Koyaanisqatsi
If we associate landscape with slow cinema it is partly because we are used to seeing scenery framed statically, like a photograph, focusing our attention on small movements or gradual change....
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Out of Ice
Last Saturday The Independent had an 'In the Studio' feature on Scottish environmental artist Elizabeth Ogilvie and found her 'experimenting with blocks of melting ice suspended over a small pool, to...
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Soft Estate
I mentioned Edward Chell's art of the motorway verges in an earlier post on Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' book Edgelands. Since then he has had an AHRC grant to make new work and research...
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Watching a herd of grazing cows
Frederik de Moucheron, Mountain Scene with Herd of Cattle, second half of the 17th centuryIn the course of one of those long conversations in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities, Ulrich tries to...
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Sea of Ink
Bada Shanren, Fish and rocks, 1696Source: Wikimedia CommonsIn Meer der Tusche (2005), Swiss writer Richard Weihe tells in 51 short chapters the life story of the great seventeenth century Chinese...
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Cities express the human will
'And how can it be,' asked Georges Bataille, 'that a landscape, formed of interrelated appearances without any meaning, can, according to the position of the eye, in one place be empty and without...
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What soever delightfull view the Eye takes pleasure in
Paul Bril, Self-Portrait, c1595-1600Source for images: Wikimedia Commons Edward Norgate's Miniatura; or The Art of Limning, composed probably in the late 1620s and revised two years before his death in...
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Like a crystal flood
The story of Acis and Galatea is rooted in the landscape of Sicily. When the sea-nymph sees her lover killed by a great rock, thrown by the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, she transforms his blood into...
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We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. On the final page of Finnegans Wake, the River Liffey enters the ocean. But the book is circular and...
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The Ice Palace
'How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary.' It would be hard to imagine higher praise than Doris Lessing's,...
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The Stones of Chamonix
John Ruskin, View from my Window at Mornex, c. 1862-1863Images from Wikimedia Commons If you're in Edinburgh this summer you'll be able to see the National Gallery of Scotland's exhibition John...
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When the brush moves, water flows from a spring
'Consider that when the brush moves, water flows from a spring, and when the brush stops, a mountain stands firm' - Sun Guoting (648-703) Sun Guoting, part of the Treatise on Calligraphy, 687 In Tim...
View ArticleThe Garden of Music
'I love gardens. They do not reject people. There one can walk freely, pause to view the entire garden, or gaze at a single tree. Plants, rocks, and sand show changes, constant changes.' - Tōru...
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Ruin lust
The Colosseum seen from the ruins on the Palatine HillIn my last post I said we were about to head off for Rome and now I am back with a camera full of images of ruins. Just before we left, I had a...
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The Third Paradise
Earlier this month at the Baths of Caracalla we saw this spiral arrangements of Roman stone - like a Richard Long sculpture re-imagined by Ian Hamilton Finlay. It is in fact an installation by...
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The Ruins of Hohenbaden
Carl Philipp Fohr, The Ruins of Hohenbaden, (1814-15)The Morgan Library & Museum Today was the last day to see A Dialogue with Nature, an excellent little exhibition at The Courtauld which...
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The Agony in the Garden
Paolo Veronese, The Annointing of David, c. 1550During the spiritualism craze that swept Victorian London in the 1860s, John Ruskin would occasionally allow himself to be brought along by fashionable...
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Blood Meridian
'Blood Meridian is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms in its leading role, imposingly—truly the...
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Atmosphere
We were in Margate recently and saw the new installation by Edmund de Waal, atmosphere. As usual in his recent work, the vitrines and their arrangement in space are as important as the small porcelain...
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Yellow & Blue
A poetry reading by Thomas A. Clark is a rare and special occasion, so we took leave this week and headed up to Grasmere to hear him. Earlier this year Carcanet published a new collection, Yellow...
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