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Rive Oriental du Nil
'He would like to travel, if he could, stretched out on a sofa and not stirring, watching landscapes, ruins and cities pass before him like the screen of a panorama, mechanically unwinding.' Thus,...
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Ice welding land to sea
'Millenial bergs from the glaciers, morbid, silent except for waves breaking on their flanks, the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore. Foghorns, smothered gun reports on the coast....
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A Wall is a Path
We will soon learn whether Paul Noble has won this year's Turner Prize. The landscapes he has been drawing for the last two decades depict Nobson Newtown, a place that emerged into the artist's...
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Field Notes
Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton have kindly sent me a copy of Field Notes, a compilation of their place-poems. The first section reprints Typography of the Shore which explored connections...
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Abundant brooks wandering over the snow white sands
'Its plains are spacious, its hills are pleasantly situated, adapted for superior tillage, and its mountains are admirably calculated for the alternate pasturage of cattle, where flowers of various...
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Landscapes surge into consciousness
(1) from Thomas Köner's Novaya ZemlyaThis is my third annual survey of landscape music, following an initial list covering 2010 and another for 2011. Last year I noticed that I was talking as much...
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The forest gloom got heavier and the forest-silence deeper
Earlier this year I read The Hobbit to my young sons and, coming to the book again as an adult, I was impressed by the way the landscape is so vividly described without holding up the action. After...
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Far in the wild His steps were driven
William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (1858-60)The development of landscape art in the margins of Italian and Northern Renaissance religious paintings was assisted by...
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Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River (1942)Source: Wikimedia CommonsThis image was included on the Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record. Old photograph albums are littered with images of mountains,...
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Dark mires where only priests should wade
The Ankerwycke Yew, BerkshireSaid to be the site of Henry VIII's first liaisons with Anne Boleyn Amongst the praise heaped on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall it was not surprising to see it described as 'a...
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Even Over Eden
Exhibition booklet showing a detail fromAdam Pynacker, Landscape with Sportsmen and Game, 1665The Mall Galleries have a new exhibition, 'Memory & Imagination', that brings together contemporary art...
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I've been reading the late Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Among the interesting things I learnt was that Heaney's poem 'The Mud Vision', in which a strange...
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A banked-up, soothing, wooded haze
Seamus Heaney's first foray into translation, Sweeney Astray, published thirty years ago, was a version of Buile Suibhne, which survives in seventeenth century manuscripts but probably written five...
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"The usual approach to Arnheim was by the river. The visitor left the city in the early morning. During the forenoon he passed between shores of a tranquil and domestic beauty, on which grazed...
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Our Banner in the Sky
Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861The National Gallery's new exhibition‘Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch’ includes a version of this patriotic sunset,...
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Anamorphic landscape in the form of Saint Francis of Paola
Emmanuel Maignan, Saint Francis of Paola (detail), 1642I have talked here before about landscapes that are transformed into bodies, and vice versa. Another example can be found at the top of the...
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In the Field
I spent Friday and Saturday at In The Field, a symposium on the art and craft of field recording. During the two days we heard about a diversity of methods - from undersea hydrophone recordings made by...
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Ice on the Yellow River
Ma Yuan (1160–1225), The Yellow River Breaches its CourseIt would be impossible to summarise the career of Liu Tieh-yün (1857-1909) briefly. In addition to writing and scholarship (he was a pioneer in...
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The Index to Some Landscapes
Just a brief post to let readers know that I have now completed a new version of the index to this blog. I had realised that I was no longer able to remember who all the artists mentioned here...
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Shadow Sites
There are some interesting things in the V&A's current exhibition, Light from the Middle East: New Photography: Tal Shochat's portraits of fruit trees, for example, and Ahmed Mater's Magnetism...
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