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Autumn on Mount Oshio
Ōtagaki Rengetsu, Autumn Moon, 1870Source: Wikimedia CommonsI've been very busy this week, but I just have time for a short post to recommend the website of The Rengetsu Foundation Project, which is...
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Like a cloud of mist on the silent hill
The poetry of the Scottish bard Ossian is often described in terms of its admirers: Diderot, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Mendelssohn etc. Few read it now though,...
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Straight Outta Compton
Here's an extract from Evelyn McDonnell's interview in the LA Review of Books with Paul Beatty, about the novel that has just won the Booker Prize. 'The Sellout is set in an inner-city rural...
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Arcadian Landscape with Resting Shepherds and Animals
Adriaen van de Velde, Arcadian Landscape with Resting Shepherds and Animals, 1664Source: Wikimedia CommonsI feel in need of a little escapism at the moment, so I went down to Dulwich to look round the...
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A Gentle Collapsing
Last weekend we went to the Victoria Miro gallery to see After You Left, an exhibition of work by Alex Hartley. The rooms contain images of modernist domestic architecture photographed around Los...
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Topographia Germaniae
We had a family DVD viewing this weekend: Karel Zeman's Bláznova kronika (A Jester's Tale), a 1964 Czech film about a peasant caught up in the Thirty Years War. Philip French described it in The...
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A Downland Index
A Downland Index is 'a hundred successive slow runs on the chalk downs above Brighton, each written up in a hundred words.' These hundred short texts are themselves collections of fragmentary moments...
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Emergent landscapes
Earlier this month we were at Tate Modern for Rob St John's participatory installation Emergent Landscapes. There were two elements to this: painting clay tiles with a solution containing lichen...
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The dew under the blossoms
"Not very festive" was the complaint I received when I attempted to read a few winter poems by Saigyō aloud to the family over Christmas. Maybe it was the images of solitary life in lonely huts with...
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Terra Incognita
Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita was published twenty-one years ago, before the hundredth anniversaries of the expeditions led by Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. Reading it recently, I wondered if we...
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Mountains and forests and the marshy banks of rivers
'The four seasons move on in their lush cycles; but stillness of heart is important for them to enter into a writer's meditations. However opulent and dense the sensuous colors of physical things may...
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Journey to the Land of the Real
Returning from the Small Publishers Fair last November and looking on the bus at my new copy of Journey to the Land of the Real felt like being a teenager again, after finally tracking down some...
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Rose, open door of the year
The fourth volume of the journal Reliquiae is now available. I have referred here in previous posts to some of the authors included in earlier editions: Hans Henny Jahnn, Jürgen von der Wense, Étienne...
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An ancient earthworks project
In his book Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time, Alexander Nagel writes about the way ideas and practises associated with relics, chapels, mosaics and other pre-modern art forms informed twentieth century...
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The spousalls betwixt the Medway and the Thames
William Blake, Edmund Spenser, c. 1800Source: Wiimedia CommonsIn Book IV, Canto XI of The Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser describes the marriage of Thames and Medway. I won't attempt to describe...
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Cattle and their doubles in the lucid shallows of the bay
This little book, Letters on Landscape Photography, was published in London in 1888. By then there were numerous such books dedicated to the hobby, but many people, like its author H P Robinson, were...
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Wind at Walden Pond
The artwork on the cover of this January 2008 edition of Art in America is by Spencer Finch: Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004). Emily...
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The ebb-tide beach
Trees and rocks in the 1466 Maeda manuscript of Senzui narabi ni yagyo no zu (Illustrations for Designing Mountain, Water, and Hillside Field Landscapes), attributed to the priest Zoen.The last words...
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Under the trees, where the light air stirs the shadows
I once wrote for myself a guide to the trees and plants in Virgil's Eclogues, drawing on the Clarendon Press commentary by Wendell Clausen. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but will give here a...
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Plans-Reliefs
If you have access to the BBC iPlayer you can see Andrew Graham-Dixon's latest series, an attempt to tell the story of the Art of France in three hours. The first episode stretches over the centuries...
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