Michael Vickers: Black Horizon, ink on Fabriano, 56 x 76cm each
Memories and Landscape Metaphors
Whenever I go out into the spectacular South African Wilderness to enjoy the stillness of the uncultivated expanse before me, I form organic memories that add to my identity and overall human experience. While walking through the Highveld Sanctuaries, I constantly imagine how biblical metaphors can be applied to the landscape around me, and in essence, to my world. Metaphors like the water of life, or the light of the world always include the landscape. Ancient Hebrew Literature in the Bible often speaks about nature in terms of energy and vigour, heavenly realities and visions, revelations and songs of praise. These actions form who I am.
On a cultural level, I believe that art has the power to shift our perceptions, in line with William Blake's quote on the doors of our perceptions, this artwork looks through a lens that is disrupted. Instead of having a cleansed perception that I always strive to share with the viewer, I now shift the narrative to a world with blurred realities, a world that believes there is no universal truth. I depict a dampened wilderness, with a sky that comes crashing down against a black horizon. There are glimpses of beautiful revelations in the sky, but overall the tone is elusive and dark. The natural world that we live in now will change as we know it, and so the placid peace of the natural world that has shaped my identity is now burning of depravity.
Michael Vickers is a contemporary landscape Artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work focuses on the natural world as an integral part of human life that has the potential to empower our thoughts and perceptions through gentle encounters with the sublime. He calls this 'perceptive devotion'. Practicing in paint, printmaking and drawing with gestural marks, he creates glimpses of the uncultivated wilderness that lies beyond us, sharing a sacred voice in the secular urban space of Johannesburg.