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Memoryscapes
I was pleased that Caught by the River made Frozen Air their Book of the Month, although they have now sneaked in a second one - The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris - a book it's been...
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Luxuriant Forest among Distant Peaks
Li Ch'eng, A Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks, Sung Dynasty In Michael Sullivan's history of Chinese landscape painting, Symbols of Eternity, he describes the predicament of one of the great...
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The ghats at Haridwar
Sita Ram, The Firoz Shah Minar at Gaur and a Palash tree, 1817 This watercolour is owned by the British Library and is one of several reproduced in a fascinating blog post by J. P. Losty, 'The...
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Red Cliff
Unidentified artist in the style of Sheng Mou, Fan painting illustrating Su Shi's 'Second Ode on the Red Cliff', late 14th/early 15th century Source: The Met, public domain Earlier this year I wrote...
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Landfill
I recently came across a piece in the Yorkshire Post about the poet, John Wedgwood Clarke, whose book Landfill is the fruit of his year as a poet-in-residence at two Yorkshire rubbish dumps. “At...
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Dresden in Ruins
Earlier today I was looking at these images while listening on headphones to a recording the BBC reporter Wynford Vaughan Thomas made during an air raid on Berlin. His voice was clear over what he...
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Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich
Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement effet de soleil), 1903 Tate Britain's new exhibition, Impressionists in London, has been criticised as misleading, including...
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Clouds Rising from the Green Sea
Clouds Rising from the Green SeaTen Thousand Riplets on the YangziThe Waving Surface of the Autumn FloodThese beautiful images are from the Water Album, twelve studies made by the great Southern Song...
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The stiff-feathered pines shed their darkness
Six years ago I wrote about The Peregrine (1967) and its elusive author, J. A. Baker. I was prompted in part by the airing of a radio play about him, written by Helen MacDonald. The book she...
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Shy Sculptures
Rachel Whiteread, Chicken Shed, 2017 This post can be read as a sequel to one I wrote nine years ago on Rachel Whiteread's move to making art for the landscape. In 'Ebbsfleet Landmark' I described her...
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Withert vines, auld trees, derknin crows
I bought this book at the recent Small Publishers Fair: a selection of classical Chinese verse translated into Scots, with English versions provided as well to help non-Scots speakers. It was hard to...
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Streams, falling from the heights
'Cliffs stand on both sides like parallel walls. Here it is so narrow, so very narrow, writes one traveller, that one not only sees but actually feels the narrowness, it seems. A patch of blue sky...
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A winding river and a bridge
Jan Van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (detail - full picture below), c. 1435-7Source: Wikimedia CommonsEarlier this year I discussed a miniature in Christopher de Hamel's Meetings with...
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Landscape of the Megaliths
Lucas de Heere, Stonehenge, c. 1572Images: Wikimedia CommonsIn British Art: Ancient Landscapes, a catalogue published last year for an exhibition at The Salisbury Museum, Sam Smiles describes the...
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Primeval world
Josef Kuwasseg, The Period of the Muschelkalk, c. 1850Source: The Universalmuseum Joanneum This remarkable vision of a prehistoric shoreline was painted by an Austrian landscape painter, Josef...
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There Lies the Temple
Today I launched a new initiative, to post 365 landscapes on Twitter over the course of 2018. In doing this I am using a format (see above) which will usually include a telling detail in addition to...
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The sea like a vortex
"The sixth storm, rain. Just barely saved the boat. The sea like a vortex, the surf like cannon fire. The tent broke. Wonderfully beautiful." - Tove JanssonIn the middle of the Tove Jansson exhibition,...
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Lichens and Ferns on a Rock Face
Gherardo Cibo, Men Collecting Specimens on a Hillside, 16th centurySource: British Library Twitter feedThis illuminated manuscript page shows specimen hunters on an Italian hillside, equipped with...
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Frail songs by torrents
Yesterday evening I listened yesterday to a recent episode of 'Late Junction' in which Anne Hilde Neset was taken by Jana Winderen to a snowy forest just outside Oslo to discuss field recording. I...
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Body of Ice
In 2011, Australian harpist Alice Giles got the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of her geologist grandfather Cecil Madigan, who has been a member of Mawson's First Australasian Antarctic...
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