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Oppressive Light
Two new translations of the poetry of Robert Walser have been published this year. Christopher Middleton's slim volume for New Directions is a beautiful thing, but highly selective (it eschews all of...
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London's nocturnal beauty vanishes
We went along today to see the Olympics torch procession through Stoke Newington, but the big story this week has been around security, with the army drafted in to cover for those G4S guards who have...
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Fog Tropes
I've embedded above two versions of Fog Tropes, the original for brass sextet and a second version for strings commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. Ingram Marshall explained the origins of his best...
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Earth has not anything to shew more fair
I was going to photograph the view from Westminster Bridge this morning but we've been asked to work from home during the Olympics period, so I took the snaps above with my phone last week. Two...
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An inflatable Stonehenge
I'm not sure how big a bouncy castle has to be before it can be considered landscape architecture, but let's assume that Jeremy Deller's Sacrilegequalifies for a mention on this blog. I've not seen it...
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Above the sea and sea-washed town
Claude Monet, Étretat, la porte d'Aval: fishing boats leaving the harbour, c1885This post begins with Claude Monet at Étretat, a subject I've covered here before in 'The Cliffs at Etretat' and...
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The green chaos
'Always the green chaos rather than the printed map' - John Fowles The Tree, the sea, the CobbLast week in Lyme Regis I sought respite from the sweltering heat and hard labour of a sandcastle...
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Light lay over the northland like a shawl
On the Shetland island of Unst Before our summer holiday in the Shetland Islands I tried to do some background reading in Shetland's poetry, using the new anthology edited by Kevin MacNeil, These...
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Sonata of the Sun
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Sparks II, 1906Perhaps the most fitting posthumous tribute to a landscape artist is to name a landmark after them, although I imagine few would wish this to happen....
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Before the Kingsland Road
Walking down the Kingsland Road last night towards the quadrivium that is Dalston Junction, I was following the route of the old Roman Road that ran north from Londinium to Eboracum via Lindum Colonia....
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La femme dans le Paysage
In 1994 the Belgian painter Marie Desbarax became bewitched by a certain landscape near the city of Nivelles. A text inspired by the paintings she produced there over the course of a year, 'La femme...
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Plyushkin's garden
In May 1922 Vladimir Nabokov sat his finals at Cambridge and was relieved to find that one of the questions asked him to describe Plyushkin's garden in Gogol's Dead Souls. As Brian Boyd says, this...
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The Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa
Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape, the most exciting art exhibition this year, will shortly be coming to the end of its run at the Scottish National Gallery....
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A Shaded Path
Next month Tate Britain will feature a new display of its works by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Meanwhile in Edinburgh there are still a few more weeks of 'Ian Hamilton Finlay: Twilight Remembers' at the...
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By the Open Sea
A strange work of land art avant la lettre is created in August Strindberg's extraordinary novel By the Open Sea (1889). Although summer has arrived on the island of Österskär, 'drift-ice was still...
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Wildtrack
To the ICA last night for the London Film Festival Screening of Pat Collins' film Silence. Like the film I saw at last year's festival, Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea, it is slow cinema, situated...
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Dew-Drenched Furze
On my morning walks to the Underground this week I have passed front gardens strewn with delicate dewy cobwebs, as you can see from the photograph above. I realise there is a beer bottle in this...
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Deep South
‘I look for it always, the thick, vespertine gloaming that douses the day’s heat. When it comes, the landscape grows soft and vague, as if inadequately summoned by some shiftless deity, casually...
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Autumn colours on the Qiao and Hua mountains
Last year I wrote about one of James Elkins' Art Seminar Series, Landscape Theory, and I'm turning now to one of his other recent books, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (2010). I say...
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Tongues in trees
I was at the Barbican yesterday for Calixto Bieito's Forests, a World Shakespeare Festival production composed from fragments of Shakespeare's woodland and heath scenes. 'The play takes audiences from...
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