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Alan Rankle

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Further Study for Calder Valley
2006
oil on canvas
65 x 65 cm

As was so pointedly illustrated by much of the performance work and ideas of Joseph Beuys, late twentieth century culture has become characterised by the mediation of science and technology to such an extent that we have had to invent for ourselves or discover in other cultures, rituals with which we can re-experience nature; by which we can free it from ideology. This return to an integrated state constitutes a hope against the threat posed to nature by a Western culture of hyper-consumerism and hyper-fragmentation. In this context the role of the landscape artist has become more urgently political just as the re-appropriation of our environment as an objectified and reified image has become a politicised act. The history of Western landscape painting is littered with the representation of nature as a backdrop for portraits of power; the land having been reduced to a sigh of the power of patriarchal man to tame and possess. Images which acknowledge a plurality of possible origins, representations and states of reception, are images which imply integration and equilibrium, ideas which stand opposed to hierarchy and property ownership. Alan Rankle’s painting is concerned with the ‘disruption of tradition rather than its abandonment’. It is born from a studied practice and an empathetic and receptive immersion with his subject matter; our natural environment.

At the age of sixteen, as a student at Rochdale College, Alan Rankle developed an early interest in Chinese painting and poetry. He also encountered and was inspired by the ideas of John Cage, through a guest lecturer at Rochdale, a Black Mountain student. At Goldsmiths’ College Rankle wrote his BA thesis on the Origin and Development of Early Chinese Landscape Art. At this time landscape work was being translated into acts of land art and earth work by Christo, Robert Smithson and Richard Long amongst others. A commitment to landscape painting would have been highly unfashionable at the time – the iconoclastic art stance within the iconoclastic art world. Rankle remains active in both the tradition of landscape painting and the burgeoning movement of installation and performance, all the while continuing to explore the ideas and culture of both the East and West.

It was during a six year period in Yorkshire, where Rankle produced the Endless River Landscapes, a series which were his first major group of works to relate the precepts of Chinese painting to the Western naturalistic tradition of landscape painting. It was here, too, that Rankle first concentrated solely on the medium of painting. Using oils, pastels and watercolours, he created small scale studies which were painted, en plein air; simultaneously continuing and commenting on the tradition of the landscape painter literally painting in the field.

The image is one which fits a mythopeic vision of the Romantic nineteenth century landscape painter out in the great – bourgeois – expanse of the English countryside, however it is also one which, when viewed with a disruptive ironic humour, comments on that particular ‘way of seeing’ the artist and the art’s subject matter. For this stage in Rankle’s work was also a deferential nod towards and practice of, landscape painting, which Western innovators in colour, form and approach, such as Whistler, Monet and Hitchens (the latter with whose work and ideas Rankle shows a certain affinity) practised as part of a search, not only to express a voice particular to their time, but also to discover a more dialogic approach to landscape painting, such as the one inherent in Chinese painting.

Dialogue is the key to Rankle’s work. His paintings – and his ongoing involvement and commitment to art which is available to and active within the community – encourage the expansion of views, not to mystify or solidify knowledge. If his work draws a veil, it draws a visible one in order to call attention to itself; a veil of gold leaf on copper or dripping paint; of glazed and scumbled layers over heavily wrought textures, deliberately offsetting the conventional tensions of surface and space, illusion and reality in the structure of the painting. It disrupts and interrupts itself in order to disrupt and interrupt the tradition of ‘fine’ art and landscape painting, to pry open the restrictive and reductive approach to viewing art and to the artist’s viewing of his or her subject matter.

The experience of Alan Rankle’s paintings is one which includes and reflects back upon the viewer, just as subject matter is included and reflected back upon. This absolute integration of the works in their environment, be it in a gallery, in a specific architectural space, or in public, is what ultimately gives them their optimism – like a double-sided mirror through which we can both see ourselves and pass through to the other side to see what lies beyond – and their dynamism – the potential born from the dialectics of discourse to spark transformation.

Clea H. Notar
Reprinted from ‘Painting and Landscape: Extending the Dialogue’,
exhibition catalogue, Southampton City Art Gallery, 1993.

Alan Rankle

1952 born in Oldham, United Kingdom

Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark

Education

1968 - 1970 Rochdale College of Art
1970 - 1973 Goldsmiths' College Scool of Art

Solo Exhibitions

1973 The Pardonners Tale, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
1976 Landskip Reflections, University of Manchester
1981 Recent Paintings & Drawings, Bankfield Museum, Halifax
1981 Endless River Landscapes, Arts Centre, York
1982 Endless River Landscapes, Oldham Art Gallery & Museum
1982 New Paintings, Mid-Pennine Arts Association, Burnley
1984 Recent Works, Patrick Boyd-Carpenter, London
1985 Paintings & Drawings, Patrick Boyd-Carpenter, London
1986 Landscapes & Romance, Patrick Boyd-Carpenter, London
1987 Recent Paintings & Pastels, The Hallam Gallery, London
1987 Landscapes & Romance, Hastings Art Gallery & Museum
1991 Recent Works, The Star Gallery, Lewes
1993 Riverfall & Other Works, City Art Gallery, Southampton
1996 Landscapes for the North, Maidstone Museum
1997 Paintings & Drawings, Yehudi Menuhin School, Cobham
1998 Terre Verte, Danielle Arnaud/Clink Wharf Gallery, London
1999 Studio Notes & Field Studies, Folkstone Art Gallery & Museum
1999 Recent Paintings, The Oxford Gallery
2002 Further Tales, Charles Everritt Fine Art/The Air Gallery, London
2004 On the Edge of Arcadia, Waterhouse & Dodd, London
2006 Light + Meaning, Galleria Seriola, Tampere, Finland
2006 Strange Territory, Galleri Nordlys, Copenhagen
2006 Paintings for the Turning Earth, Gallery Oldham
2007 Formal Concerns, Galleri København, Copenhagen
2008 On The Edge of Arcadia, Octavia Gallery, Bath

Group Exhibitions

1974 Patrick Cook/Alan Rankle/Michael Taylor, Artisan Gallery, London
1975 SPACE Open Studios, Charlton House, London
1982 Andy Goldsworthy/Michael Jepson/Alan Rankle, LYC Gallery, Cumbria
1985 New Figurative Works, Patrick Boyd-Carpenter, London
1988 Order out of Chaos, Artists Unlimited, Bieldefeld, Germany
1991 Earthscape, Hastings Pier
1994 A Vision of Albion III, Collyer-Bristow Gallery, London
1995 Tom Lomax/Alan Rankle/June Redfern, Danielle Arnaud, London;
1995 MIART, International Art Fair, Milan;
1995 Driven to Abstraction, Rye Art Gallery;
1995 Art at 100, Hammerson, London
1996 Last Lights, Rye Art Gallery; English Landscapes, Danielle Arnaud, London;
1996 A Different Pursuit, Danielle Arnaud, London;
1996 Endangered Spaces, Christies, London
1997 Madern British & Contemporary Painting, Clink Wharf Gallery, London;
1997 Art 97, Danielle Arnaud, London;
1997 Landscape, Addison, Wesley Longman, Harlow;
1997 Visions of Rural England, Fairfax Gallery, Tunbridge Wells
1998 Emergence, Belgrave Gallery, London
1999 Works on Paper, Clink Wharf Gallery, London;
1999 Sublimate Sublime Subliminal, Clink Wharf Gallery, London
2000 Serena Banham/Per Fronth/Alan Rankle, Anderson Stewart Fine Art, London
2001 Paintings from Martha's Vineyard, Steven Summerville Gallery, London
2002 Art London, Long & Ryle Gallery, London
2004 Maltby Art, Winchester
2005 The Painted Landscape, The Belgrave Gallery, St Ives
2005 Portraiture Now , SoCo Gallery, Hastings
2005 Cave Painting , Rock-a-Nore Art Gallery, Hastings
2005 Gallery Artists , twenty twenty, Much Wenlock
2005 Art in Romley Marsh , St Mary in the Marsh
2005 Unlimited Edition , SoCo Gallery, Hastings
2007 London Art Fair, Hart Gallery
2007 20/21 Art Fair Royal College of Art, twenty twenty Gallery
2007 Kunst 5000, Galleri Sortedam, Copenhagen

Collections

Southampton City Art Gallery
Gallery Oldham
Hastings Art Gallery & Museum
Bankfield Museum, Halifax/Calderdale Museum Service
Hammerson plc
Baker McKenzie plc
PriceWaterhouseCoopers plc
Sun Alliance plc
Bain Capital, London
Thames Water plc
Hastings Borough Council
Tonbridge School
Kessler & Co
Southampton Hospital Trust
Chemical Materials Recycling
De Lessac Settlement
Concept Public Relations
Paintings in Hospitals
Hastings Trust
NNIT, Denmark

Bibliography

Laurence Bristow-Smith; "Alan Rankle: Landscapes for the Turning Earth"
Gallery Oldham 2006
ISBN 0-9550358-3-7

Imola Antal; "Alan Rankle: Light + Meaning" Galleria Seriola 2006
ISBN 978-0-9553068-0-8

Tom Burke, Laurence Bristow-Smith, Roger Woods, Clea H. Notar, Alan Rankle: "Gates to the Garden" Galleri Sult 2003
ISBN 1 898272 07 7

Links

www.alanrankle.com

www.galleri-kbh.dk

Alan Rankle

c/o Holmberg
Sjællandsgade 33, 3th
Copenhagen N
DK 2200

+45 35 35 79 96
studio@alanrankle.com
www.alanrankle.com

Alan Rankle Studio
100 Norman Road
St Leonards on Sea
East Sussex
TN38 0EJ
England

+44 1424 447411
studio@alanrankle.com
www.alanrankle.com