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Undercity
I have started the audiobook of Underland. I listen to it underground, during my tube journeys to work, where claustrophobia comes from the crush of people rather than the confined space of the...
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Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon (1958)In 1959, the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Live Action) was won by a Walt Disney film, Grand Canyon. Nearly twenty years early the studio had received critical acclaim for Fantasia,...
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The Sun's my Fire
Joan Carlile, The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park, detail, 1650s Today we made our way through the Pride crowds in London to Lyon & Turnbull for “Bright Souls”: The...
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The white island
Keros and DhaskalioSource: Wikimedia Commons, ZdeI've just been reading an interesting article in the Independent about a kind of artificial mountain in the Aegean, built 'within 100 years or so of the...
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Black ice
Sólheimajökull glacier, IcelandPhotographed by me in May 2019 After returning from Iceland recently I was keen to write something about its landscape but realised I had already covered a lot of the...
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Lunar surface and horizon
Apollo 11 Mission image - Lunar surface and horizon Source: Internet ArchiveTomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing and it feels too momentous to let it pass without mention on this...
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Mountain R
Mountain R is a 1996 novel by the French Oulipian writer Jacques Jouet (1947-) about a failed attempt to construct an artificial mountain. The Dalkey Archive published an English translation by Brian...
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The sky was a subtle newsprint grey
Last month, in connection with the Apollo landing anniversary, I mentioned Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007), Katie Paterson's work in which Beethoven’s...
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Viewing the Three Lakes
Hsieh T'iao'Viewing the Three Lakes'I have previously devoted a post to Hsieh Ling-yün (Xie Lingyun, 385-433), known as the founder of the shan-shui ("rivers-and-mountains") tradition in Chinese...
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Windsor Castle and Park
Well, here's some interesting news from the British Library: 'With something like a thrill we must record that probably the very germ and protoplasm of landscape art in Britain sprang from a king, and...
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River Landscape
Annibale Carracci, The Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1599-1600In The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (1966), A. Richard Turner singled out this painting as the most brilliant landscape painted by...
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Roma antica e moderna
German soldiers in 1944, posing with a picture by Giovanni Paolo Panini taken from NaplesSource: Wikimedia CommonsWe have just returned from a holiday in Berlin where quite a lot of time was spent at...
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Blue River
The other day I pulled out from my library the anthology Poems of Arab Andalusia that City Lights Books published back in 1989. The translations were made by Cola Franzen (1923-2018) and she based...
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A map of Elmbourne
I have just read All Among the Barley, the third novel by Melissa Harrison, whose writings and nature observations I've been following over the last few years via her prolific Twitter feed. Looking...
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Bare plain, leafless, treeless
Reading the exiled Ovid's Tristia and Black Sea Letters you keep wanting him to tell his correspondents back in Rome about the landscape at Tomis. But all of these poems are about one thing - his...
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A dialectic of the near and the far
Guo Xi, Early Spring, 1072In 1072 the Chinese artist Guo Xi completed one of the most celebrated landscape paintings, Early Spring. It is his only surviving large scale work - there are smaller...
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A Timeline for Landscape in the Arts
I have put together a new timeline of landscape and the arts based on entries in this blog. It covers five hundred people, ranging in time from Sargon II, King of Assyria, to Robert Macfarlane. It...
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Emerald City
I’ve been looking through a library copy of The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop, a huge, glossy and expensive book based on material in the Art Directors Guild archives. Among its many full page...
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Ten Skies and 13 Lakes
‘The only way one can understand landscape is through time.’ - James Benning This is a still from TEN SKIES (2004) a film by James Benning that lasts over two hours and consists of ten static shots of...
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Diamond Mountains
Jeong Seon, General View of Mt. Geumgang, 1734Source: Wikimedia CommonsIn these days of mass global travel it feels as if everywhere of note is being constantly visited and photographed, but one of the...
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