Heaven and Earth 1967

Curator: Ronnie Landfield painted "Heaven and Earth" in 1967, working with acrylic paint. Editor: My first thought is how strangely the colours interact. That pale, sickly yellow surrounding such gloomy swathes of green and brown – it’s unsettling, like looking at a dreamscape that’s slightly out of sync. Curator: Dreams can be portals, can’t they? Landfield often uses landscapes as a base for more abstract, internal narratives. He plays on traditional archetypes; in many cultures, earth symbolizes the maternal and nurturing, while heaven offers notions of the spiritual, transcendence. This stark contrast perhaps echoes an internal struggle between those two forces. Editor: Formally, the bands of colour function almost like theatrical flats, compressed and flattened. The colour's applied with thin washes, heightening the canvas’s texture to articulate shape. Curator: Looking at it that way, it strikes me as a symbolist gesture, attempting to represent unseen or subconscious forces. You see how the yellow surrounding colour functions? Editor: The yellow and the dividing colour creates distance. The perspective is very controlled and forces a particular vantage. But still, it fails to resolve a deeper meaning. Is there anything we can grab onto here? Curator: The bridge at the foreground serves as a connection between two spaces in the painting and our two worlds in theory, so it could suggest that it is about building towards some synthesis, however imperfect or transient. Even those jarring contrasts in color I see as opportunities, points where we must try to reconcile ourselves to incongruities. It's about reaching beyond immediate comfort zones. Editor: A fraught, uncertain peace, maybe. Looking again, there's a vulnerability. It doesn't present any certainties, that's for sure. Curator: No, perhaps it is in questioning certainties, it opens into possibilities of how such visual art can be powerful.