The following text has been edited from Rhodes’s handwritten notes for an application she made to the Scottish Arts Council in 1998 for funds to enable her to visit the Netherlands for the first time. The manuscript is preserved in the artist’s archive. The text is being made available here for the first time.
Rhodes’s notes provide a fascinating insight into her thinking about her work at this important point in her career. In November 1998 she presented her first solo show at the Andrew Mummery Gallery in London and the paintings that she showed were a summation of her mature work up until that time, featuring the key characteristics that she was to develop and refine over the coming years.
The pictures are all quite small. They’re all composites from a lot of different photographs, and I alter sometimes the perspective and colours and lines to suit my initial idea. They are all made up. In fact, someone described them as a faithful record of places that do not exist.
Height is very important in my work – that the higher up you go, the more you see, and the feeling of security and control that that gives you. The high view seems to bring order and purpose and smoothes out small imperfections. Of course anyone who needs that much control has to be questioned. I’m afraid it must come from a position of anxiety, so these views are not seen from a position of power and this saves them from any coolness associated with such abstract shapes.
The height and distance induces a sort of nostalgia but also a detachment. They sit quite oddly with each other. I think though that the detachment is ultimately contradicted by the fact that I’ve chosen to paint a particular view in the first place and with such attention, tunnel vision even.
The nostalgic aspect has for me a particular implication. I was brought up in Bengal in India and I think the pictures illustrate some of the dislocation that comes from living in two countries. When I was in India I didn’t look as though I belonged and when I was here I didn’t feel as if I belonged.
People remark that the work has a social dislocation. The absence of movement and clutter seems to leave only architecture and town planning. The viewer is cast immediately as an outsider by a series of barriers into the painting. In nearly all the pictures there is a horizontal line near the bottom which, however, is crossed to see what is beyond (usually something tiny and far away).
I like the idea of being repulsed back and drawn in at the same time. An interesting aspect of the barriers in the pictures is that although there are no figures in the painting to act as the surrogate viewers, the very fact that barriers exist, presupposes a viewer.
The colours I use are a sort of echo of the use of a barrier, then setting up a re-engagement. The tones are very close, almost always tertiary colours, so that any small deviations from that has an impact. I feel that if everything is close to each other – tones, colours, lines mimicking each other – and it works, it has an excitement to it because it never quite reaches a conclusion.
Generally I paint wet on wet and it appears that the whole thing is done fairly quickly. I like the contradictions between that and the minuteness of detail.
I tend to flatten the subject, sometimes the distant surface of the landscape rises up slightly to come towards the picture plane. The middle distance is often emphasised – I like the paradox of seeing too much – I often have equal concentration on foreground, middle ground and distance. It implies an underlying disbelief in the reality of what is there and produces a healthy amount of uneasiness I think. The views themselves often have no immediate interest, they are a peripheral, sideways look for all that they are panoramic.
I’m drawn to views that lend themselves to the nondescript; areas which have been artificially landscaped or in which environmental control breaks down or blends into the natural, or at least the untended. I like car parks, edges of golf courses, bits of scrub land, service roads and canals.
Quite often the pictures are almost anatomical with views of arteries and veins. Of course, landscape has its own tradition of that – the ground inevitably compared to a human body.
Recently the scale of everything has been getting reduced in size. I was struck when I visited the Giacometti exhibition in Edinburgh and learned that for a period during the war his figures measured only a couple of centimetres in height. He says of this work “to my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller, they only had a likeness when very small, yet their dimensions revolted me”. I feel the same way about my present work. I start out with a healthy sized subject but it diminishes as I draw it out and it’s only when the buildings are tiny that they become anything like themselves.
The paintings are also becoming more abstract. There is a danger in that they could become emblematic and I absolutely don’t want that. I want them to look as though they are of very specific places, while also being read as purely painted sites.
I’m reacting to the real world through a combination of photographs and my experience of it. I’m using landscape as a revealing force – to create a psychological mood. Actually, of course, the pictures are all self-portraits.
The surface of the picture is of almost pathological importance to me. They all have a single paint layer – I wipe areas off rather than build up. Because of the hard edges of the objects I like to paint with a certain amount of softness. The light in each painting is quite specific. I do imagine a time of day, although I take care to flatten most objects by limiting the tones. Any cast shadow is used very particularly. I don’t see the paintings as a part of a process – rather each painting is the end product of its own process. Each picture is entire and almost has nothing to do with the one before it or the one to come.