Carol Rhodes – a View from a Low-Flying Airplane
By Thomas Gibbs
I love flying. Maybe it is just that the novelty has not worn off yet but there is something magical to me about seeing the world from a perspective God never intended. My favourite part is always right before landing. As we fly gradually lower details come into focus: highways, factories, huge commercial structures, then neighbourhoods, individual houses, eventually cars – tiny people scurrying about living their individual lives, oblivious to my gaze from above. I love how you can start to know a place before you even land or before your phone connects to roaming. Each snapshot tells a story, a change in streetlights demarks new and old developments, you can tell an abandoned district by the mere absence of activity… This window-seat view is what Carol Rhodes evoked in her simple yet haunting paintings of the British landscape from above.
Carol Rhodes, Service Station, 1998, oil on MDF board, 46.9 x 47.1 cm, Modern One, Edinburgh.
Rhodes focuses on a specific part of the landscape, neither industrial nor rural – what Marian Shoard terms the 'edgelands', where manmade development meets nature. Stood before Service Station (1998) in Modern One Edinburgh, I was unsettled by her aerial perspective on a liminal space. What she depicts, in many ways, are non-spaces – places we all know and pass through, but rarely dwell on long enough to think about. This sense is emphasised by her fluid brushwork, which abstractifies architecture, blurring the lines between manmade and nature. Her scenes are semi-fictive, a capriccio of aerial photographs, architectural plans, and vague memories. Yet Rhodes remains engaged with the spaces she depicts despite her perspective. 'Distance needn't mean you're detached,' she said. 'When you notice something, really notice it, you're inside it and outside it at the same time.’ This all-encompassing perspective, emphasised by the lack of horizon, makes the second defining element of her work all the more disturbing.
Where are all the people? That is the first question my friend asked upon seeing Service Station. Like many of Rhodes’ subjects, motorway services are open 24/7, they are not meant to be empty – nor is the motorway that runs alongside. All Rhodes works bear the imprint of human activity but no humans themselves. I am reminded, viewing such works, of my walks over our suddenly silent motorways during COVID lockdown. These pieces seem apocalyptic but there is no sign of decay. It is as if everyone just left.
Carol Rhodes, Industrial Belt, 2006, oil on MDF board, 71.5 x 81.0 cm, National Galleries of Scotland (in storage).
This is one of the confusing elements of Rhodes’ work that Tom Lubbock praised as an antidote to the undemanding instantly-gratifying paintings dominating the commercial art world. ‘These paintings, with their markedly low-key palette, do not cry out to you across the room. They hold very little for the swiftly passing viewer. They wait for your close attention.’ For Lubbock, the barriers Rhodes’ places to our understanding only make the works more enigmatic. Take her selective use of detail. Some areas are blurry – as if glanced from a banking plane, gone before we can focus. Yet Rhodes’ thick paintwork suggests that there is a meaning, a story, behind this surface. We just cannot access it.
Rhodes studied under realist painter Alexander (Sandy) Moffatt, and her works stay true to the philosophy of realism. Yet she drew too on a wide range of influences, from Walter Sickert to Nicholas Poussin, to create unified and yet intricately detailed works. She worked slowly, producing an average of only five paintings a year. Each work required numerous preparatory drawings and near-constant repainting. Rhodes was not afraid to wipe away paint and start over, or simply layer paint over paint, until she was satisfied. Layering paint on top of primed MDF board, Rhodes’ method mimicked the layered content of her works.
Carol Rhodes, Picnic Site, 1997, oil on MDF board, 39 x 49 cm, British Council Collection.
Beneath the surface, Rhodes’ work is deeply political. Although its subtlety frequently borders ambiguity. Some of her metaphors initially appear quite innocent – the lake in Picnic Site (1997) is a poached egg. Yet a darker element lurks within, this visual metaphor is inviting us to savour this remaining slice of nature surrounded by roads on all sides. By excluding a horizon line or satisfying edges to painting, Rhodes frequently depended upon the implication of a continuing landscape to convey her message. This is used particularly effectively in Industrial Belt (2006) where both the encroaching yellow industry and pristine green farmland appear to continue beyond the scope of the painting, divided by a railway line that again we cannot see in full. This technique broadens her work to make a statement about the condition of the entire country surrounding. Furthermore, David Jenkins argues that the low aerial perspective positions the viewer as complicit in the ‘industrial ravage’ of the earth, particularly if that is the view from a polluting airplane seat. Rhodes’ husband and critic, Merlin James, described her work as both celebrating and lamenting 'the anti-idyll of the industrialised world'.
Rhodes’ style reflects her biography. Her landscapes are vaguely international, they could be anywhere really – they too, on a larger scale, are non-places. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh but grew up with her Christian Missionary parents in Bengal and went to Woodstock boarding school in the Himalayas aged twelve. Ashley Tan suggests that it was the slow, winding steam train towards Woodstock every term that first inspired Rhodes’ perspective on the landscape around her. Certainly, from her time in India, Rhodes developed a keen awareness of social inequality. Despite graduating from Glasgow Art School in 1982, alongside the notably boisterous and masculine New Glasgow Boys, she turned her back on painting and directed her energies into campaigning for feminist, anti-nuclear, and left-wing causes. During this time, she worked at Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery (among others) but did not paint. She took painting back up in the 1990s, around the time she gave birth to her first son. Initially, she concentrated on a single object in the landscape, but her mature style developed quickly – something she credits to long walks with a pushchair around Glasgow’s outskirts.
Her later works take on a more urban and domestic focus, albeit still devoid of human activity. Carol Rhodes’ life was cut tragically short in 2018 by motor neurone disease. A year after her diagnosis in 2013 she began walking with a stick, and by 2015 she could not move without a wheelchair. Her husband Merlin James, formerly a writer on her art, set up a sling mechanism in her studio so she could continue drawing until 2016. In the end, she could only speak through an Eye Gaze communication system, but her artistic inclinations persisted: her reading of a poem by Dante (linked below) remains deeply moving.
Carol Rhodes reading a sonnet by Dante:
Notes:
Jenkins, David Fraser. ‘Carol Rhodes Obituary.’ The Guardian, December 13, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/13/carol-rhodes-obituary
Johnson, Ken. ‘ART IN REVIEW; Carol Rhodes.’ New York Times, January 11, 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20100831083922/http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/arts/art-in-review-carol-rhodes.html
Lubbock, Tom. ‘Carol Rhodes turns the world upside down.’ The Independent, December 10, 2007. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/carol-rhodes-turns-the-world-upside-down-765013.html
The Scotsman. ‘Obituary: Carol Rhodes, Scottish artist whose ambiguous paintings speak of man's desire to govern the land.’ The Scotsman, December 8, 2018. https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituary-carol-rhodes-scottish-artist-whose-ambiguous-paintings-speak-mans-desire-govern-land-193485
Tan, Ashley. ‘The aerial and apocalyptic landscapes of Carol Rhodes.’ July 19, 2021. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-aerial-and-apocalyptic-landscapes-of-carol-rhodes