Curlew

The feeling of absolute aloneness with only the curlew's cry for company imbues Julian Rowe's work. Literally the landscape is present within the paintings - reeds, earth and seaweed sit within hollows filled with diluted paint between raised pathways curling through the width of the artwork. Here is a map. Here is where we try to orientate ourselves. Here are pale grey Suffolk skies and the feeling of wide open spaces and wind. Here are strange abstract shapes that have been imposed upon the ruddy rust landscape of an autumnal Norfolk, shapes more industrial than rural.

The two bodies of work which make up Julian Rowe's exhibition Curlew each refer to specific East Anglian places: Burnham Overy in Norfolk and the just-inland landscape around Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Made two years apart, there is a clear evolution within the work, a distinction between the experience of different places; a feeling of time moved forward, both physically and psychologically, both for the artist and the land. These locations are known intimately to Rowe and it is this almost-in-the-bones knowledge of the familiar that informs his work. The two sites lie inland from the sea. Burnham Overy on the North Norfolk coast sits within saltmarshes on reclaimed land. Inlets, rivulets and creeks criss-cross the marshes before meeting the sea. The River Aide in Suffolk snakes its way through the village of lken, along the coastline past Aldeburgh itself and on to Orford where it splits the land to create the peninsular of Orfordness. All along this stretch of land, the river bends and sneaks. On the Great Britain A to Z Road Atlas the river appears as a trace of blue line at Iken then opening itself out wide and pale blue as it moves past the Martello Tower at Aldeburgh Bay.

Rowe speaks of elements of chance in the way that the work evolves and of “scoring the work" as if it were a piece of music or a mathematical puzzle to be solved.' This notion of a map, of grids, is embodied by the actual elements imbedded in the surface of the painting. They are remembered maps and traces of the land that exist in his head as he makes the paintings in his studio. The Suffolk series is based on two arcs of different diameters, creating endlessly curling serpentine estuaries which traverse the paintings, beneath which, sometimes, lies a shock of pure colour. These forms that he chooses for the work take their shape and character from forms he has seen in the sites he has visited. Rowe's work contains a distillation of his experience of the landscape and each painting is named by its precise location, the name appearing as a sign that this place is real.

Curlew invites us to engage with these paintings as unique objects, to question our relationship to landscape and to artistic vision.