Terror Firma

Two hundred years ago, wealthy tourists (and all tourists were wealthy then) used their Claude Glasses to compose aesthetically pleasing scenes while on their travels. While Claude Lorraine himself peopled his landscapes – providing the ‘Argument’ of the picture – the fashion for landscape he helped start eventually favoured the Sublime and the Picturesque. Neither needed a protagonist other than the land itself. Awe-inspiring manifestations of the might and wonder of God in the case of the Sublime, and charming vistas that provided a spectacle and record of place for tourists in the case of the Picturesque.

The history and origins of landscape ín art can never be ignored. The weight of convention means landscape paintings now have to work hard to avoid the formulaic. Even at their best they may still be a mask, a seductive curtain behind which the activities of the inhabitants take place. In terror firma Liz Rowe picks up the stylistic threads of the Sublime and the Picturesque to provide two quite different takes on our world today.

Rowe’s small, jewel-like paintings are disarmingly beguiling. With their feet firmly planted in the Picturesque, they seem to fit the convention of a well-framed and attractive slice of scenery. But something wrong-foots us about these works. On closer inspection the chosen vistas are unremarkable on their own account and of nowhere we can locate exactly. Something that looks like a patch of semimilled exotic forest features in a few, there is also a hill-side dotted with wilding pines, a paddock, and perhaps a road-side layby. What’s more, the painting style has a decidedly kitsch feel to it, with its highly-keyed palette and whiff of a paint-by-numbers style.

Kitsch, with its associations to mass culture, value, and nostalgia, combined with ideas about place, or non-place, provide a different lens to view the land in New Zealand. This is a country that is well practiced and enthusiastic about exploiting its natural beauty for commercial gains. Our scenery draws tourists in their hundreds of thousands for it is no longer just the wealthy who travel. Today’s tourists come armed with their own digital Claude Glasses and images of the snow-capped Southern Alps and the golden sands of the Coromandel populate photo albums around the world. But Rowe’s concern is not what the tourists are up to – let them look – but rather how the scenic and the picturesque govern New Zealanders’ own attitudes to the land. There is more to preserving our land than ensuring the tourist vistas remain pristine. By focusing on the non-places, those places that are normally over-looked and therefore perceived as valueless, she draws attention to what we do with all our land, not just the small pockets of spectacle amongst the paddocks and the tracts of housing. It is the terror of unsustainable farming practices, endless subdivisions for housing sprawl, and exploitation of resources at any cost that she alludes to in the title.