Mark Edwards "The View from Here"

Mark Edward's 'The View from Here' was something that i truly understood straight away and developed my own opinions of the images with ease. The idea that landscape can be viewed and shown differently over a period of time. There is so much choice that many artists who either capture or paint or anything else all create and highlight different perspectives of the beautiful surroundings. In Mark's work he looked at Thomas Gainsborough where landscape painting first started in England and how it has become a tradition to capture these beautiful landscapes. These images that have been rendered and observed of the landscape helped to show the public how treasured and important these paintings are when documenting our history but also a standard of how we picture a beautiful landscape. Mark explores further into how through detail studies of the area and an emotional bond towards it, it provides a sense of identity and purpose for that area.

Now when i saw Mark's images at first i thought they were plain and very basic. However, by the way in which he anchors the text to the images you begin to be revealed key points of interest you would not notice at first glance. He has used a wide angle lens to capture as much of the scenery as he can while still keeping details in view for a clear understanding as to what they are. The images show that there was something in these areas before the images were taken such as tire tracks in the mud to a quiet farmland. Almost as if what was there was removed, changed or simply moved on and out of sight from this point of view of the area. For me that is what i start to feel and understand from this body of work and that the way in which there is nobody in any of the images show to me that at some point there was got to have been something else in that area. But the landscape over time has changed and altered these perceptions and is a reason as to why many artists captured these areas as a document of some kind and part of the reason as to why i think Mark has shown it to his viewers.

In conclusion, the reason i felt that this linked to my own work was the way in which he wants to show beautiful landscapes but also how different artists over time produce their own contemporary response to what they begin to see. So for my work what i want to show and highlight may look completely different over time when the landscape changes due to weather, natural growth and many other factors that will alter other artists, like myself, to have different contemporary responses due to the way the land has formed and changed its original look.