Angela Lane’s small paintings on wood conjure wondrous scenes of mysterious atmospheric and celestial phenomena. I want to speculatively connect these paintings to one of history’s most significant examples of such phenomena, and the art that relates to it. I’m talking about the infamous ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816. This is going to be kind of a ghost story about a ghost story about what might best be considered spectral paintings.

In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in what we now call Indonesia. This is the largest known eruption in human history. The consequences were devastating. An estimated 10,000 people were killed. The eruption sent millions of tonnes of volcanic ash into the atmosphere which created extreme weather conditions across the globe. A veil of sulphuric dust covered almost the entire planet. This created dark skies that had never before been seen, and doused Europe in acidic brown/orange snow. The world fell into darkness. Crops failed, famine and disease followed. Tens of thousands died. Now, lets first stress that the real story and true horror here are those victims in Indonesia and across Europe. What a few snooty artists and poets did in response is far less important, but instructive for our purposes.

In Europe, there was no explanation for this phenomenona. It took 6 months for news of the eruption to hit London, and much longer to connect it to Europe’s Year without Summer. So, of course, people resorted to old ways of understanding such things. Church numbers swelled and clerics took to the streets to offer public prayers. This was God’s wrath, the sun was dying, and the end was neigh. One astronomer put a date on it – July 18th 1816.

And, then, of course there was the art. Art’s relationship to nature was already shifting in the hands and the overstimulated minds of the romantics. They celebrated the wild, chaotic elements of nature as a mirror of the human imagination and creative spirit. The pastoral landscape tradition of artists like Constable and Wardsworth no longer felt relevant. In some ways, the Year Without Summer was the gloomy romantics dream. They yearned for and sought out the sublime and the unknown in nature and in themselves. Many artists(and many of those who lurk in the background of Angela Lane’s paintings)responded directly.

Joseph William Turner was already a sucker for dramatic storms and weather — embodied, of course, in that apocryphal story of lashing himself to the mast of a ship to experience the storm from the inside. He and others no longer had to make up such stories. His paintings in 1816/17 changed as a direct result of these conditions. Not only do these skies in his paintings get more blood red and apocalyptic, but scientific studies show that those paintings made plein-air or outdoors by Turner and other artists at this time have a high percentage of ash and sulphate embedded within their surfaces. He’s painting a changing atmosphere in a changing atmosphere that is changing his painting.

One of Angela’s real touchstones is the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who, was also working at this time. His painting Woman Before the Rising Sun depictsa figure with her back to us raising her arms as if to embrace the sun, the sky a golden-orange blaze. The painting is often read as symbolising a desire to become one with nature or of religious devotion. But, knowing that this painting (in which the sun is obscured) was made at the tail end of the year without summer puts a different spin on it. Is the painting addressing that natural disaster and its impending end? Are we allowed to ask if this climate disaster actually helped Friedrich develop his symbolic and painterly language? He wouldn’t be alone in this. Those dramatic skies representing the crossing of tumultuous interior and exterior worlds in Edward Munch’s painting The Scream were made in direct response to the atmospheric effects created by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883.

Enough about the painters, onto the writers and poets! In 1816 and amongst all of this chaos, a small group of English writers decided to get the hell out of London to the Swiss Alps. The group included the poet Lord Bryon and his personal physician John Polidori, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley(who would soon be married with Mary taking the Shelley name), and Mary’s step-sister Charlotte (who was pregnant to Byron but feared losing him to Percy Shelley). Some major psychosexual dramas were also in the air – the atmosphere was charged in all sorts of ways.

Again, in light of all of those tens of thousands of deaths, it seems really glib to say that the poet’s summer by the lake was ruined by bad weather. But this was the case. They did not get a glimpse of sun, and complained about it a lot. Mary Shelley wrote in her diary ‘It proved a wet, ungenial summer, incessant rain often confined us for days to the house … never was a scene so awfully desolate’. Bryon and Percey almost drowned when their boat capsized in a storm (which, is kind of funny in relation to that story of Turner wishing to experience the storm from the inside out).

The group amused themselves by reading horror stories. Bryon and Percey proposed a game that everyone should retire to their rooms and write a ghost story. And in that moment, during the year without summer, in a dark desolate landscape and in a world changing in ways that no-one really understood, a couple of literary classics were born. The first, ironically written by Dr Polidori, was called The Vampyre – and is credited with popularising a certain blood sucking character who Bram Stoker will fully flesh out a few decades later.

This was also when Mary Shelley first sketched out what would become known as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (initially credited to Percey). So there is a casual effect here – Frankenstein was only written because of this trip and the climate conditions that spoiled it. This all somehow sparked a burst of intense creative activity.

Frankenstein even takes on these conditions in its form, and in its monster. The novel presents nature as a powerful, uncontrollable and unknowable force or entity. Thunder, lightening, rain, icecaps are omnipresent. Percey described it far more eloquently than me by calling it ‘a storm shaped novel.’ It starts with a letter longing for ‘a place where the sun is visible forever, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour’. That line is an eerily, almost impossibly, perfect description of Angela Lane’s painting Path of the Sun made in 2023.

I remember reading Frankenstein for the first time and being utterly compelled with its description of the desolate yet magical landscape in which the monster roams. This is exactly the same feeling I get when standing in front of one of Angela Lane’s paintings. To me, Mary Shelley writes about Angela’s paintings better than anyone alive today.

Here’s another line from Frankenstein: ‘Vivid flashes of lightening dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then, for an instant everything seemed of a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash.’

Its like this line was written in response to Angela’s 2020 painting ‘Light Pillar’, or vice versa. But, of course, neither of those things are true. What is true is that Angela is deeply engaged with the history of artistic and scientific encounter with celestial and atmospheric phenomena — as were Byron, both Shelleys, Friedrich, Turner. And all of these artists participated in that existential act of looking upwards and outwards to ask the big questions of human existence.

Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel, and the first modern horror novel. But, more recently, it has been talked about as the first climate change novel – a text that explores and deals with the climate catastrophe of its time and promotes natures ability to heal and destroy. Its central theme is the hubris of a man who tries to bend nature to his will. It is about the penalties of violating nature.

These histories and possibilities intrigue me in relation to Angela’s work and the question that contemporary art – and especially contemporary landscape painting – has to ask itself today. How can we make landscape paintings in the age of the Anthropocene, in the midst of our own climate catastrophe when our relationship to nature has changed so dramatically? Is this even possible, or ethical? One answer is to make art about the climate catastrophe. There is a lot of art that does this, A LOT – and often in very direct and didactic ways. The Year without Summer features regularly in this sort of art as a kind of cautionary tale.

Angela’s paintings are not about the climate catastrophe, or about the Year without Summer. But they exist in a mode of speculative thinking and imaginative encounter with our inner and outer worlds – and the history of that thinking across art and science that, to me at least, takes these possibilities much further. Her paintings let us see the wonder and mystery of the skies and the world again, encourage us to think through the mediated encounter we have with them, and, in doing so, urge or even potentially challenge us to better value these relationships and environments. In that sense, they share a lot with Mary Shelley’s writing and her accidental making of the first climate change novel.

There is one anecdote I must conclude with. Like artists, scientists have looked at the year without summer in relation to our own climate crisis – and the monstrous scenario we all face. A theory has been proposed that global warming could be halted by artificially cooling the planet. Theoretically, this could be achieved by injecting volcanic ash into the stratosphere to block rays of sun. This would recreate the effects of the Year without Summer — but for beneficial purposes. This is, not surprisingly, a controversial theory – one that has been described as – wait for it –  ‘Frankensteining the weather’. If ever that happens, and God I hope it doesn’t, I definitely want Angela to paint it.

I’d like to acknowledge the Allusionist podcast, especially episode 47 on the Year Without Summer from where much of this information is drawn. I’d also like to acknowledge the recent passing of teacher, mentor and artist Norman Maclean, which leaves a huge hole in Tarawhiti Gisborne’s creative community. The first copy of Frankenstein I ever read was lent to me by Norm, as part of an ongoing challenge to look and think about art differently.