Apollo's  Eye

At the beginnings of Western philosophy
were the Greeks. At the beginnings of

Greek philosophy, about two and

half thousand years ago, were the so

called Pre-Socratics:Thales (c624-546 BC),

who held that the origin of all things was

water (a view shared in Hindu philosophy);

Anaxamander (c610-546 BC), for whom

the world floated free in space, and all the

phenomena of life emerged from a primal

'Boundlessness', Anaxagoras

(c500-428 BC) who believed that

everything,large and small,started in an

original mixture which was set into rotary

motion by Mind, Nous. Like a centrifuge

this motion separated things out and

created the cosmos; at the same time

everything, in this account, remained

fundamentally interconnected.

The 'Pre-Socratics' passion for under

standing the macro and the micro,

the light and the dark, the revolutions of

the stars and the seasons, drew on

immediate experience, perception,

and bodily sense, especially of movement

and of gravity, as well as on deductive reason.

Hemming's passion is of a comparable

order. His is the Nous of an artist: the

intelligence of hand, eye, thought,

emotion and bodily sensation in concerted

response, mediated through his relation

ship to his materials, to the physical land

scape. This is no mere optical landscape,

like that of the snapshot,

any more than the universe of the

first Greek philosophers was just

a dry representation.

On the face of it, Hemming's paintings

might seem to fit into the currently

fashionable category 'abstract landscape'

they might indeed be considered supreme

examples of it. Yet to frame them in this

way would be to distance and delimit

them; the paintings do not 'abstract'

from anything. It might dampen

the spectator's response to

their invitation to get involved.

The source of Hemming's recent

canvasses is a pond in Jersey, a

green island in thegrey-green

English Channel far from the

(to Northern eyes) startling blue

of the Mediterranean. The four

large, square 'Apollo's Eye'

paintings slip, slide, swirl and crack;

it is as if we were witnessing a cosmic

birth. A pond is a microcosm, a

universe in microscopic miniature,

a primal, evolutionary soup.

It is a self-contained eco-system,

with its own internal, thermal currents.

The wind also stirs and patterns its

surface. It  carries reflections of its

near and distant environment, of

surrounding vegetation and of the

day and night sky.

It is easy to fall into a pond;

the biographer Richard Holmes,

writing about William Herschel, the

great modern successor to the Greek

astronomers, felt a 'kind of cosmological

vertigo' when he first looked through

a big telescope, as if he were falling

into the night and might drown.

The title 'Apollo's Eye' is profoundly
suggestive. It comes from a book by

Hemming's friend the geographer Denis

Cosgrove. In Greek mythology Apollo is

the god of the sun, of cosmic order,

as well as of the arts.

He is the guarantor of the dawn

and dusk and of the cycle of the stars

and the seasons; his power is awesome.

He lent his name to the United States'

space programme in the second half

of the twentieth century; the first

astronauts saw with their own eyes what

had been known or intuited from the

beginnings of written philosophy,

that the earth is an orb held inboundless

space, fissured, textured, and divided

into primary masses of land and water.

The Apollonian eye is also that of the

artist, a window into that human mind

which has the power to imagine,

as well as to analyse, to feel with,

as well as to gaze from a dispassionate

distance, to bring to life, as well as to

organise its own destruction.

Adrian Hemming's art allows us, if we can

bear the vertigo, a glimpse into our own

nature and origins; in the face of the

alienating, whirlwind distractions of

globalisation, his paintings,

in their intense physicality,

re-ground us in a real sense of wonder.

Robert Snell, February 2010

Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye.

A Cartographic Genealogy of the

Earth in the Western Imagination.

The John Hopkins University Press,

Baltimore, Maryland, 2001

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder. How

the Romantic Generation Discovered the

Beauty and Terror of Science.

Harper Press, London,2008, p119

Catherine Osborne, Presocratic Philosophy:

A Very Short Introduction.

Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004