Angela Lane: Waiting for the Fall

Overview

Angela Lane’s work is Armageddon writ small. Her paintings capture a sense of impending doom and vast emptiness, even the ones that are less than 10cms across. By using the imagery of miniaturist landscapes from 15th and 16th century Netherlands, when the Dutch saw man’s failing relationship with God in the hardships of the Eighty Years War, Lane has transformed the antiquated concerns of medieval Europe into something startlingly modern. As the natural world seems to become less and less able to support the lives that we’ve built, the foreboding in Lane’s work seems not only spiritual but desperately practical.

Where Dutch artists contrasted peaceful images of the infant Christ with ravaged battlefields and the toil of everyday life, it seemed as if to illustrate just what we were missing. Lane is even less forgiving, seeing our sins as against the landscape itself. The figures in her haunted world scrabble around naked, doom written in every brushstroke. The places they inhabit are not metaphors for loss, they are what has been lost. Waiting for the Fall shows us an uncertain future in lovely, disquieting glimpses.

Image: Angela Lane