A man stands on a pavement looking up at the clouds, full and grey. At the first drop of rain, he lies on the ground with his arms and legs slightly ajar. The man lies still as the rain falls and darkens the concrete all around him. In due course, he gets up, leaving a pale silhouette in his wake. Within seconds, the edges of this shape – part crime-scene outline, part evanescent graffiti – begin to blur. Minutes after the man lay down, there is nothing left of this ghostly shadow, no suggestion he was ever there.
The British artist Andy Goldsworthy has been performing and photographing this ritual since 1984, three years before I was born, in an ongoing series called ‘Rain Shadows’. I was in my early twenties when my father gave me a catalogue of Goldsworthy’s work. Back then, I was a newly minted art dealer in thrall to London’s vibrant contemporary art scene. My lodestones were artists like Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst – makers of crisply clinical works which seemed anathema to Goldsworthy’s seductive earthiness.
Goldsworthy’s practice takes place in and interacts with nature; even works which are destined for museums or galleries are made from elements he finds in his environment. I remember looking through the book on the train back to London the following day, flicking through page after page of manipulated branches, chromatically arranged fallen leaves, elegant piles of stones. The work was pastoral, somehow the artistic equivalent of really liking Wordsworth – just a little too pretty to be serious. I was bewildered, almost angry with my father: here was proof – if any more were needed – that he didn’t get me. The next day I took the book to a charity shop.
My father didn’t go to university and instead began training to be a barrister, but he quit inexplicably just before his final exams. Later that same year he started working on the reception desk of the auction house Christie’s. His art historical training, such as it was, came on the job and was focused mainly on antique furniture and bronze statues, but he had an almost photographic memory and his curiosity soon outgrew the bounds of its professional applications. Born in 1942, he learned to love interwar painters like John Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, artists whose engagement with landscape was as uneasy as the times they were living through.
Though initially encouraged by my nascent interest in art, my father was dismayed when I chose to go to Goldsmiths to study aesthetic theory rather than a traditional, more ‘useful’ Praxiteles-to-Picasso art history survey course elsewhere. He loathed the art I had become fascinated by and we fought bitterly about the cultural and critical theory – ‘utter nonsense’, he called it – that I had learned to espouse, and which was beginning to shape my world view. By the time I opened a gallery of my own, however, about a decade later, my tastes had changed somewhat and we found common ground in School of London painters: Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews.
In February, 2018, I broke down and was hospitalised for severe depression. After I was released, I stopped working at the gallery I had started with a friend. With nothing to fill my days, I tried to reset my relationship with art by going to museums and galleries. In my anhedonic state, nothing affected me. In May that same year, my father died suddenly in his sleep.
I don’t recall exactly how I came across Rivers and Tides, Thomas Riedelsheimer’s 2001 film about Goldsworthy, but soon after my father’s death I was watching it several times a week. I found it soothing in a way I couldn’t identify. The film shows Goldsworthy at work in the cold reaches of Nova Scotia and in the dry summer heat of Provence, as well as in the countryside surrounding his home in Penpont, Scotland. Using only materials he finds in the landscape in which he is working, Goldsworthy makes artworks of spirited, ludic beauty. Much of his work involves repetition, a sedulous, almost prayer-like approach to art making; we watch as he painstakingly assembles colours and forms – a whirlpool of driftwood, a riverine snake of icicles protruding from either side of a rock, a crowd of dandelions in a pool – and then watch as they disintegrate, the materials returning to the state in which the artist found them. I came to see that Goldsworthy’s work wasn’t twee or bucolic, as I had once assumed, but rather that it existed within a wider art historical context – that of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, American artists whose large-scale interventions in the desert terrain of the south-west of the US I had long admired. But Goldsworthy’s response to his environment felt commensurate with a landscape I knew well, a rural terrain latticed by hedgerows and drystone walls; his work in turn felt more approachable, the commonality of a shared national heritage somehow enough to make me see it both as something in conversation with artists I revered as well as somewhere that was so familiar to me.
At its most basic level, Goldsworthy’s work is about mark-making; the ‘Rain Shadows’ series calls to mind those prehistoric hand stencils on cave walls from Argentina to Indonesia, where the mark-makers followed the simplest of human impulses: to declare, ‘I am here. I was here.’ It is at once an acknowledgment of life and of the certainty of death, both the presence and the absence of the maker. Goldsworthy makes his mark on the land without the material or formal arrogance of avowed permanence though. His art tells us – shows us – that all marks fade eventually. Goldsworthy’s medium isn’t stone or ice or foliage or wood, but rather time itself, the gradual but inexorable entropy that is our common state. ‘The real work is the change,’ he says in the film.
Now, almost eight years since he died, my father has begun to fade. I can’t recall his voice as clearly as before, can’t bring to mind his fervently blue eyes, his smell, or what it felt like to hug him. I still watch Rivers and Tides occasionally though and I’ve visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see the works Goldsworthy made there, and when I did my father came back to me more strongly, as if he were in the work, in the landscape. Art was something my father and I discussed at length, often infuriating each other in the process, but at heart I thought it was something that was ours, a language and an interest particular to our relationship. When he gave me the catalogue, it felt as if all those conversations had been for naught, like he hadn’t been listening to me. Now I wonder if, despite our profound differences of opinion, he was trying to show me that there was more we shared than not; that in Goldsworthy the British artists he liked and the Americans of whom I was then so enamoured, there was common ground. Goldsworthy was a gift my father gave me – a mark he made. He knew me, after all.
Image © The New York Public Library
This essay is part of Resistance, a series on Granta.com where writers tell us about a time they have pushed back against change or advice.
