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Snow Light, Water Light
The Collected Poems of Frances Horovitz only runs to 118 poems but many are centred on the natural world and the landscapes of Cumbria, the Welsh Marches and the Cotswolds, where she lived for ten...
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Circle of Light
Circle of Light is a fascinating new vinyl release on Trunk Records - the soundtrack to a film made in 1972 by Anthony Roland. A hauntological mixture of electronics and field recordings, it was...
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Voices from the Land
I don't think I've ever embedded a Ted Talk before. This one covers some of the key points Bernie Krause makes in his recent book The Great Animal Orchestra. The book's title comes from an insight...
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The rocks of Fårö
'My ties with Fårö have several origins. The first was intuitive. This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your internal imaginings of forms, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds,...
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The Stockholm Archipelago
This month we spent a week in and around Stockholm. I took the photograph here from a boat, although we actually spent most of our time in the city rather than exploring the archipelago. We saw...
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The Black Place
'As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's just different. The sky is different, the stars...
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Bus de la Lum
In 'The Eeriness of the English Landscape' Robert Macfarlane wrote about a growing interest in landscape and the uncanny, with recent books, music and art all exploring places that seem to hide dark...
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The open pit at Dannemora mine
We saw this tall clock a few weeks ago in Stockholm's Royal Palace. It dates from the 1760s when ideal landscapes were painted onto all kinds of cabinets - there's no particular connection between the...
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The New West
Robert Macfarlane recently choseArctic Dreams by Barry Lopez as 'the book that changed my life'. He says 'it struck me with the force of revelation the first time I read it, aged 21 and walking the...
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Naturgemälde
Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt, 1806Images: Wikimedia CommonsAndrea Wulf has just won another prize for The Invention of Nature and I am not surprised as it is a really good read. In...
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Weatherland
I only recently got round to reading Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies and can highly recommend it to readers of this blog. A book like this will cover some...
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The Rakkóx cliffs
Félix Vallotton, illustration for Paul Scheerbart's Rakkóx the Billionaire, 1901In this picture Kasimir Stummel, a young man employed in the Rakkóxian Department of Invention, is suggesting a grand...
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The fog has pathways
I was thinking, walking home this evening, that the season of mists is upon us again here in London. Then, later, I found myself reading about a proposal for a fleet of sculptures in Santa Monica bay...
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There are just a couple more weeks to see George Shaw: My Back to Nature at the National Gallery. The title comes from Shaw's observation that he has his back to nature most of the time, something...
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The Khyber Pass in Hull
'There are few sights in England that can quite equal the absurd charm of the imitation Khyber Pass in Hull's East Park. This slice of South East Asia in the East Riding sits just a short stroll away...
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It will hold the spring sunlight
Musō Soseki (1275-1351) designed two of the great landscape gardens in Kyoto, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, neither of which I managed to get to on my all-too-brief visit to the city nearly...
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Ten Views from a Thatched Hut
Lu Hong, View 1 of Ten Views from a Thatched Hut (copy of 8th century original)Source: Wikimedia CommonsWhen we look at Chinese landscape paintings, we are seduced not just by their rivers and...
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Mountains, rocks, clouds and rivers would emerge
Ten years ago, in an early post here, I mentioned the mysterious Ink Wang and other ‘late T’ang eccentrics’, distant prototypes of the New York Action painters. I recently came upon a 1998 academic...
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The source of the Sorgue
Philippe-Jacques van Brée, Laura and Petrarch at Fountaine-de-Vaucluse, 1816Source: Wikimedia CommonsIn 1337, a year after his ascent of Mont Ventoux, Petrarch travelled to Rome. On his return to...
View ArticleThe Landscape is Staring at Us
Regrettably I don't normally have time to read the London Review of Books although the 6th October issue was a good one - Kathleen Jamie on Orkney and reviews of a new book on Frederick Law Olmsted and...
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