The art historian Kenneth Clarke believed we remake landscapes and what’s in them in our imaginations to fit with how we feel, with what we believe: ‘we have come to think of them as contributing to an idea which we have called nature. Landscape painting marks the stages in our conception of nature, its rise and development since the Middle Ages…’

Kate Carruthers’ exhibition at Altenburg & Co extends her fascination with the region’s sky. The paint is applied in a more gestural manner than before. So we take a step towards that abstract expressionist celebration of the paint-loaded swinging brush. Of course gestural painting or drawing transports viewers to way back when humans were part of nature, to when the sky presented imaginative possibilities far more various than those of the movies. All day, all night that vast non-canvas composes and recomposes itself while allowing us to find within it fantastic creatures, portraits, landscapes, pretty much anything we like.

So, Carruthers is a sky painter? Well, yes, but in this show she gives a real identity to the land beneath. And titles like Rain at Last; Wishing for Rain; Frosty Morning on the Road to Mongarlowe indicate how dependant a landscape is on what skies deliver. The often more specifically pigmented landscape beneath anchors the compositions and provides a platform from which we might observe so much subtle colour/tone change, such unresolved shapes. The idea that works of art ought to keep on developing for the viewer originates in the sky. So go and take a look at this fine exhibition, get transported.

BY ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE