Thoughts/challenges from the article by Julian Bell

'Wright of Derby, an acute barometer of intellectual trends, undoubtedly painted with an awareness of Burke’s 1757 Enquiry. He takes up a challenge that Burke doubted painters could meet: for the young Irishman argued that ‘painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents’7; whereas the words used in poetry can affect us ‘much more strongly’8 than the things they represent. Poetry, therefore, with its suggestive obscurity, was the art that could bring us closest to the sublime – ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’;9 a state of ‘astonishment’ including a ‘degree of horror’ that ‘anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force’.10 Burke contended that ‘darkness’ – the darkness of words dying away into silence – ‘is more productive of sublime ideas than light’, the condition within which paintings present their static imagery. And yet he allowed that ‘such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great idea’.11'

challenging the use of light/darkness in my own video ..... 

Also a helpful exploration of contemporary artists and the sublime for reference:

Bill Viola

Rothko's Seagram Murals 

James Turrell's presentations of light

Mike Kelley - the everyday 

Also questions towards the end - can the sublime be beautiful? Does it have to be ?

'It is just that, as of 2012, the process of rounding up feels to have gone a little too far. As a painter – a dealer in surfaces, a literally superficial individual – I need to keep in mind some look that distinguishes what is sublime from what is not. For me, it does not seem useful to include in the category art that employs the whole human figure as its central property. Art that describes the human figure in completed relationships is surely outside the province also. Individuals in relation to interiors they inhabit and in their social interrelations make poor candidates for the sublime, and by extension associated subject-matters – whether we are talking about identity issues and political contestation, or pastoral landscape and still life – are not well described in this way. (It is true that any of these prescriptive guidelines might be overturned as soon as an artist reaches out for extremes of scale.) Completed relationships on a formal and abstract level are obviously non-sublime. Donald Judd, Patrick Caulfield, Sophie Calle, Thomas Hirschhorn: these are all in their differing ways exemplary artists of the non-sublime. How far to gather them up within the attractive enclosure of the beautiful, I leave to others.

That still leaves rather a vast amount of contemporary art stuck in the bracing cold outside. And I think the point has been reached where a blanket description for these aesthetic asylum-seekers will no longer do. The critical border police need to find superior methods of discrimination.'

According to Bell can my work then be termed sublime - looking at the interiors that individuals cohabit ? Perhaps the lack of people within the interior and the somewhat eerie sense of emptiness within habitation can stake a claim to Present the unpresentable as the work is about relationships - intimate intrinsic ones yet their invisibility gives the sense that they cannot be defined