Helen Colledge

Keld, 1980s

Lately I’ve been getting random attacks of nostalgia – a strange feeling which seems part mental and part physical, with a bit of an achey quality to it. It made me wonder exactly what nostalgia is and how it relates to painting.

A lot of my reasons to paint something from real life seem to come from a strong feeling of nostalgia, a feeling for a particular place at a certain time. Even painting out of doors means putting moments on the canvas just after they have flitted by.

Old, golden-faded photos from the ’80s show I visited some of the landscapes round here a long time ago. Memory brought me back here to recreate them in paint, translated out of time and into something else (perhaps so I could save them?).

Kingsdale, 1980s

Is trying to immerse yourself in a painted scene an attempt to cure nostalgia? To me, a painting offers immunity from nostalgia because you can step inside it at any time.

Although looking at a photograph can feel as if you’re peering into a mirror reflecting another time, the landscape of the mind seen in a painting feels, to me, much more immediate and intense than anything frozen by a machine. Paintings have a structure and emotions that the artist provides because they were “there” and transferred everything they experienced into paint. The translation process, if successful, adds many extra notes or layers so that viewing the painting is like entering the space the painter occupied and being “there” yourself.

the road from Ingleton to Hawes, 1980s

One of the most dramatic experiences I had of being “there” was looking at a painting by David Bomberg in an exhibition at Abbot Hall in Kendal, in 2006. It was a painting of the view at dusk from a Cornish cliff – and I felt like I was standing inside the scene. It may have helped that I had been to that same or a similar spot in the past, also at dusk, but it was odd the way the scene became “real”.

In a reversal of this there was one Bomberg picture of a Cornish scene, a valley rolling at fast pace towards the sea, which I used to be particularly fond of when I lived in Manchester, often visiting the City Art Gallery to bask in front of it. A camping trip to Cornwall resulted in a walk which passed along the same section of sparsely inhabited coastline. We became lost and began to run out of daylight and started to rush away from the sea and head up the nearest valley towards civilisation.

It was a steep climb and the sea was behind us. Suddenly a helicopter buzzed over our heads and made us turn and, as it disappeared from view, I recognised that we were scrambling up the valley from the painting. I was inside the picture I knew so well, with its tumbling painted slopes and twisting course racing down towards the waves, although I was moving against the paint, heading up towards the fields.

Recent visits to the City Art Gallery in Manchester, since its renovation and extension, have revealed that painting never seems to be on display any more.

Fleet Moss, 1980s

Towards the end of 2013 I had a phase where I went out painting every day, no matter what the weather. Sometimes it poured down and I had to hide under a tree with rainwater mixing into the paint on my palette. Other days it was incredibly windy and, on days where we were away from home, I would sometimes find myself in a busy place trying to hide from passers-by.

Only a few of the paintings weren’t duff (duff, adjective, meaning inferior, worthless; from duff, noun, meaning something worthless, first known use: circa 1889) which made me question the value of forcing yourself to paint, regardless of what’s in front of you. The best results seem to happen when you feel excited about what you’re doing, rather than trudging along as if you’re practising scales on the piano, but maybe the trudging is necessary in some mysterious way. Perhaps it prepares you for the times when you feel enthused and stores up skills that you can call on then. Who knows, really? Painting is a very mysterious business.

I managed to do this plein air experiment for 54 days in a row until the weather became so relentlessly awful that I gave in. People had become used to seeing me trundling up the hill with my pochade box every evening and had been speculating as to what was inside the peculiar wooden case, which looks as if it should contain something with dials, wires and antennae rather than comparatively dull oil paints. I never did work out how to answer the question: “What’s in the box?” If I told the truth people were invariably disappointed because they’d imagined something far more exotic. If I made up something or refused to say I felt guilty for being, perhaps, pretentious.

Out of all the 54 days I mostly painted in oils, starting with small 6″x8″ pochades and then swapping to watercolour for a while when I ran out of materials. Finally I did some bigger 9″x12″ paintings – still fairly small in the grand scheme of things but it wasn’t really the weather to hang around for long and I wanted to complete the pictures in one sitting before the light disappeared.

Some of the results that weren’t on the “completely duff” pile are below: