Nature Painting

Nature Painting 2008, industrial paints on aluminium by Keith Tyson (1969-).

Keith Tyson is a major British contemporary artist and the foremost living artist to have emerged from Cumbria. In 2002 he won the prestigious Turner Prize. Although Tyson is a conceptual artist he creates works which are visually beautiful that we can all relate to. This painting is part of a major series of work, titled Nature Paintings, produced by the artist since 2006.

In this painting Tyson explores how making art can communicate the complex nature of the world. This painting has associations with cosmology, atomic physics, meteorology and topography but defies any single interpretation or categorisation. The painting makes visual allusions to the natural world – including geological strata and cosmology – achieved by chance rather than skill. Previously artists were valued for their skilled representation of the physical world. But in this Nature Painting Tyson has replaced skill with chance. The forms and colours are determined, not by the artist’s hand, but by reactions between specially mixed paints and chemicals poured at different angles and temperatures onto an aluminium plate.

In the context of Cumbria, this work has links with the history of landscape painting in the region especially the rise of Romanticism in the late 18th century in the Lake District. Tyson was born in Ulverston on the edge of the Lake District National Park and attributes his love of the natural world to his Cumbrian upbringing.