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Five Sunsets in One Hour (Country Sketch) (1978)

Roger Ackling

burnt lines on board and transfer lettering on card

Tate, London, Liverpool and St Ives

Five Sunsets in One Hour (Country Sketch) (1978)

© The Artist's Estate. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Details

Classification:

Drawing and Watercolour

Materials:

Board, Transfer lettering, Letraset

Physical Object Description:

Burnt lines and Letraset on card mounted on paper-covered card 22 × 14 1/2 (559 × 368). Letraset inscription ‘A COUNTRY SKETCH/CHILLERTON DOWN ISLE OF WIGHT ENGLAND/JUNE 24 1978’ bottom centre.

Dimensions:

55.8 x 36.7 cm

Accession Number:

T03562

Credit:

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 1982

Ownership history:

Purchased from the Lisson Gallery, London by Gabrielle Keiller (1908-1995) for the Contemporary Art Society, 10 October 1979; presented to the Tate Gallery, 1982

Roger Ackling's work, Five Sunsets in One Hour (Country Sketch) (1978), is on a sheet of paper-covered card mounted by a smaller coarse brown wood pulp board incised with five parallel lines. He has drawn scorched lines by concentrating the sun’s rays through a hand-held magnifying glass, whilst walking up Chillerton Down, a hill behind his parent’s house on the Isle of Wight, in June 1978. These five stages are ‘sunsets’ because each time the sun sank below his immediate horizon line, he had to climb higher to catch sight of it again. He has marked each ‘sun line’ with the exact time at which it was made (6.50pm, 7.07pm, 7.15pm, 7.36pm and 7.50pm). A printed inscription: ‘Walk up the Hill’ is repeated at five intervals, and above the top scorched line is: ‘Walk down the Hill’. Ackling also records the wind conditions on the day it was made; the degree and angle of the smudging around each line indicates that the wind was stronger at 6.50pm but had weakened and changed direction by 7.15pm. He once said that by harnessing the sun he is channelling energy but also releasing it back into the atmosphere through burning.

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