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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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Great Fear on the Mountain
I still occasionally end up buying a book for its cover, or at least picking it out to look at on that basis. This one (published last year) got to me through that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting,...
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Dormitorium
Yesterday I went to see Dormitorium | The Film Décors Of The Quay Brothers at the Swedenborg House - wonderful stuff. John Coulthart has written about it and included photographs on his site (he also...
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Cornstalks and wildflowers
Tirzah Garwood, The Photographer, c. 1947The Dulwich Picture Gallery's current exhibition is a Tirzah Garwood, covering her early woodcuts, marbled papers, box-frame collages and slightly surreal oil...
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The Abandoned Park
Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850Earlier this week, writing about Tirzah Garwood, I referred to landscapes in art that appear uncanny because they contain outsize plants or objects (I might also have...
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The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice
François-Auguste Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841 Having written last time about Victor Hugo I will add something here about his lover Léonie d'Aunet, a novelist and playwright who inspired many of the poems...
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The new open farmland
The latest David Matless has quite a lot to say about English landscape. Some of the things covered in England's Green have been discussed on this blog in the past, including Richard Long, Ghost Box,...
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