Open Cast Coal Mines, Newcastle

Crump’s work was dominated by watercolours, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. The watercolour landscape genre is a difficult one to extract from its connotations of pallid amateurism. Like most of the Sunday afternoon impressionists, Crump’s landscapes contain no trace of human figures.

Unlike the conventions of this genre, however, his works are weighted with cultural symbolism and subtle political ALLUSION. The several views of mining landscapes done throughout the 1990s demonstrate Crump’s style and thematic preoccupations in his use of the watercolour medium and the landscape as a trope. This view of an open-cast coal mine demonstrates his consistent framing of landscapes as essentially human – or cultural – rather than natural.

The image is of artificial or damaged topographies, and carries political force. Though this work was done in the early 1990s, Crump would doubtless have been aware that most of the country’s mines, even then, were being abandoned after decades of degradation of the environment through mineral extraction. 

Artwork courtesy of Durban Art Gallery.