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Pyramids in the Sea
If you haven't been yet, there are still two days left to make your way through the long David Hockney queues and see Tate Britain's Paul Nash retrospective. His work may seem familiar from relatively...
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The Court of Gayumars
Tabriz artist, Rustam Sleeping While Rakhsh Fights the Lion, c. 1515-22This painting is the only page that survives from a manuscript of the Shahnameh (Ferdowsi's 'Book of Kings') commissioned by the...
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The wind was bitter from the north
Last night a strong wind rose in the evening. As it rattled the windows at the top of our house, I was watching an old TV play, Whistle and I'll Come to You. The professor in this story, played by...
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Brick-dust in sunlight
‘Brick-dust in sunlight. That is what I see now in the city, a dry epic flavour, whose air is human breath. A place of walls made straight with plumb line and trowel, to desiccate and crumble in the...
View ArticleA black mountaintop looms out of the slate-grey darkness
A post shared by Awoiska van der Molen (@awoiska_vdm) on Mar 2, 2017 at 8:16am PSTAwoiska van der Molen is one of the contenders for this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. At the...
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’T is a most beauteous Strait
Towards the end of his life Henry Wadsworth Longfellow oversaw a 31-volume anthology, arranged geographically, called Poems of Places. It can be read in its entirety on Bartleby. The poems begin in...
View ArticleThis loud brook’s incessant fall
As this loud brook’s incessant fall In streaming rings restagnates all, Which reach by course the bank, and then Are no more seen, just so pass men.- from Henry Vaughan's 'The Waterfall', 1655My...
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When the two essences of nature are bright and clear
A scholar playing the guqin, Ming Dynasty Reproduced in R. H. van Gulik's The Lore of the Chinese LuteI have written here about guqin music twice before: once in relation to two compositions of the...
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In the mist of the secret and solitary hill
"I have given you the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley, both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect...
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The voice of the north wind sad
Zhang Fengyi as Cao Cao in John Woo's Red Cliff (2008-9)Ina post earlier this month I referred to the musical duel in Red Cliff, John Woo's epic film about events at the end of the Han dynasty, based...
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Holy Island
The view from Holy Island on the morning of Maundy ThursdayBefore leaving for our Easter break in Northumberland I had joked about shivering on beaches in a freezing North Sea wind. However, I hadn't...
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Landscape and time
I am getting close now to having written one thousand Some Landscapes posts. I hope to mark this milestone soon, but for now I'd like to draw your attention to a new feature accessible through the...
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This city which is no longer anything but an orchestra
When in the past I have added extra features to Some Landscapes, I have tried to include some new material at the same time. What follows was going to be appended to my last post, introducing a new...
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Fog Line
A fortnight ago I was at the Wellcome Trust for an event curated by Amy Cutler in which artists, musicians and academics re-soundtracked nature documentaries by performing texts, improvising music and...
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Trees that in moving keep their intervals
A constant keeping-past of shaken trees,And a bewildered glitter of loose road;Banks of bright growth, with single blades atopAgainst white sky; and wires—a constant chain—That seem to draw the clouds...
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The Gibberd Garden
We made a trip this week to see Sir Frederick Gibberd's garden, created between 1957 and 1984, and located just outside Harlow, the New Town for which he was chief architect. Gibberd's best known...
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The ruins of Karnak
Paul Nash, The Wanderer (detail), 1911Source: British MuseumThe British Museum currently has an exhibition of British landscape watercolours which focuses on the period 1850-1950, the century after the...
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Pure light flooding the rock walls
There is a new article on China and its rivers in Lapham's Quarterly by Philip Ball, author of The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. He says that Chinese culture is orientated along the course...
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The Great Forest
Jacob van Ruisdael, The Great Forest, 1655-60Peter Handke's text The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1980) unsurprisingly focuses on Cézanne and the landscape of Provence, but it ends with a painting...
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The Pink and White Terraces
Charles Blomfield, Pink Terraces, 1886Source: Wikimedia CommonsEarlier this month news came in that the lost terraces of Lake Rotomahana had been discovered. The Pink Terrace (Te Otukapuarangi - 'the...
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