Cookham - Stanley Spencer's country

The Village of Cookham is by the river Thames and was home to another great eccentric artist, Sir Stanley Spencer. The place is a typical village, not quite is aseptic, but it has the quaint old collages and the stone towered church at it's heart. Further on is the a long meadow common now owned by the National Trust.

Spencer's work is both figurative, but not full on realism. It is a personal iconography linked to biblical imagery and his own village world. A lost world of between the wars, even after World War 2, one thinks of those very British period TV shows of Poirot and Marple. The paintings harks back to a 'golden' era.

I believe that Spencer is in a long line of 'eccentric' British artist who are not define by an 'ism'. William Blake is a fore-runner of Spencer with his linking of the real world with the world of the ethereal. Francis Bacon was an usual individual and his work, did not lead to a 'genre'. In some ways, Graham Sutherland's work were adrift from the mainstream. Although, Sutherland has been credited with the forming what is now called 'Neo-romanticism' as art historians try to shape the shifting seas of art ideas and work of the period.

When you walk around places where artists worked, you can feel the imagery reflected in the landscape. It makes me think of my own village and if I could create work using my village as a backdrop. Could I do 'The Ressurection at Bookham' or a historical painting 'Jane Asuten inspired by Bok Hill', etc.

This takes us back to the idea of this blog of Surrey Dreamtime. How could I combined the two elements from the title. I have a copy of Contemporary Aboringal paintings bookthat is an inspiration. This looking at inner space, rather than the visual 'realistic' one that our eyes are training to view.