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Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm
We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photography in museums was prohibited; now I find my phone full of...
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View of Frankfurt/Oder
Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world's oldest globe. For the purposes of this blog though I was...
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From Art to Archaeology
Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology. It featured contemporary artists with work inspired by...
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Study of a rock-face
I was recently in Nuremberg and had been keen to see the Albrecht Dürer house, although I was a bit disappointed to be honest, hoping for something that felt a bit older and less-restored. You can see...
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Blue Sky
Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter.Encouraged by Geoff Manaugh's defence of the practice, I have followed the...
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Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head
Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Rising Tides', which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard...
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Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest
Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with...
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The temple’s firm towering
Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. He deliberately looks at a non-representational work of art: a...
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Summer storms, sea, light, silence
Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the themes of his nature poems are conventional - blazing sunsets,...
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Streams had burst their banks and sallied out
In 1809 Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) published his first collection of twenty-three verse fables - over time the book grew to include 197. Gordon Pirie’s translations of a few of these were praised in...
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Lagoon city
I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo...
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Lost in the sand
I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the...
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A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been...
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The Willows
When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something...
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Drunkard's Rock
Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past...
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Ash Dome
Here is a photo I took this morning of the David Nash: 45 Years of Drawing exhibition at London's Annely Juda gallery. This room is dedicated to Ash Dome, the living tree sculpture he planted in 1977....
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The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees
We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities...
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Gathering Grounds
I have been reading Harriet Tarlo’s Gathering Grounds (2019), described by publishers Shearsman as a ‘collection of place-based work emerging from three collaborative projects that took place between...
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In a shower of shadowing roses
We went for a walk in Richmond last week and I photographed this memorial to James Thomson on Henry's Mound. In an earlier post I listed all the reasons why Thomson is unpopular today, but The Seasons,...
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His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands
"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It...
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Architecton
Here are J. M. W. Turner's The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810) and an explosive rock fall in Victor Kossakovsky's new essay film Architecton. I watched the latter from the safety of my...
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An Outcrop in the Campagna
Frederic Leighton, A Nile View, 1868'The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple...
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Maps of Other Possibilities
Yesterday I went to a wonderful event at Tate Britain devoted to the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. There were three short films and then a conversation between Louisa Buck and the two remaining members, Anne...
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Pine River and Lone Peak
I've been looking in this 1991 anthology for any interesting landscape-related poems that Peter H. Lee didn't include in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, a book I discussed here...
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Sahara Project
Tate Modern's Electric Dreams exhibition includes the film Tele-Mack, shot in 1968, featuring the work of West German artist Heinz Mack. It starts in black and white with him driving an E-type through...
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