The questions of the sea

May 23, 2015, 10:16 am

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The Royal Academy's Richard Diebenkorn exhibition divides neatly into three rooms, the first covering his early abstract period in Albuquerque and Urbana, the second charting his move into figurative drawing and painting while living at Berkeley, the third focusing on his famous Ocean Park series (1967-88). Diebenkorn had grown up in the San Francisco Bay area and moved in 1950 to Albuquerque to complete his MA at the University (Agnes Martin, the subject of a respective at Tate Modern opening next month, taught there a few years later). The city is located on a high plateau of the Chihuahua desert and, as co-curator Sarah C. Bancroft writes, 'the dusty whites, tans, reds, ochres, oranges, yellows and pinks of his environment are seemingly baked onto many of his paintings'. It was on flight from California to Albuquerque in 1951 that Diebenkorn was first struck by the view of landscape from the air. "I guess it was the combination of desert and agriculture that really turned me on,” he said, “because it has so many things I wanted in my paintings. Of course, the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’ - I mean, it was all like a flat design - and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid.” Diebenkorn's paintings in the 1950s often remind me of the contemporary works of Peter Lanyon who also used an aerial perspective - it is sad to think that Lanyon might have had an equivalent of the Ocean Park series ahead of him if he had not died in a glider accident in 1964.

By the early sixties Diebenkorn was painting more recognisable landscapes like Cityscape #1, which you can see and read about in the RA's Exhibition in Focus PDF. 'The colours and atmosphere of these landscapes are clear, crystalline and bright.' Too bright, some viewers have apparently felt, although as Bancroft says Diebenkorn himself was struck by the vividness of Northern California when he made a return visit in the 1980s: "God, that is the colour I used to use, when I lived up here!" Whilst in Berkeley he was also painting interiors with views through windows, influenced to by Matisse, Bonnard and Hopper. These, Steven A. Nash writes in the catalogue, 'provided a means to compare internal and external light, a way to project attention into the far distance, and a device for exploring the emotional contrasts of near and far, culture and nature, and a sense of confinement versus longing for release and freedom'. Nash also makes a connection with Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of windows (which I've referred to here before), whose 'reigning mood is serenity tinged with melancholy'.

Back in 2006 I wrote about the Ocean Park paintings and their relationship to landscape. Since then an essay by poet and former Ocean Park resident Peter Levitt has appeared called 'Richard Diebenkorn and the Poetics of Place'. It can currently be read online as a PDF and I will end this post with a quotation from it that conveys the rapture these extraordinary paintings can provoke. However, I think Laura Cumming is as usual very perceptive in her review, when she notes that up close they 'are stranger than expected, and this paradise is not without shadows – sometimes a grey pall, or a funereal black border edging into the frame. In fact the Ocean Park series that has given so many people such pleasure arrives out of hesitation, correction, uncertainty, further attempts, frequent cancellations. How can one tell? Diebenkorn leaves the workings on show. The veils of colour that settle on the painting like a misty haar lie over many trials and second thoughts. The paintings look light, bright, uplifting, slim; but this only comes after long and patient thinking.' Here then is Peter Levitt, who first visited Ocean Park in 1967 and marvelled 'at the unique and beautiful quality of the light, how from morning to night the sky’s variable shades of blue seemed to retain a moist translucence, as if the colour rose from the nearby sea to cool the heated summer air.'

'The paintings call forth how it actually felt to live bathed in a wash of such colour and light, to feel the steady, calm, and gradual movement of time reflected in the environment as one lived one’s moments, days, months, and years in a small seaside town (now grown overlarge) whose primary quality was the interaction of this extraordinary light with everything and everyone it fell upon. ... There is something that moves through me when I stand calmly before this work that doesn’t seem to have a beginning and, equally, may never end. It may be the way Diebenkorn caught the light I’ve been discussing. It may be how the shapes are so perfectly drawn and coloured that they call to mind the sound of the nearby ocean, where, as Pablo Neruda wrote, waves repeat the questions of the sea. How can I know? Should I even try to comprehend? To stand in the company of these paintings—where the world I know is one a painter helped to create, and what lies beneath the paint is the common bond of what I call home—is enough.

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Earth, besmirched, is churned and shattered into chunks

May 25, 2015, 5:07 am

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I'm a bit amazed to see I have now written 3000 tweets, which looks a lot when put together as a long list. The great epic of Old English, Beowulf, is 3000 lines long. The same length sufficed for Parmenides to write On Nature (fifth century BCE), Bernard of Cluny to explore De Contemptu Mundi (1150) and Mayakovsky to sing the praises of Vladimir IlyichLenin (1924). The manuscript shown above comprised 2997 hexameters and was the first significant poem in Lithuanian: Metai ('The Seasons'), composed by Kristijonas Donelaitis around 1765–1775. It was first published posthumously in Königsberg in 1818, with a dedication to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Seasonal poetry had by then been popular for some time in Europe - half a century earlier Prussians were reading Ewald Christian von Kleist's Der Frühling ('The Spring'), which had been inspired by James Thomson's The Seasons. In an earlier post I mentioned another such poem, Počasy ('The Seasons') by Hendrij Zejler, the 'father' of modern Sorbian literature, and regretted that I didn't know whether it conveyed 'any particular sense of the Lusatian landscape.' Fortunately there are some translations of Metai available online that provide an impression of how seasonal change was felt in the Lithuanian countryside. Here are a few lines (translated by Demie Jonaitis) on the effect of autumn rain - the blubbering earth is one of many examples of anthropomorphism in the poem.

Earth, her every corner soggy, blubbers softly
For our wheels slash through her washed-out back.
Before, how smoothly two old horses dragged our load;
Now, with four good horses struggling, we bog down,
Wheel on axle, groaning, gags and, grinding, turns.
Earth, besmirched, is churned and shattered into chunks,
Fields in patches swim and splatter, drowning everywhere,
Rain, splish-splashing, washes down the backs of folks,
Bast shoes, stuffed in shabby boots, soak up the water,
While they stomp and knead foul mud like dough.
Ah, where are you now, you wondrous days of spring,
When we, re-opening the windows of the cottage,
Welcomed back your first warm flood of sunshine?

Record sleeve for a recording of Bronius Kutavičius's Metai oratorio.
From the'Kristijonas Donelaitis in art'page of a site (in English) dedicated to the poet.
The site also includes illustrations for Metai, including this autumn rain scene.

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The vast and queachy soil

May 29, 2015, 7:44 am

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In this post I want to draw your attention to Complex Crosses, a book of close readings by my friend Edmund Hardy which 'spans the history of poetry by alighting on small fragments'. I reproduce with permission one of these in its entirety below.

Michael Drayton / compounds of place / 1622

From fast and firmer earth, whereon the Muse of late,
Trod with a steady foot, now with a slower gait,
Through quicksands, beach, and ooze, the Washes she must wade,
Where Neptuneevery day doth powerfully invade
The vast and queachy soil, with hosts of wallowing waves

(Polyolbion, The Five and Twentieth Song, lines 11-15)

The muse trods in gradations from the “fast and firmer” chalky uplands of Lincolnshire into the ooze of “vast and queachy soil”: “with a steady foot” begins on the chalk (to the north and south of the fens) and Jurassic rocks to the west, then down into the levels “with a slower gait” as sedimentation has slowed the landscape with “quicksands, beach, and ooze”, an interdigitation of peat, clay, silt and chalky islands. “Neptune every day” fixes the eroding action of the sea within the long time-span needed to imagine the erosion of the one-time chalk escarpment as the sea breaks in, and sedimentation fills the basin – the long span of Neptune within “every day”. The resulting fens are both sea and land, compounded linguistically in “wallowing waves”, presaging the area’s own self description in the poem “I peremptory am, large Neptune’s liquid field” (line 151). The soil is onomatopoeically queachy, heard and felt as the steady foot of the topographic muse puts a foot in, and finds that foot sucked into the landscape.

- Edmund Hardy, Complex Crosses (2014)

Illustration from Polyolbion (1622) engraved by William Hole

While the topographic muse trod through quicksands, beach and ooze, the inhabitants of the Fens in Drayton's day got about on stilts. Drayton mentions this in his poem and William Camden, writing a little earlier, drew particular attention to the practice. In Brittania (Latin 1586, trans 1610) we read of the inhabitants of Cambridgeshire’s peat fens: ‘a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell rude, uncivill, and envious to all others whom they call Upland-men: who stalking on high upon stilts apply their mindes, to grasing, fishing and fowling.’ Isaac Casaubon spent some weeks in 1611 in and around Ely where he ‘made acquaintance with the solitary bittern and the imitative dotterel, with turf-fires and with stilts, and with the stilt walkers who were able to run so quickly. At Downham, he was surprised to see one man on stilts drive 400 cattle to pasture with the help of only one small boy.’^* It is tempting to draw a comparison with Drayton's poem, which is rarely stilted but does (as I've mentioned before) tend to stride rapidly over the landscape without really touching its surface.

Drayton died in 1631 and in the subsequent decade work began on the draining of the Fens. It was a process described in a poem that has been attributed to Samuel Fortrey:

I sing Floods muzled, and the Ocean tam'd,
Luxurious Rivers govern'd, and reclam'd,
Waters with Banks confin'd, as in a Gaol,
Till kinder Sluces let them go on Bail;
Streams curb'd with Dammes like Bridles, taught t'obey,
And run as strait, as if they saw their way.

It is not surprising to read in 'An Account of Several Observables in Lincolnshire, not taken notice of in Camden, or any other Author’, written at the end of the seventeenth century by Christopher Merret, that 'Stilts are now grown out of Fashion.’

^* H. C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens, 1940, which contains the two quotes in the last paragraph here too.

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Wreckage upon wreckage

June 4, 2015, 1:57 pm

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Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.' - Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'

A couple of months ago I was in Eastbourne to see the exhibition Ori Gersht: Don’t Look Back. It included his two-screen film, Evaders, a reimagining of the last journey of Walter Benjamin. The film begins with an actor in a hotel room and we hear Benjamin's famous description of the angel of history. When the voice-over reaches “his face is turned toward the past”, the other screen is activated. Now the actor is trudging through the cold mountains, battered by the weather, looking older than Benjamin actually was in 1940 (but Benjamin was physically frail and encumbered by a heavy suitcase). ‘He moves at a steady, laboured pace through patches of mist, along a snowy tree-lined path. Often, on the right screen majestic landscapes contrast with the man’s suffering and vulnerability on the left: sweeping mountain vistas grazed by clouds, trees shrouded in fog, craggy boulders, and the wind whipping over a riverbed’ (Al Miner, Ori Gersht: History Repeating). The route taken by Benjamin was 'particularly dangerous because of the tramontana, a violently strong, dry wind that can last for days and is, in the cooler months, bitterly cold. The tramontana is known for its piercing moan, and locals attribute murders and suicides to long exposure to the sound.’ Benjamin survived the journey but at Portbou, on the border of France and Spain (as I wrote here a few years ago), exhausted and fearing repatriation, he took his own life with an overdose of morphine tablets.

In 2005 Ori Gersht travelled to Kosov in Ukraine, the birthplace of his father-in-law, who hid there for from the Germans two and a half years after the village had been declared “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews). The blurred Richter-like photographs Orsht took raise similar questions about the representation of such places as the Sally Mann Civil War landscapes I wrote about here a few years ago. Gersht explained his decision not to photograph what he saw in a clear, objective way: ‘the camera can only depict the here and now, in this instance a pastoral Brueghelesque landscape, but my experience of these places was conditioned by what I knew…’ Steven Bode puts it well in an essay in the book to accompany Gersht's exhibition The Clearing: ‘the ghostly indeterminacy of the majority of the images, rather than reading as portentous, seems more redolent, at times, of feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Is this landscape as haunted, and as loaded, as he himself sees it? Have these places retained any traces of what happened over sixty years ago? And if not, how can they be made to communicate, so that the memory of what once went on there is not to be forgotten?’

On the same journey Gersht made a film in the Moskolovka Forest (see the clip below). The setting, a site of Nazi atrocities during the war, reminded me of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory ('Blood in the Forest') and the histories, myths and ideologies associated with Europe's ancient woodlands. In Forest trees are felled, crashing slowly to the ground with a sound that reverberated around the gallery. In between these moments, birdsong can be heard again as the camera remains still or pans slowly across the tall trunks, leaving you wondering which one will be next. We never see the men whose actions result in the death of these trees. Whilst it is, in Al Miner's words, ‘an elegy for the nameless dead who were lost in wartime atrocities, the piece also enacts the kind of ceaseless vigil that will be needed if these crimes are not to be repeated.’

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Uncommon Ground

June 11, 2015, 2:30 pm

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A few weeks ago, on leaving the job I had done for six years, I was gifted a copy of Dominick Tyler's Uncommon Ground. It combines attractive photographs with short descriptions of some of the words that have been used for British landscape features, partly inspired, like Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, by the Barry Lopez/Debra Gwartney collection Home Ground. There are some intriguingly obscure words here like 'fraon', a place of shelter in the mountains, which Tyler found in a couple of early eighteenth century Gaelic dictionaries. But many will be familiar from school geography lessons: tor, meander, blowhole, clint and gryke. As I remember it the standard geographical terms were taught rather than local British variants: arête rather than druim or aonach. However in one case I do recall being offered three interchangeable terms - cirque, cwm and corrie - as there seemed to be no collective agreement on what to call these glacial basins. Tyler groups these under the word 'coire' - the Gaelic original of 'corrie'. He says coombes are the same thing too which I don't think my geography teacher would quite have agreed with (we had lots of coombes in periglacial Sussex). The one that Edward Thomas described in his poem 'The Combe', 'dark, ancient and dark', would have been quite difficult to photograph for Uncommon Ground: 'The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, /Are quite shut out.'

blowhole!

Uncommon Ground quotes sparingly from writers, but there are three lines from Milton's 'Comus' that mention both 'dingle' and 'dell': 'I know each lane, and every alley green / Dingle or bushy dell of this wilde Wood, / And every bosky bourn from side to side.' The photograph accompanying this text shows Bunyan's Dell in Herefordshire, where a large congregation of non-conformists once gathered 'under the canopy of heaven' to hear John Bunyan preach. Milton's word 'bosky', referring to a thicket of trees, 'was also a word for a state of mild inebriation, perhaps drawing a parallel between a confusion of mind and a tangle of branches.' I can't find any of these terms in the Landmarks glossaries, which suggests there is less overlap between the two books than you might think. Robert Macfarlane is happy to admit words coined by poets, most notably Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems include: 'twindle' - stream foam dividing into two braids; 'heavengravel' - hailstones, and in the same line of poetry 'wolfsnow' for a sea-blizzard; 'slogger' - the sucking sound made by a waves against the side of a boat; 'shadowtackle' - the shifting patterns of shadow on woodland floors; 'leafmeal' which evokes the way leaves fall one by one and then lie like ground grain, 'silk-ash' - the fine ash covering glowing embers; and 'doomfire', an apocalyptic sunset.

Bunyan's Dell

Uncommon Ground starts with a local word, 'zawn', derived from a Cornish word for a chasm, but reading it through you keep coming across connections with other languages and landscapes. 'Shiver', the Cumbrian term for a fragment of slate derives from the Germanic word for splinter, 'scivero', which in turn, 'in a nice little etymological loop', led to the modern German 'schiefer', slate. It is pleasing to learn that the Russian word 'Zastrugi' which gives us the name for ridges in snow formed by the wind also means 'the splintering of planed wood against the grain' and 'the undercut bank of a stream' (although even more pleasing would be to learn that Russian has two additional words for these precise phenomena). This kind of thing made me want to see the global glossary of landscape terms being slowly compiled, according to Robert Macfarlane, by the Arabic scholar Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall. It has occurred to me that this Borgesian encyclopedia may prove insufficiently ambitious if it excludes the rimae, catena and dorsa of the Moon, or the words that will be needed to describe detailed features or atmospheric effects elsewhere in the solar system. But I suppose I am betraying here my urban sensibility, where the daily experience of nature can seem as remote as those planetary features discerned in telescopes and given Latin names before anyone has been able to experience them.

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The sea is never far

June 16, 2015, 11:27 pm

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'Narrated in fruity tones by future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Figures in a Landscape offers a poetic portrait of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the otherworldly Cornwall landscapes that inspired her work.' This is how the BFI Mediatheque describes Dudley Shaw Ashton's short film and you can hear that plummy voice in the extract below, along with the 'haunting score' by Hepworth's friend Priaulx Rainer. It would be easy to assume that the words in the film are Day Lewis's but in fact they were written by Jacquetta Hawkes, whose remarkable book on Britain, A Land, had appeared two years earlier. The film begins with shots of the sea and coast and the words I have quoted below (punctuation my own), in which landscape, through the forces of wave and wind, is figured as a natural sculptor. It then traces the ways that stone has taken on 'forms rising in the minds of man', from stone circles to churches and mines, standing out initially from their settings until 'seasons and centuries claimed them for the landscape.'

"Cornwall, a horn of rock, its point thrust out into the sea. Smooth or ribbed with waves, pale deep blue or angry dark, the sea lies round about it and from three sides sends up its mirrored light. Here is Penwith, the moors narrowing to Lands End, from the sea coast to the north it is not far across the rusty moors, where the rocks break through the bracken, not far to where the sea lies to the south. The sea is never far. It shapes the rocks, sometimes fingering them gently, sometimes forging them with long thundering blows, hollowing those caves where waves revolve in darkness.

"Or it cuts arches where the bright see light stares through above the waters, the wind blows upon the skin of the sea until it creeps and shivers. It follows behind the relentless roll of the tides. The wind passes its hand across the moors, ordering the grasses, smoothing the rocks beneath. Autumn, winter, spring and summer, the wind and the sea carve the rocks, whittling their images. They are at it now and have been at it a million million years, beyond the reach of clocks."

Whilst the dominant metaphor here may be nature as sculptor, it is hard not to read a sexual element into this imagery. I mentioned this in an earlier post on Jacquetta Hawkes, whose lover J. B. Priestley is quoted as having said of her "What a woman — ice without and fire within!" Ashton's visual imagery echoes the script with shots of standing forms and foaming waves, but what is most distinctive is the way he uses Hepworth's sculptures, placing them around the landscape in compositions that have a surreal quality (see below). The clip embedded here shows Hepworth in her St Ives garden (which Priaulx Rainer helped design), at work with her mallets and files, but around the three minute mark we see a finished piece lying on the sand to be polished by the waves. "The waves beat on the stone and the yielding wood, claiming them back from the small plans of man, they give them the shape of the earth and its tides, but the carver cuts deeper with her seeing eye."

Barbara Hepworth's Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)(1940)

in front of mounds of china clay in a scene from Figures in a Landscape.

"But others came cheerfully to dig for china clay. They piled the dark moors with soft white cones that stood in the staring light of the sea, bright light that breaks into colour."

A new exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World starts next week at Tate Britain and it will focus on the way her work has been presented or imagined in different contexts, including the landscape.

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Sonic Waters and Fantastic Caverns

June 21, 2015, 1:14 am

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I have written here before about composers who have sought to impress the environment into their music by burying instruments in the earth (Richard Skelton) or immersing recordings in river water (Rob St. John). A desire to enter into the landscape may also lie behind music that has been created underwater or in caves beneath the ground. I have mentioned a few examples of the latter before, but there is now a relatively long history to these genres of landscape music and so I thought I would highlight here some examples from over thirty years ago, beginning with the work of Michel Redolfi, whose Pacific Tubular Waves / Immersion was recently reissued by Editions Mego. Pacific Tubular Waves (1979) is not an underwater piece - it was 'inspired by the oceanic horizons of San Diego' - but it became the raw material for Immersion (1980). For this, Redolfi played his earlier piece through a sonar loudspeaker underwater, so that it was 'shuffled by the waves and unexpected filtering effects resulted from its passing through clouds of foam. Its dispersion at sea by currents would send back incredibly smooth harmonic echoes.' If he had left a recording of Immersion in the sea it might have been brought up years later, scoured by the underwater currents but still usable as the basis for a third version of this composition.

In 1981 Redolfi's Sonic Waters concert was broadcast underwater in the Pacific for an audience who could experience it floating on the surface or submerged in diving suits. However, as Stefan Helmreich has pointed out, this concert was 'accompanied by campy sea creaturey devices, such as the giant colorful “jellyfish” that kept a low-frequency speaker afloat in La Jolla Cove. Such playfulness is a reminder that Redolfi does not imagine crustaceans, fish, or marine mammals as audiences ... Redolfi’s approach looks similar to that of the Florida Keys underwater music festival. Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009, the festival offers to scuba divers music played over Lubell Laboratory speakers attached to boats floating near the reef. Attendees dress up as fish.' There is an ocean of difference between that festival's'reef rockstars, "Paul McCarpney" and "Ringo Starfish"' performing sea-themed pop songs and the experimental underwater investigations of modern sound artists like Jana Winderen. I can't help feeling there must be potential between these extremes for new forms of site-specific undersea composition and performance in the future.

Over the last few decades most of Redolfi's concerts (see clip above) have taken place in swimming pools, where the emphasis is on the unusual auditory experience rather than the character of the sea. However, the ambience and special qualities of these locations will never be irrelevant. The pools chosen by Redolfi and others like the Wetsounds organisation or Max Neuhaus, the pioneer in this field, will have had their own acoustic properties and historical associations. Similarly, performances in cave-like spaces in cities or industrial locations can be as atmospheric as concerts in natural caverns. As with the underwater composers, much of the motivation for seeking out resonant underground spaces has been to make use of their unique sound properties - the Deep Listening Band, for example, have played in the giant Fort Worden Cistern which has a 45 second reverberation time. But caves have a deeper significance, having been the sites for music making since prehistoric times, a point brought home to me recently by the discovery of an ancient lyre in a cave on Skye. Here there is no direct parallel with performing underwater, although if there is an atavistic urge to make subterranean music, there may be an even more profound source for subaquatic music, since all of us begin life experiencing sound and music immersed in amniotic fluid.

Back in the late 1950s (when the real Paul McCartney was making his first appearances at the Cavern club with The Quarrymen), the Great Stalacpipe Organ, designed by Leland W. Sprinkle, was under construction at the Luray Caverns in Virginia. Although described as ‘the largest natural musical instrument in the world’ its design involved altering the shape of some of the stalactites. Music had actually been performed in this sonorous cave (as the postcard above from 1906 below shows) almost since its discovery in 1878. A delegation from the Smithsonian Institution were surprised on an 1880 tour when co-discoverer Andrew Campbell picked out a tune on the rock formation that was later used for the Organ. There are no other Stalacpipe Organs, but many other American caves have been settings for concerts: Bristow Cave, Tennessee, the Great Saltpeter Cave, Kentucky, Longhorn Cavern, Texas. Worth mentioning here if only for its cover is a live recording from 1968, The Fantastic Thrashers at Fantastic Caverns. According to its sleeve notes, 'the underground auditorium was packed and jammed. The dripping water, the underground river in the background, the weird effect of the lights off moist stalagmites were all made to come alive by the sparkling sound of the Thrashers.'

Then, in a very different vein, there was Don Cherry, who recorded two improvisations at the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in 1978. Here is Anna Mayo's description (from the useful Caveinspiredmusic site)

“On a morning in early October I watched the great free jazzman Don Cherry as he scaled a ledge high on the sheer wall of the Longest Cave in the World and played the rocks like a xylophone. Far below, our guide had fired up two kerosene lanterns so that we were able to doff our miners’ hats. Cherry, on the ledge, gave off vibes of the leopard-spirit of the Ngbe tribe as he improvised a roller-coaster of sound. Throughout Cherry’s performance, producer Verna Gillis sat on the cave floor, at one with her Stellavox tape recorder, earphones like a ceremonial headdress... Adjusting the AKG microphone... was sculptor Bradford Graves. Cherry darted from one rock to another, striking them with two hickory branches he’d brought along at the guide’s suggestion.”

Perhaps improvisers are best suited to exploring the musical possibilities of cave systems. The Summartónar festival has brought jazz musicians like John Tchicai to perform to an audience in small boats in the sea caves of the Faroe Islands. However, it is more usual to find show caves used as natural halls for the staging of more traditional concerts. There are several such venues in Germany, including the cavern at Hohler Fels where, some 35,000 years ago, Palaeolithic musicians left behind bone and ivory flutes. In Lebanon the Jeïta caves were opened for concerts in 1969 and closed a decade later during the Civil War, its passages converted into a munitions store. Thus the distinction between caves and buildings becomes blurred - 'natural' spaces cease to become natural when they are discovered. My last example below below combines natural and electronic sounds. It is part of Jeïta ou Murmure des eaux (1970), a composition by François Bayle, who performed the inaugural concert at the the Jeïta caves. When he found back in Paris that some of the field recordings he made in the cave were not good enough for his purposes he decided to replace them with 'beautiful water sounds' recorded in the bathroom of the studio.

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Groombridge Place

June 28, 2015, 8:31 am

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'The origin of the plot of The Draughtsman's Contract is autobiographical ... I discovered a house on the border of England and Wales not far from Hay-on-Wye, where I attempted to draw a fairly modest early Victorian house. The weather was unusually fine. For about three weeks, I did some drawings ... But also, since I was on holiday and enjoying myself, there were constant interruptions that I made no attempt to avoid: playing with my children, doing a piece of gardening, going to the shops, having meals, simply falling asleep in the sun. And this is the premise for the film. It's a story about a draughtsman who draws a country house and is constantly interrupted. ... It is also a fictional evocation of a long-vanished age in which draughtsmen and painters were employed by country-house owners in England to draw or paint their estates, their property, their houses and gardens. They commissioned such works to show off to their neighbours, or maybe even simply to delight themselves with their prosperity and status ... The whole film is very much a landscape film, which would relate to the traditions of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, two Frenchmen who spent most of their lives and their painting careers in Italy and had an enormous influence, not only on French landscape but on English landscape. The three predominant colours of this film are black, white and green. The black and white essentially of the costumes, and the green of the English countryside.' - Peter Greenaway quoted in the Guardian, 1 August 2003

Yesterday, in 'unusually fine' weather, we travelled to Groombridge Place in Kent, the setting for The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). The house was built in 1662 by Philip Packer, with assistance from Christopher Wren, and the gardens designed by John Evelyn (all three were fellows of the Royal Society). Writing about this period at the beginning of his gardening history The Arcadian Friends, Tim Richardson regrets that 'there is a tendency today to view this kind of seventeenth century 'formality' - what a strange term for it! - as sterile and lifeless.' The same has been said of Peter Greenaway of course: 'for every person who reveres his work, there are many others who regard it as arid, cerebral and insular. "It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content," he says. "It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport."' The Draughtsman's Contract exemplifies Greenaway's belief that 'the form and the content should ideally be brought closely together.' It is designed like a Baroque garden and its plot links the ideas of framing for a drawing and framing for a crime.

Michael Nyman, Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds

The game of formal constraints that structures the film carried over into Michael Nyman's conception for its music. Nyman's website explains that he went back to the complete works of Purcell (who died in 1695, a year after the film is set) 'and rooted out ground basses' to provide repetitive harmonic schemes. These 'could be interpreted as making a musical parallel with the organisational and temporal constraints that the draughtsman Neville imposes on the Herbert household as he goes about his task of completing the 12 commissioned drawings of the house and the grounds. The initial plan for the score was to assign a different ground bass to each of the two sets of six drawings (to help with the ‘reading’ of each of Neville’s designated viewpoints) and allow each piece to grow and develop as each drawing progressed over six days. This fine plan was shot to pieces by the practicalities of film length, the editing process and the invariable problems of balancing the demands of dialogue.'

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Hans Willem Bentinck, c. 1698-9
(those wigs in The Draughtsman's Contract were not completely exaggerated)

One aspect of the film I particularly like is that for all its postmodern artifice in design, dialogue and music, there is a very specific historical context. It is 1694, year of the Married Woman's Property Act (which is crucial for the plot) and, as Greenaway explains, 'the Dutch Protestant aristocracy is now firmly in place in England.' At Groombridge the canal, where a body is found in The Draughtsman's Contract, certainly gives the garden a Dutch feel. It is Tim Richardson's contention that this period of Dutch influence, rather than the eighteenth century, gave birth to the English landscape garden. Formality gradually began to give way to naturalness in the form of looser planting and serpentine walks. Richardson writes about the friendship between Sir William Temple and Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, both diplomats and garden designers who worked to secure the throne for William and Mary. Bentinck 'proudly commissioned a series of forty-four engravings of his garden at Zorgvliet in the 1690s', a fact which makes me wonder whether Greenaway had them in mind when he wrote his film. EventuallyBentinck married a niece of Temple's, with whom he had six children. There is a Dutchman too in The Draughtsman's Contract, but he is unable to provide his wife with an heir. Which is why she strikes up her own private contract with the Draughtsman, for rather more than he could deliver with a pencil...

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As we descended to this valley

July 3, 2015, 4:09 am

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Samuel Palmer, The Harvest Moon: Drawing for ‘A Pastoral Scene’, c.1831–2

Source: Wikimedia Commons

As we descended to this valley,
where Samuel Palmer had used to walk - bareheaded
under the moon -
the passing clouds above
"did marvellously supple the ground."

- Ronald Johnson, The Book of the Green Man (1967)

Samuel Palmer is the inspiration for the fourth part of Ronald Johnson's marvellous book-length poem, an 'attempt, as a brash American, to make new the traditional British long seasonal poem', recently re-published by Uniformbooks. Johnson had come over to England in 1963 and he descended into Palmer's 'Valley of Vision' with Jonathan Williams, who would write his own 'Two Pastorals for Samuel Palmer at Shoreham, Kent'. These can be read at the Poetry Foundation, although they omit a footnote in which Williams refers readers to Geoffrey Grigson's Samuel Palmer: Valley of Vision and Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years. Johnson was also influenced by Grigson's anthologies and writings on Romanticism: 'one should read all of Grigson' he wrote, 'his books are seminal and essential.' The Book of the Green Man concludes with a yellow moon rising over Palmer's hills and newly-cut wheat: 'beneath a husk / of twilight / were as many suns as kernels, / & fields were far / as the eye / could reach.'

Jonathan Williams quoted this 'ecstatic reverie' in the appreciation he wrote when Johnson died in 1999. He also recalled their early walks together in America, 'perfect training for poets: learning to attend the names of birds and plants and stars and trees and stones.' Their discovery of Palmer's Shoreham was just one part of an extraordinary British 'Grand Tour' which formed the basis for The Book of the Green Man (links are to earlier posts on this blog):

We went up to Ardgay in Easter Ross in the north of Scotland to meet Ian Hamilton Finlay. We saw Hugh MacDiarmid in both Langholm and Biggar. We saw Basil Bunting up the Tyne above Newcastle at Wylam. And Herbert Read at Stonegrave House in the hills north of York. We went to Broad Town under the Wiltshire Downs to see Geoffrey and Jane Grigson. Geoffrey took us to Faringdon for Lord Berners' folly tower, to Buscot Park for Burne-Jones's Briar-Rose paintings, and to Lydiard Tregoze for the splendid interior of the Church of St Mary. Jane fixed Welsh girdle cakes for breakfast, the first we had ever tasted. We visited the graves of Blake and Palmer, Stanley Spencer and Walter Sickert, Delius and William Morris. In the spring of 1963 we walked from the mouth of the River Wye at Chepstow, up its long, winding valley, to its source high on the flanks of Great Plynlimmon. We hitched a few rides to allow us to add Kilpeck Church to Francis Kilvert's at Bredwardine along the route. And Strata Florida and the site of Hafod House further into Wales. And more pilgrimages that summer. To Nottinghamshire to Southwell Minster and the amazing foliate heads and plant carvings in the Chapter House. To Gilbert White's Selborne in Hampshire. To Samuel Palmer's Shoreham in Kent. To the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. To Compton in Surrey for the Watts Mortuary Chapel. To Brighton for John Nash's Royal Pavilion. We were looking for all things, as RJ said, 'most rich, most glittering, most strange'.

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The River of Heaven

July 6, 2015, 11:00 pm

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Ando Hiroshige, Tanabata Festival in Edo, 1852

(from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji)

'Among the many charming festivals celebrated by Old Japan, the most romantic was the festival of Tanabata-Sama, the Weaving-Lady of the Milky Way.' When Lafcadio Hearn wrote this at the beginning of the twentieth century, the custom had largely been abandoned in the cities. I wonder if even then light pollution was beginning to make it hard to see the Milky Way (in 2008 the Japanese prime minister asked people to switch off their lights to celebrate the festival). The Chinese legend behind the festival tells of Orihime, daughter of the Sky King, who weaves clothes beside the heavenly river, and her marriage to the herder Hikoboshi. Once married she stops weaving and he lets his cattle stray all over Heaven, so the Sky King forbids them to meet. However, moved by his daughter's tears he relents and allows them to cross the river once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, when a flock of magpies create a bridge for them. Today, July 7th, still marks the beginning of the Tanabata festivals, although the exact date varies by region. Lafcadio Hearn's description of how it used to be celebrated is, I think, particularly evocative: ink stones, morning dew, poetry, bamboo planting and offerings to the star deities...

'The popular customs relating to the festival differed according to locality. Those of Izumo—where all classes of society, samurai or common folk, celebrated the holiday in much the same way—used to be particularly interesting; and a brief account of them will suggest something of the happy aspects of life in feudal times. At the Hour of the Tiger, on the seventh night of the seventh month, everybody was up; and the work of washing the inkstones and writing-brushes was performed. Then, in the household garden, dew was collected upon yam-leaves. This dew was called Amanogawa no suzuki ("drops from the River of Heaven"); and it was used to make fresh ink for writing the poems which were to be suspended to bamboos planted in the garden. It was usual for friends to present each other with new inkstones at the time of the Tanabata festival; and if there were any new inkstones in the house, the fresh ink was prepared in these. Each member of the family then wrote poems. The adults composed verses, according to their ability, in praise of the Star-deities; and the children either wrote dictation or tried to improvise. Little folk too young to use the writing-brush without help had their small hands guided, by parent or elder sister or elder brother, so as to shape on a tanzaku the character of some single word or phrase relating to the festival,—such as "Amanogawa," or "Tanabata," or "Kasasagi no Hashi" (the Bridge of Magpies). In the garden were planted two freshly-cut bamboos, with branches and leaves entire,—a male bamboo (otoko-daké) and a female bamboo (onna-daké). They were set up about six feet apart, and to a cord extended between them were suspended paper-cuttings of five colors, and skeins of dyed thread of five colors. The paper-cuttings represented upper-robes,—kimono. To the leaves and branches of the bamboos were tied the tanzaku on which poems had been written by the members of the family. And upon a table, set between the bamboos, or immediately before them, were placed vessels containing various offerings to the Star-deities,—fruits, sōmen, rice-wine, and vegetables of different kinds, such as cucumbers and watermelons.' (The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories, 1905)

One reason for mentioning this festival here is that in the Tanabata story the Milky Way has been imagined as a landscape feature in the sky. Hearn begins his essay with a quotation from an 'ancient scholar': 'Of old it was said: "The River of Heaven is the Ghost of Waters." We behold it shifting its bed in the course of the year as an earthly river sometimes does.' At the end of the festival people went down to their nearest earthly rivers. The bamboo that had been planted and fixed to houses (like branches in the European May traditions I wrote about here recently) were then thrown into the water with poems attached to them. Hearn concludes his essay with the reflection that old Japanese poetry based on the Tanabata legend, so remote from our modern worldview, may have little appeal in the West.

'Nevertheless, in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the scintillant sky,—to make me forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanogawa itself,—the River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the winds of autumn.'

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Vision of a possible city

July 10, 2015, 2:46 am

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In 2012 William Kentridge delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. This was the lecture series that gave us Italo Calvino's wonderful Six Memos for the Next Millenium (he died before he could deliver them); I wonder how differently these might have been conceived now, in the age of Ted Talks and multi-media. It is no surprise that an artist like Kentridge interspersed his words with film clips or that Harvard University Press have produced an enhanced e-book of the lectures, Six Drawing Lessons. However, I've been reading an old-fashioned hardback version and thought I'd share here a few observations he makes on the history and geography of Johannesburg, a city he has lived in his entire life.

Johannesburg is a city that has 'an entirely geological justification'. When a meteor struck the land it's impact caused a thin seam of subterranean gold to be tilted so that it met the surface a hundred kilometers from the impact site. After the discovery of gold in 1886 Johannesburg was, for its first thirty years, the fastest growing city in the world. There is a map made in 1889 that shows the physical landscape, the initial constructions (see photograph below) and 'a vision of a possible city. At the time the map was drawn and printed, only about 3 percent of the streets and buildings and suburbs on it had been made. It is extraordinary that now, 120 years later, almost all the map exists as a physical fact.'

Kentridge goes on to describe an episode that would have intrigued Calvino, author of Invisible Cities and The Baron in the Trees.

'Around 1900, at the end of the war between the British and the Afrikaners for control of the gold mines, the city of Johannesburg, wanting to keep the demobilized soldiers busy rather than drunk, employed them at a penny a tree to plant a forest of a million trees on the pavements and gardens of the city. Johannesburg, by its own and some outside estimations, is the largest man-made forest in the world. From my studio, you look out over an undulating sea of treetops.'

The lush gardens and trees are sustained in this naturally dry, inhospitable land by irrigation that brings water from rivers hundreds of kilometers away. 'The streams of the city itself are miserable ditches, stormwater drains awaiting the rainstorms. But underground, where the mining is, it is the reverse.' The continual pumping away of this water has left the ground prone to sinkholes, an unstable foundation for the racially segregated suburbs. 'In my childhood there were stories of an entire tennis match - the umpire on his high chair, the tea and orange juice on the table next to the court, the family Labrador - all being swallowed by a huge sinkhole, never found, never recovered.'

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Rewilding

July 24, 2015, 1:52 am

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Last week saw the launch of Rewilding Britain and an interesting piece on Channel 4 News in which George Monbiot returned to the Welsh sheep-farming 'Desert' he described in Feral. The clip embedded above includes interviews with rewilder Ritchie Tassell and sheep farmer Dafydd Jones, who speaks entirely in Welsh to emphasise the landscape's cultural ecology. Both feature in Feral and demonstrate opposing ways in which rewilding can be seen - as an attempt to reverse the long history of increasing estrangement from nature, or as the final step in a process that has driven people off the land. Tassell recalls his childhood in Northumberlandshire, when the last mixed farms disappeared: 'that was the worst of times in terms of habitat destruction, almost the final nail in the coffin of what John Clare was writing about.' But for Dafydd Jones, rewilding is a post-Romantic ideology, that seems to imagine a world without people. In Feral Monbiot tries to reconcile these positions, concluding that it would be possible to rebalance economic incentives so that 'people as well as wildlife will regain a footing on the land.'

Monbiot wrote about John Clare in one of his columns a few years ago, recalling how he documented 'both the destruction of place and people and the gradual collapse of his own state of mind. "Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave … And birds and trees and flowers without a name / All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came." Enclosure removed Clare from the intimate Northamptonshire landscape he had experienes as a boy. Jay Griffith, quoted in Feral, sees this as a historical moment that 'reaved children of the site of their childhood, robbed them of animal-tutors and river-mentors and stole their deep dream-shelters.' This is one of the concerns of Rewilding Britian, which is part of a wider movement to encourage children to reconnect with nature (discussed, for example, in the last chapter of Robert Macfarlane's recent book Landmarks). In Feral, Monbiot writes that 'of all the world's creatures, perhaps those in greatest need of rewilding are our children. ... Missing from children's lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods.' My own children see little of woodlands in Hackney but they did spend last weekend playing among the trees with their school friends on a parent-organised camping trip. We were in Epping Forest, not far from the spot where John Clare arrived one July day in 1837, to live at Dr. Allen's asylum.

Wandering through the forest and playing hide-and-seek among the trees it was impossible not to be struck by their strange shapes, with multiple trunks growing from their bases. They were regularly pollarded until the Epping Forest Act of 1878, which stipulated that the City of London Corporation "shall at all times keep Epping Forest unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people". However, this preservation of the forest has affected its biodiversity as the trees' great crowns block out light, leaving the ground almost bear apart from dead leaves, bark and odd bits of rubbish. Some of the forest trees have multiple trunks at ground level, representing decades of growth since they were last coppiced. Their ability to regenerate after coppicing is the subject of a startling speculation in Feral: that our trees adapted to survive snapping and uprooting by the straight-tusked elephants that roamed across Europe until 40,000 years ago. Similarly, 'blackthorn, which possesses very long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not, perhaps to deter browsing by rhinoceros.' The toughness of holly, yew and box trees may reflect an ability to withstand threats that no longer exist.

'Even if these speculations do not lead to the reintroduction of elephants and rhinos, do they not render the commonplace astonishing? The notion that our most familiar trees are elephant-adapted, that we can see in their shadows the great beasts with which humans evolved, that the marks of these animals can be found in every park and avenue and leafy street, infuses the world with new wonders. Paleoecology - the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our won - feels like a portal through which we may pass into an enchanted kingdom.'

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Toward the sea’s edge

July 31, 2015, 10:53 am

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Reading sad news this week of the death of Lee Harwood, I remembered an unfinished post I began a few years ago on one of his books and its inspiration, Raymond Roussel's poem, 'La Source'. I will return to this shortly, but it seems fitting to say a few things first about Harwood's own landscape-related poetry. According to the Poetry Archive, 'his work is ... as much in the traditions of John Clare and Wordsworth as the 20th century avant-garde poetics of DADA, the Black Mountain poets and the British Poetry Revival.' He wrote of the Welsh mountains, the Northlands of Canada, the coast of California and the Sussex landscape in and around Brighton, where he mainly lived from 1967 (I wonder whether, growing up in Brighton, I ever encountered him there in his day jobs as a postal clerk or bus conductor). His verse was embedded with intriguing and eclectic cultural references (such as Roussel) and often took inspiration from specific paintings. In an Argotist interview he said, 'I hope my work isn’t full of art references, but equally it would be stupid to believe that we’re some kind of Gary Snyder backwoodsman and that we never listen to music or look at paintings or read difficult books. That’s part of life too.' He would have enjoyed the Royal Academy's Joseph Cornell exhibition, which I visited with two poet friends last week. In his poem ‘Days and Nights: Accidental Sightings', Harwood wrote 'A Bundle of 50 Sticks For Joseph Cornell and Others’. This is the last one:

The white box contains a landscape – bare branches, a night sky
set with stars, a window, a figure, curious objects.
We look in from outside.

The photo above shows the title page of a short collection called simply Landscapes that Harwood published in 1969. The poems do not have precise locations and places are remembered only haltingly. In ‘Question of geography’ he half recalls somewhere, ‘green a rich brown as the sun shone / turned to slate grey at times a soft blue smudge/ with dusk or rain clouds the detail obscured.’ These broad strokes remind me of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings, slowly worked on over the years whilst memories become overlaid and blurred. ‘You paint over the picture & start on / the new one but all the same it’s still there beneath the fresh plains of colour.’ Several poems in this book are ‘for Marian’ and sometimes the loved body and the landscape fuse: ‘When the sea is as grey as her eyes / On these days for sure the soft white / mist blown in from the ocean the town dissolving / It all adds up her bare shoulders…’ He writes about painting out in the landscape but can sound weary of the ‘the whole routine of bare / canvas & all the paints all squeezed out’. Next to the experience of another person, a seascape can seem superficial: ‘Sea coves & cliffs, the deserted beach - / they all mean so little / You are there & that is what it is.’ ‘When the geography was fixed’ begins with a view from a room of distant hills, which turns out to be a painting, so delicately done that it is almost a bare canvas. ‘The hill & the room are both in / the white. The colours are here / inside us I suppose.’

The book I had intended to write about here was 'Wine Tales', a collaboration with Ric Caddel. I was intrigued by its premise, to write short texts based on the images in wine labels. The wines chosen – Muscadet, Claret, Liebfraumilch – take me back to the time when my parents would choose a bottle from a Brighton supermarket to drink together a the weekend. I started making tasting notes and still have them, including one for Sainsbury's Rosé d'Anjou (£1.69, "pleasant, if undistinguished"), which was the source for one of the 'Wine Tales'. In a book of interviews Harwood described the genesis of the book:

'Ric was visiting me in Brighton and we were talking about the wonderful labels you used to get on wine bottles and the stories you could make up to go with them. I'd already done one from a Claret label. So we decided on a collaboration where one of us would choose a wine label, start a piece, send that to the other who would complete that piece. ... The idea was sparked by a poem by Raymond Roussel called 'La Source'. It's a long poem in strict verse form. A narrator is sitting in a restaurant with a bottle of mineral water and there's a scene, a landscape, on the bottle. He walks into the landscape. It's a long description of what he sees. Right at the end, he comes out of the label, back to the table in time for the waiter to arrive with his lunch.'

← part of a page from 'Wine Tales' (Galloping Dog Press, 1984)

my Rosé d'Anjou tasting notes from 1985 →

The reason I never finished my post on Lee Harwood and 'La Source' was that I did not have an English version of Roussel's poem. However, there is an English translation by Anthony Melville of 'La Vue', which Roussel published together with 'La Source' (and a third poem 'Le Concert') in 1904. 'The View' is a description over 2000 lines long of a tiny beach scene set into the lens of a pen-holder. The poet's eye focuses in on this seascape and begins to explore the view, encountering a fishing boat and a yacht with people standing about on deck, whose attitudes suggest their inner emotions and motivations. Returning to the beach he alights on a couple who are themselves gazing at the water – ‘their thoughts are far from the world; they are rapt before / The profound feelings they have poeticised.’ There is a dog chasing a stick, a kite up in the sky, walkers on the boardwalk, beach huts, rocks and a natural arch which perhaps resembles the one at Etretat, so popular with nineteenth century artists. Indeed there is a painter at work by this arch, oblivious to everything but a decision to be made over one precise spot in his picture.

The poem moves inland, up a road and into the villas that look out to sea, where a boy gazes at a lighthouse through a pair of opera glasses. Below the lighthouse there are more groups of people, lost in thought or watching the beach, like the poet, and his reader. ‘Their eyes are turned / Toward the sea’s edge, if not for the beauty / Of the waves, at least to watch some incident.’ They are like characters in Proust, whose narrator would recall similar scenes in À la recherche du temps perdu. Now as I write this, seeing that old wine label again, I am taken back to my own memories of the seaside at Brighton. Lee Harwood wrote 'yet another Brighton poem' in praise of its beach, which made him feel 'good and happy and so at ease in the world'. In Raymond Roussel's poem, the light finally goes down on the view, and the poet is left with his own ‘latent memories of a summer / Now dead, now far from me, fast blown away.'

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Frozen waves

August 2, 2015, 12:12 pm

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A photo posted by marcquinnart (@marcquinnart) on Jul 14, 2015 at 3:54pm PDT

I've written here before about the way Modernism distanced itself from landscape painting and how Oscar Wilde could only look upon a sunset as a 'second-rate Turner'. Over a hundred years later it is interesting to see the lengths Mark Quinn has gone to in his new exhibition The Toxic Sublime to turn a Caribbean sunrise into art now that, as he says, “you can’t do sublime any more. You can’t make a painting of nature.” Having transferred the original photograph to a set of canvases he sanded them down and stuck on strips of 'aeronautical grade aluminium tape'. Then he spray-painted them in the lurid colours of urban graffiti through templates of plastic chord and other rubbish collected from a beach. Next he took them into the street and rubbed into them impressions of drain covers (the familiar words 'Thames Water'). I thought for a moment of the Situationists''beach beneath the street' but Quinn is referencing the way water is taken and controlled in the city. Finally they were bonded to aluminium sheets and subjected to creasing and denting so that they look like they have been retrieved from some kind of wreckage. In the photograph accompanying the Telegraph review they actually look rather beautiful and, although I have some sympathy for the Alastair Smart's view that they 'represent an awful lot of work for awfully little reward', I think he goes too far in likening them to crumpled crisp packets.

This White Cube exhibition also includes four Frozen Wave sculptures which are much easier to like (even though their shiny stainless steel surfaces reminded me uncomfortably of Jeff Koons'Rabbit.) These are based on eroded shells, copied and cast at different scales, including one that has a whole room to itself and looks from the side like a small sperm whale. As the curators explain, 'in the moment before they disappear and become sand, all conch shells end up in a similar form – an arch that looks like a wave, as though an unwitting self-portrait by nature.' And it is remarkable how wave-like they look, with their rough surfaces and glassy-smooth undersides. At the same time, the largest (23 feet long) might be a fragment of landscape, a silver sea cave, with the shells' exposed layers blown up to resemble surf-polished rock strata. There are also two sculptures made from 3D-printed conch shells that seemed less interesting and more obvious. There was no way of putting one of these to the ear, but look inside and their mirrored surfaces are like jets of water, recalling the surging currents and breaking waves that pick them up and sculpt them.

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The Seven Wonders of the Peak

August 8, 2015, 12:41 am

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I've been reading A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe (3 vols, 1724-6), written whilst he was living at 'a very handsome house' just up the road from me here in Stoke Newington. It is a very handsome edition,^* published by Yale University Press in 1991 and illustrated with 319 contemporary engravings and watercolours, which set me back me just £4.95 in the little second hand bookshop a few yards from the Daniel Defoe Pub. There is much I might say about it here but I want to focus on Defoe's travels in the Peak District at the beginning of Volume 3, because it reveals much about his no-nonsense attitude to landscape. The earlier volumes covering London and the South and are full of descriptions of farming, commerce and trade, thriving market towns and expanding cities. In Derbyshire he remains more fascinated with human activity and industry than the beauties of the scenery - coal and lead mining and the operation of a throwster's mill (for silk throwing), whose owner nearly came to grief once showing some friends his impressive water wheel.^† And when his narrative eventually gets to the spectacular natural phenomena of The Peak, he goes out of his way to downplay them.

The first 'Wonder of the Peak' he dismisses is the baths at Buxton - 'nothing at all; nor is it any thing but what is frequent in such mountainous countries as this is, in many parts of the world.' Next, at Poole's Hole, he observes that 'the wit that has been spent upon this vault or cave in the earth, had been well enough to raise the expectation of strangers, and bring fools a great way to creep into it.' Earlier writers had gone over the top in their praise: 'Dr. Leigh spends some time in admiring the spangled roof. Cotton and Hobbes are most ridiculously and outrageously witty upon it. Dr. Leigh calls it fret work, organ, and choir work.' But 'were any part of the roof or arch of this vault to be seen by a clear light, there would be no more beauty on it than on the back of a chimney; for, in short, the stone is coarse, slimy, with the constant wet, dirty and dull.' A famous spring is 'a poor thing indeed to make a wonder of'; nor is The Devil's Arse all it has been cracked up to be (I referred to this cave here before in connection with Thomas Hobbes' book in praise of The Seven Wonders). As for Mam Tor, 'the sum of the whole wonder is this, That there is a very high hill, nay, I will add (that I may make the most of the story, and that it may appear as much like a wonder as I can) an exceeding high hill. But this in a country which is all over hills, cannot be much of a wonder, because also there are several higher hills in the Peak than that, only not just there.'

Page from The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton (1741, written 1681)

But Defoe doesn't leave the Peak District without praising two of its sights, 'one a wonder of nature, the other of art.' The extraordinary and mysterious Elden Hole is a 'frightful chasme' whose 'opening goes directly down perpendicular into the earth, and perhaps to the center. ... What Nature meant in leaving this window open into the infernal world, if the place lies that way, we cannot tell: But it must be said, there is something of horror upon the very imagination, when one does but look into it.' And then, by contrast, there is the Duke of Devonshire's house at Chatsworth, whose beautiful new garden required some serious landscaping. 'To make a clear vista or prospect beyond into the flat country, towards Hardwick, another seat of the same owner, the duke, to whom what others thought impossible, was not only made practicable, but easy, removed, and perfectly carried away a great mountain that stood in the way, and which interrupted the prospect.' The result is a house and garden that delight the traveller as a haven of civilisation in a wild place (an emotion I've always associated with Tolkien's Rivendell).

'Nothing can be more surprising of its kind, than for a stranger coming from the north, suppose from Sheffield in Yorkshire, for that is the first town of note, and wandering or labouring to pass this difficult desert country, and seeing no end of it, and almost discouraged and beaten out with the fatigue of it, (just such was our case) on a sudden the guide brings him to this precipice, where he looks down from a frightful heighth, and a comfortless, barren, and, as he thought, endless moor, into the most delightful valley, with the most pleasant garden, and most beautiful palace in the world: If contraries illustrate, and the place can admit of any illustration, it must needs add to the splendor of the situation, and to the beauty of the building, and I must say (with which I will close my short observation) if there is any wonder in Chatsworth, it is, that any man who had a genius suitable to so magnificent a design, who could lay out the plan for such a house, and had a fund to support the charge, would build it in such a place where the mountains insult the clouds, intercept the sun, and would threaten, were earthquakes frequent here, to bury the very towns, much more the house, in their ruins.'

J. Kip after L. Knyff, Birdseye View of Chatsworth House, c. 1707

^* A reviewer for the London Review of Books felt this edition 'breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’' and questions the way it has been abridged. Nowadays it is of course possible to read the original unabridged version online.

^†'Keeping his eye rather upon what he pointed at with his fingers than what he stept upon with his feet, he stepp'd awry and slipt into the river. He was so very close to the sluice which let the water out upon the wheel, and which was then pulled up, that tho' help was just at hand, there was no taking hold of him, till by the force of the water he was carried through, and pushed just under the large wheel, which was then going round at a great rate. The body being thus forc'd in between two of the plashers of the wheel, stopt the motion for a little while, till the water pushing hard to force its way, the plasher beyond him gave way and broke; upon which the wheel went again, and, like Jonah's whale, spewed him out, not upon dry land, but into that part they call the apron, and so to the mill-tail, where he was taken up, and received no hurt at all.'

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The landscape has an antique stillness

August 23, 2015, 8:11 am

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For the past week I have been immersed in the Catalan landscape described by Josep Pla in his remarkable book, The Gray Notebook. The NYRB Classics site explains how it was written:

'In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor. Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works.'

Palafrugell, dawn, 21 August 2015

If you're interested in an overview there is a New York Times review; here I will of course focus on Pla's descriptions of landscape, illustrated with a couple of photographs I took. To give you a flavour (it would be tedious to quote too much out of context), here he is on the afternoon of 7 May 1918, walking to his family's farm, admiring 'the white Pyrenees against an immense sky' and 'a swath of pink mist the colour of seashells, the mist off the sea in the gulf of Roses ... The rain has refreshed the green of the pine groves and the fields of alfalfa. Everything is bronzed and gleaming. The wheat is about to shift from green to the white, golden foam of ripeness. The small hills undulating on both sides of the landscape - parallel to the sea - are gently luminous, alive and graceful, like a sleeping, breathing nude.'

On a subsequent walk these hills are 'as firm as the breasts of an adolescent girl from these parts' - Pla was a bookish youth, too shy to form a relationship with a woman. His friend and walking companion Joan B. Coromina advances the theory that ones interest in women 'is shaped by the suitability of the landscape in which she moves. There are women for many landscapes, some women are right for only one, and some women for none at all. When the fit is right, infatuation is guaranteed, automatic, inevitable.' Later that year 'the vines are turning gold, the pinewoods wear a thick layer of dark green and the olive trees an airy silver-gray. The stubble in the fields takes on a granulated, reddish tone. The whole landscape could fit nicely between a pot of honey and a bottle of rum.' However, Pla doesn't see much 'Dionysian sensuality' in all this - it is no place for 'garlands, cornucopias, and a warm Venus with a dainty head and huge buttocks strolling through a meadow surrounded by trees wreathed in mist. Autumn here is rather serene, linear, and never harsh but somewhat languorous, inducing a vague, bitter melancholy.'

Pine trees, dawn, 21 August 2015

The Gray Notebook is over six hundred pages long and includes, in addition to descriptions of the countryside around Palafrugell, memorable passages on Girona in the rain and Barcelona, 'turtledove grey', laid out below him from the mountain of Montjuïc. Re-reading some of these now I can see that they are often tinged with sadness, where for example a walk through waves of pine trees, an 'unbroken verdant sea', ends with a depressing encounter with a poor country priest (Coromina complains it "has spoiled the landscape and our stroll. It seems incredible that such pretty countryside can contain so much wretchedness.") I will end here though with an idyllic vision more in keeping with my holiday memories, from one of the stories Pla tells about local characters, in this case an easygoing shepherd.

'If it's hot, he lies under the soft, caressing rustle of the tall pines. From the shade he watches the white, lathering, languid sea. The horizon is blue and cool. A seagull glides by flapping its wings. The landscape has an antique stillness, at once benign and paternal. If someone shouts, the wind carries the cry gently away. Time passes, like a trickle of olive oil.'

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The Green Ray

August 28, 2015, 10:17 am

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'In America they call it the green flash. When the sun sets, in a very clear horizon, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles, and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing it. The slowest ray is the blue ray, which comes across as green when the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions. It’s the last ray as the sun recedes with the curvature of the earth.' - Tacita Dean, Bomb Magazine, 2006

Still from one of several videos of the phenomenon that have been

uploaded to YouTube, this one by

The quote above comes from a conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides, who briefly refers to the green ray in his novel Middlesex... “They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray and I grabbed my camera and I got it.” In the interview Eugenides asks Tacita Dean about the elusiveness of the phenomenon in her film The Green Ray. "I think you said that you got the green ray in the film, but it never appears in any single frame. But you can see it momentarily when the film is running. Is that right?" "Yes. The film is 24 frames a second but you can’t isolate a single frame that has it. He goes on to ask her whether everybody sees the green ray when they see the film. "No. That’s what’s nice about it, because otherwise the film would just be about a phenomenon. But in the end it’s more about perception and faith, I think."

From Tacita Dean's video, The Green Ray (2001)

I first heard of the green ray when Eric Rohmer's beautiful film was released in 1986. Delphine, alone on her summer holiday and nervous of any new intimacy after a split with her boyfriend, overhears a group discussing a novel by Jules Verne, The Green Ray (1882). One of them says that "when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others too." Later she sees a beach cafe named Le Rayon Vert and at the end of the film, when she finally meets an appealing young man (they both like Dostoyevsky), she asks him to sit with her and watch the sunset over the sea. What follows is, according to Gilbert Adair in his book about the first century of cinema, Flickers, 'the tiniest and most moving special effect in the history of cinema.' Tacita Dean was less impressed: "it’s very heavy-handed; it’s like this huge, green thing. I mean, the real green ray makes your heart miss a beat, because you look, you look, you look. And then you see it so suddenly, and it’s gone. Somehow rapidity is part of its beauty."

From Eric Rohmer's film, The Green Ray (1986)

I have not read Verne's novel and it is hard to find any reviews that wholeheartedly recommend it - see for example the description on with hidden noise: 'as fiction it is sorely disappointing'. InJules Verne, Geography and Nineteenth Century Scotland, Ian B. Thompson describes it as the slightest of his three Scottish novels; however, it is informed by Verne's 'passion for sea travel and is meticulous in the nautical, meteorological and geographical detail of the journey.' At the climax of the story the two lovers, having repeatedly failed to glimpse a green ray, miss seeing it because they only have eyes for each other. Verne was clearly fascinated by the idea - in an impressive Annotated bibliography of mirages, green flashes, atmospheric refraction, etc., Andrew T. Young refers to an earlier mention of the green ray in Verne's novel Les Indes Noires(1877). This is the earliest fictional reference in the bibliography, but the phenomenon was noted by other nineteenth century writers, like J. A. Froud, whose account of a voyage to South Africa describes a sunset on 'the sea calm as Torbay in stillest summer ... The disk, as it touched the horizon, was deep crimson. As the last edge of the rim disappeared there came a flash, lasting for a second, of dazzling green - the creation I suppose of my own eyes.'

I will end here with another art form, music. Gavin Bryars has described witnessing the green ray in Southern California, but his 1991 composition refers back to the setting for Verne's novel. 'This part of Western Scotland is also the place where certain piping traditions originated. Male pipers practised in one cave on the seashore, females in another ( the "piper's cave" and the "pigeon's cave"). As they played their laments at twilight a triangulation, similar to that in the Verne story (male-ray-female) may well have occurred without the knowledge of the innocent participants, hence the sequence of simultaneous laments in the coda.' The clip below is the first half of The Green Ray - I can't find anything to embed that includes the coda, with its laments for saxophone, cor anglais, French horn, and solo violin. You can buy or hear the whole piece elsewhere of course, but perhaps it is appropriate to the theme that this should be left here to the imagination.

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Falling Upwards

September 2, 2015, 11:50 am

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Our balloon ride over the Garrotxa

Whilst in Spain last month we took to the air in a balloon. I also read Richard Holmes' entertaining history of nineteenth century ballooning, Falling Upwards,which included some details that reminded me of our flight over the volcanic landscape of Garrotxa. Holmes describes an ascent made by the leading Victorian balloonist Charles Green, accompanied by a wealthy MP and an Irish musician, Monck Mason, who wrote the trip up as Aeronautica (1838). They set off in the Royal Vauxhall from London on a November afternoon in 1836 and by dusk they were over the Channel and tucking into ‘a huge meal of cold meats and wine’. I smiled on reading this as it was exactly what we were given to tuck into after we landed. Whilst aloft we toasted the flight with a glass of pink cava. Champagne drinking seems to have been de riguer on most nineteenth century balloon trips, although Monck Mason claimed that the lower pressure at altitude made it too frothy, shooting from the bottle and ‘revealing what he called its "natural tendency to flying". Perhaps under the influence of these refreshments, the landscapes of northern France seen after dusk, with isolated points of candlelight "burning late" in the villages below, seemed infinitely romantic and mysterious.’

Above the Garrotxa we were flying over winding rivers, terracotta-tiled farm buildings and the densely wooded slopes of extinct volcanoes, but it was impossible not to register too the motorway network, ribbon developments and light industrial buildings on the outskirts of every sizable settlement. Holmes recounts how, when the Royal Vauxhall reached the Meuse, the crew were astonished to realise that the great industrial complex visible below them was the historic city of Liège. Its surrounding districts "appeared to blaze with innumerable fires … to the full extent of our visible horizon." At the height we were flying we could not hear the sounds of industry below - perhaps it is relatively silent these days. Holmes describes what the balloonists could hear as they passed over Liège: 'disembodied shouting, coughing, swearing, metallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, sharp echoing bursts of laughter. They were being granted a unique, nightmare vision of the new industrial future, a world of ever extending ironworks, where every street was "marked out by its particular line of fires."’

The Royal Vauxhall continued into the night. "Occasional faint flashes of lightning would for an instant illuminate the horizon ... Not a single object of terrestrial nature could anywhere be distinguished; an unfathomable abyss of 'darkness visible' seemed to encompass us on every turn."
Holmes observes that Mason's description of night's "cold and dark embrace", like "an immense block of black marble", might have come from Edgar Allan Poe, whose story 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall' appeared the year before this flight, and who went on to feature Green and Monck in his newspaper hoax 'The Atlantic Balloon' in 1844. Eventually the aeronauts recognised the Rhine but continued eastwards and by morning thought they might have reached "the barren and inhospitable Steppes of Russia". In fact they finally landed in some north German fir trees. Our balloon flight looked at one point like it might end in some trees too, or even on a small traffic island, but we eventually touched down smoothly on some rocky ground and once the balloon had been furled and loaded onto its trailer we set off back to enjoy our botifarra.

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View of Pernambuco, Brazil

September 6, 2015, 3:54 am

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I have added a new feature to this blog - maps. Click on one of the links above and you get a zoomable Google Map with pins connected to the 'locations' of my earlier posts (see example above). Over the years I haven't written specifically about individual places of course, so the geotags tend to relate where relevant to the main subject of the artwork, or of one of the artworks discussed. Some landscapes have been non-specific, ideal or imaginary so the maps do not include all my old posts. As I write this, I have not yet finished going back through them all and adding tags - enjoyable but laborious, even if it is improving my geography. It is throwing up a few interesting problems; I found, for example, that Anahorish, celebrated in poetry by Seamus Heaney, officially 'doesn't exist'. There are some technical limitations to the maps (no embedded audio or video), and to the way RSS feeds work that mean I have had to split posts over several maps rather than having just one (nor can I host them here, so thanks to my friend John for putting the code on his own site). Also, these are not really designed for small mobile devices, although they do work on my iPad.

Frans Post, View of Pernambuco, Brazil, ca. 1637-44

For me it has been interesting seeing where I have and haven't written about - very little on South America for example. Googling Brazil and landscape art I see that that, apart from the renowned landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, you tend to get references to a seventeenth century Dutchman, Frans Post. He is an interesting artist. The familiar view of colonial painters is that they were conditioned by European attitudes and painting conventions, excluding as much as they included, producing views that resemble the Roman Campagna with added palm trees. Whilst Post was in Brazil, he managed to make it resemble the Netherlands with low horizons and grey skies, but he also included details taken directly from nature. Once he was back, colour flooded in and his compositions became more idealised, whilst the figures (often slaves) were relegated to mere details. In 1648 he painted the landscape elements of a Biblical scene, the Sacrifice of Manoah, giving it a Brazilian setting, complete with armadillo and iguana. According to Seymour Slive, in his survey of Dutch Painting 1600-1800, 'the rather naive quality of Post's pictures has earned him the title of the 'Douanier Rousseau' of the seventeenth century'.

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Tea at Furlongs

September 11, 2015, 4:49 am

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I have not had a chance to say anything here yet about the Dulwich Picture Gallery's Eric Ravilious exhibition. Reviewers loved it: Laura Cumming described the paintings as 'exhilarating, enthralling and outstandingly beautiful', Martin Gayford thought them 'irresistible' and Richard Dorment found them 'a joy from start to finish'. From a landscape perspective he is fascinating, with those subtle distortions, unusual textures and patterns, curious perspectives and framing devices all combining to give the paintings their unique and hard-to-define quality. The exhibition included the full range of his war paintings - submarine interiors, fortified beaches, aircraft in flight and remarkable visions of ships illuminated by the Arctic sun which suggest what he might have gone on to paint if he had not been on the air-sea rescue plane that disappeared off the coast of Iceland in September 1942. It was easy to turn from these and enjoy watercolours from the 1930s of fireworks, flowers and fields. Tea at Furlongs seemed relatively uncomplicated, with its tasty-looking spread and view of the countryside: 'beyond the garden wall the wheat is almost ready to harvest , and Beddingham Hill rises to meet a sky as yet untroubled by hostile squadrons.' However, as James Russell goes on to say in the catalogue, the oddities of light and perspective suggest a scene that was 'designed to be remembered - not any old tea at Furlongs but the last, the tea that must be preserved against all eventualities.'

Eric Ravilious, Tea at Furlongs, 1939

At Furlongs, Ravilious was a guest of Peggy Angus, whom he had met when they were students at the Royal College of Art. She had left London in 1933 to teach in Sussex and found a tenant farmer willing to let her rent a cottage with a spare room, next door to a ploughman who appears in some of Ravilious's paintings. Life there, Russell writes, 'involved a good day's work, scratch meals and long evenings of music and song. Water had to be hauled out of a well and amenities consisted of a primitive stove for cooking and an earth closet in the garden.' Furlongs is quite a long walk from any main road but my parents went to look at it this summer and have sent me the photographs below. Apparently the current owners are building a new wall, perhaps prompted by the increase in visitors as Ravilious's popularity continues to grow. This cottage has an important place in British art history as the inspiration for some of Ravilious's best known work, like Train Landscape and The Wilmington Giant. 'Furlongs', he wrote, 'altered my whole outlook and way of painting, I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious...'

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