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Coniston Water
During our trip to the Lake District last week we stayed in Coniston and went to visit Ruskin's old home at Brantwood (above). There was much of interest there, although Mrs Plinius expressed some...
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Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm, 1650-1Source: Wikimedia CommonsAlain de Botton's recent ideas for making art more popular have not gone down well with the critics: 'pointless', 'smarmy and...
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Ea
We were at St Luke's on Sunday, the converted church near the Barbican which we last visited to hear Terje Isungset play his ice instruments. This time we had come to see Richard Skelton and the...
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The Broken Road
The latest New York Review of Books carries a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn on Patrick Leigh Fermor and the posthumous publication of The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos. Apparently...
View ArticleThe Enclave
We looked in on the Photographers Gallery yesterday to see the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize contenders. I was particularly interested in The Enclave series by Richard Mosse (which has won him the...
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The River Duddon
The valley of the River DuddonIn 1820 William Wordsworth published The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets. As Stephen Gill points out in his essay, 'Wordsworth and the River Duddon', reviewers were...
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A Prospect of Wales
Last year I asked here'why isn't the art of Recording Britain better known?' Well Sheffield's Millenium Gallery is currently hosting a touring exhibition devoted to Recording Britain, with some of the...
View ArticleChinese Landscape - Tattoo
Looking at players in the World Cup this month I have wondered whether those reports last year that we have reached 'peak beard' can be right, and, if they are, whether we nonetheless still have some...
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Harvest
I have just finished the Jim Crace novel Harvest: 'Sometime in the pre-industrial period, an isolated and self-sufficient English village finds its common fields stolen for enclosure as collective...
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New Western Landscapes
Rebecca Solnit published two essays on contemporary American landscape photography in Creative Camera magazine, in 1993 and 1998, and they were reprinted together in her collection As Eve Said to the...
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Dawn over the Gulf
Gerardo Dottori, Self Portrait, (1928)Comune di PerugiaThis summer at the Estorick Collection you can see a thought-provoking exhibition of aerial landscapes in Gerardo Dottori: The Futurist View....
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No other tent but the sky
Walter Crane's 1907 frontispiece toRobert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)Here is Robert Louis Stevenson, settling down with his donkey for a night in the Valley of the...
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The Journey Through Wales
Medieval manuscript of The Journey Through Wales in the British LibraryIn the spring of 1188 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, set out to travel through Wales recruiting men for the Third Crusade. He...
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Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
This autumn the Royal Academy will have a major retrospective exhibition for Anselm Kiefer. Back in the eighties, when I was a teenager and first discovering contemporary art, Kiefer was a really big...
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A hedge of rain to hinder my good fortune
I was reading Dafydd ap Gwilym in a Welsh wood last week. Many of his nature poems were addressed to a llaitai - love-messenger - like the seagull or the skylark. As Jay Griffiths wrote in her essay,...
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Stourhead
When we arrived at our Somerset B&B en route to Wales I told the owner we had chosen to break our journey there to visit the landscape garden at Stourhead. "That's it over there" she said,...
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A Journey to Avebury
There are two days left on the iPlayer to listen to an episode of Stuart Maconie's Radio 6 show on 'West Country Freaks' which includes some music specifically inspired by the landscape of Southwest...
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American Smoke
It was the season of autumn ghosts, a dampness in the soul. November 2013. I stopped outside the sea cadets building in Stoke Newington's Church Street, now re-purposed as an exhibition space:...
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Fort Process
Musical performance and sound art installation come together in site-specific festivals like the one I attended on Saturday at Newhaven Fort, 'Fort Process', or the TÖNE Festival in June, originally...
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How gloomily glaring!
'The Claude Glass was an optical device which took various forms, of which perhaps Thomas Gray's was the most typical: 'a Plano-convex Mirror of about for inches diameter on a black foil, and bound up...
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