nature

It wasnt up until the mid-seventeenth century that artists would put weeds in
the foreground of their paintings. This all began because the Dutch started
painting and drawing Burdock leaves. These were again weeds so typically seen
as being invasive or decaying to a landscape, but now they had started to
appear in paintings as a foreground focus and English artists would also start
doing this by
the 18th
century.
[Painting by Jan
Wynants]

Michael Landy // Nourishment

The popular definition of a weed is a plant in the wrong place, which makes
almost everything eligible, from an oak in a conifer woodlot to an orchid on the
tennis court. For three or four centuries landscape painters agreed, and exiled
lowly vegetation to the margins usually, quite literally, to the lower foreground
margin. Meandering through collections of early landscapes, you notice an
undifferentiated frieze of wildings somewhere at the bottom of your field of
vision much where they would be on a real walk. Theyre small, creeping,
insignificant, wild nature as cosmetic afterthought. Most do not even have any
real botanical identity, and have the stylised look of medieval posies. Michael
Landy in his series nourishment, gives all the focus to weeds and makes them
into and art form himself, this is a similar idea for what our group work on this
project with be doing. [Painting; Michael Landy]

Theyre luxuriant, wavy edged, almost rococo, the opposite of the

classically symmetrical acanthus. Their felted grey surfaces suggest
leaves posing as free-carved stone. Ruskin, as outrageously humancentred as usual, was quite clear about their function in Creation, and
therefore in painting: The principal business of that plant being clearly
to grow leaves wherewith to adorn foregrounds. He sees burdock in a
wonderfully imaginative act of attention as an exemplar of the beauty
of irregularity ~ J.M.W. Turners Study of the Leaves of Burdock.

Richard Mabey said in 2011; When we break through into the twentieth century,
the era of ecocide as well as genocide, weeds move centre stage as emblems of
wild, regenerative energy, healers of vandalised earth. Eliot Hodgkin, while
serving as an air raid warden during the Blitz, stalked the waste-ground of south
London at the same time as Rose Macaulay was revelling in the weed jungles of
the City bomb sites for her novel The World My Wilderness. Hodgkins
Undergrowth 1941, with its forest of hogweed and dock, and a single bindweed
flower glowing like a moonlit orchid, is the most exultant celebration of weeds
since Drers Large Piece of Turf 1503 four centuries earlier.
These are further ideas we would like to be able to portray in group work if
possible. This idea that nature is all important and it is not the beautiful plants or
such that represent nature. For an urban environment litter is almost like a
metaphor for weeds, always present yet always trying to be cleared up, it is a
building problem that we would also like to explore in our footage.
Just like other artists now doing so, Landy puts his focus in his series
Nourishment on something considered lowly and an annoyance. But instead he
makes it seem beautiful and elegant in its own right bringing a new viewpoint to
a much hated thing.

The etchings are all meticulous, life-sized studies of individual weeds

the artist found growing in the street. Landy has described why he was
drawn to these street flowers. He has said, they are marvellous,
optimistic things that you find in inner London ... They occupy an urban
landscape which is very hostile and they have to be adaptable and find
little bits of soil to prosper (quoted in Buck). Weeds are hardy, thriving
in often inhospitable conditions with very little soil, water or direct
sunlight. They grow between paving stones or on waste ground in the
city, tenaciously asserting themselves despite being overlooked by the
majority of passers-by. Landy collected a number of these plants and
took them back to his studio where he potted and tended them, making
studies of their structures including detailed renderings of roots, leaves
and flowers. [Rachel Taylor, 2003]

Colin

Gleadell Wrote this about Landys Nourishment projects; He became

obsessed with what he calls "street flowers", or what you and I might
call weeds. Landy had started to make drawings of weeds three years

earlier, but abandoned them to concentrate on Break Down. During the

performance, the drawings and the pens he used were destroyed along
with everything else. It was only a matter of time before a realisation
dawned: "I had to draw my way out of my financial predicament." He
returned to the weeds. "I saw them as optimistic. I liked the way they
don't want to be looked after, that they prefer to live in little cracks in
the street. It was also a continuation of my work with street furniture bakers' trays and shopping trolleys."
The result is a suite of etchings called Nourishment, a title inspired by
the way these "street flowers" - shepherd's purse, fat hen, or oxtongue
- can proliferate with so little nourishment . The etchings are unlike
anything Landy has produced before. Intricate and detailed with shapes
that criss-cross like dancing figures, they are, says their publisher,
Charles Booth-Clibborn of Paragon Press, "somewhere between Drer
and Odilon Redon".

These points link into this idea that weeds are part of what some consider a
decaying area, yet they are at their core the opposite, they are a growth, they
are nature surviving and spreading, the only thing that is decaying in these
scenarios where weeds are seen as bad is the land cultivated by humans that
has been built on and in turn nature destroyed. Yet we see them as imposing on
our world and something to be cut away at the root to ensure they dont return.
Weeds are simply hated because of their prevalence and usual less beautiful
form than a typical flower. However they can be displayed in this positive light
just as Landy did and this could be something which we could explore in out
project. Especially so in the urban environments if we can find any presence of
them in highly urbanised areas.
Landys work was inspired by that of nature printing in the 1800s, where
plants would be pressed onto soft metal to recreate their full detail, this practice
however died out when photography became more advanced.