Showing the impossible – beauty and the sublime and the work of the artist as social commentator – Richard Mosse’s Enclave

08.50 am. I’ve been struggling with my art this last few days; post assignment deadline blues (tired; what’s the point?), I knew I had get back in there, start working again to remind myself of why I really want to do this, so I started a bit of reflective practice, thinking (meditation, journeying, snoozing with my journal by my side, whatever). I wrote – I want to paint beautiful paintings that people would to have on their walls, even like to buy; but I need to comment on the devastation that we are creating of our world, even to bring it into the living rooms of the people of my city, but we are immune to this now from a thousand TV clips. I phoned my sister and she was looking at the news on her smartphone – which channel I asked – The Guardian. So I looked at Guardian culture, and I found Richard Mosse has a new show at the Barbican (Incoming), and Googling around this I found a video interview, in which Mosse talks about beauty and the sublime, about journalism and art, and about the world in flames and how to engage audiences. “If you’re able to make it beautiful, people will sit up and listen”… “to make visible the unseeable”. A pithy little film about aesthetics and the making of Enclave (2013), here it is. https://vimeo.com/67115692