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Wild Geese Returning
Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems (2011) is an introduction to a form of poetry that can be read in different directions. Thanks to the way Chinese written characters take meaning from...
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The Mountains of Madness
'The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing...
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The Himalayas of Black Narcissus
This image of a mystic alone in the mountains recalls the Himalayan paintings of Nicholas Roerich that I discussed in my previous post. It is a shot from Black Narcissus, the 1947 Technicolor film by...
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Pastoral Project
When Beethoven premiered his Pastoral Symphony in Vienna on December 22, 1808, he wrote that it should be considered "more an expression of feeling than painting." It is a feeling for nature that comes...
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Winter Night in the Mountains
Harald Sohlberg, Flower Meadow in the North, 1905Images: Wikimedia CommonsThe Dulwich Picture Gallery have done it again with another superb show and catalogue: this time devoted to the Norwegian...
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A dark and desolate place
... it seems to me that I had a dreamAnd in that dreamI am suddenly woken up bythe fracas of deafening explosions.I open my eyeson infinite smoke and fog.The incandescence of the groundunder my feet...
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Places from the Other Side
My favourite parts of Václav Cílek's To Breathe With Birds (2015) are those descriptions of sites in Bohemia that lead off into speculation on the meaning of landscape, and his references to...
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Banana Plantation
John Dunkley, Banana Plantation, c. 1945A recent New York Review of Books introduced me to the art of John Dunkley (1891 - 1947), a self-taught Jamaican painter whose landscapes remind me of Samuel...
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The Living Stones
The Living Stones (1957) is one of two illustrated travelogues written by surrealist Ithell Colquhoun in the mid 1950s and recently re-published by Peter Owen. They now come with a foreword by comedian...
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Apotheosis
It could be argued that John and Yoko made a form of landscape art in Apotheosis (1970), their seventeen minute experimental film of the view from an ascending balloon. It was shot in December 1969,...
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The Grand Canal
When I first saw Canaletto's paintings in the National Gallery, like A Regatta on the Grand Canal, I was interested in their vivid detail but dismayed by the way the water was painted. It wasn't just...
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The Lithuanian forests
..."What do you think?" He knelt and showed his drawing.Telimena studied his efforts with much grace,Though clearly she was a connoisseur. Her praiseWas sparing, but she encouraged him...
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A place that exists only in moonlight
Katie Paterson, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, 2010Photography was permitted: this is my photograph of her photographWe recently took the train down to Margate to see the...
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Roden Crater
I thought I would follow up my last post on Katie Paterson with something about James Turrell, whose light works I was reminded of when looking at her Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008). I have...
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The Garden or Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists is a novel that circles round various mysteries: the life and death of a Japanese garden designer, Aritomo, living after the war in exile in Malaya, and the...
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A shower has not long passed
In a recent clear-out my mother passed on to me this 1950 publication on Constable. At first I took it to be an exhibition catalogue but it is actually a short booklet concerning the V&A's superb...
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The Shore of Sumiyoshi
Tawaraya Sōtatsu, The Beach at Sumiyoshi,from the 'Tales of Ise', c. 1600-40The Cleveland Museum of ArtIn the highly refined Heian dynasty culture of ninth century Japan, landscape was admired in ways...
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Geeooggrraapphhy
Colin Sackett has kindly sent me a copy of Printed Landscapes, an anthology drawing on his earlier books, some of which (like River Axe Crossings and The True Line) have featured on this blog...
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Chanctonbury Rings
"Time had gone soft at the crossroads..." So begins Chanctonbury Rings, Justin Hopper's spoken word album, based on his recent book, The Old Weird Albion. I have written before here about his reading...
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The wind that waves the pines
The Overstory (2018) is the novel about trees that was up for the Booker last year and has now won the Pulitzer Prize. Clearly it is a very highly regarded novel but I have to admit I found it a slog...
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