'The Romantic era of the late C18th and early C19th is at the root of my interest in the natural sublime. Visually and conceptually, it was a profound time when the divine was brought down from the heavens and raw nature came to represent this omnipotent presence over the world. The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) painted a lot of arches - be they windows, or in dilapidated church ruins and graveyards, or found in nature by a divine order of natural symmetry.
'The arch is a threshold. It takes my mind into the realms of fantasy as I imagine it is an entrance into another world. At the time I painted Orbit, I was questioning the traditional construction of landscape paintings, and was troubled by the weight of the horizon line; how strongly it implies a landscape, and dictates the composition of a painting. So I removed it to see what would happen. I found that the paintings floated. I floated. I really enjoy what this does for the viewer. I raised the arches into the heavens like stars - alluding to the religious paintings of the Romantic's predecessors. Each one a black hole into another dimension.' - Hannah Luxton
