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periplum, not as land looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing. Ezra Pound, Canto LIX We went to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey . What did I think of it? I agree with what translator Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books and I recommend reading his essay . Emily Wilson's scathing LRB review was entertaining but had me wincing from that second paragraph, where the…
Phoenix rising by the sun in the Aberdeen Bestiary Source: University of Notre Dame It has been intensely hot again this week and I was listening on the news this morning to reports of fires in the Midlands. It made me think of these lines from ' The Phoenix ', a 10th century Old English poem in the Exeter Book which expands upon an older Latin text. When the gem of the skies in a summer season,…
In the late 1930s comparisons were often made between new art and ancient landscapes. In British Art: Ancient Landscapes Sam Smiles cites an essay by John Piper which refers to the work of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, who 'has landed us back in the stomach of pre-history' and Paul Nash, who 'leaves us with the bare sea-washed bones of it.' A Barbara Hepworth catalogue compared her work to menhirs…
Utagawa Hiroshige, Musashi Plain, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji , 1852 I have been reading A Tale Unasked , Penguin's new Meredith McKinney translation of Lady Nijō's Towazugatari , a court and travel diary completed around 1307. After her expulsion from the palace she became an itinerant nun, travelling to famous shrines and checking out utamakura on the way. I have discussed…
Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple , 1834 Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and…
Hurvin Anderson, Lower Lake , 2005 I've been twice now to the Tate's Hurvin Anderson exhibition - a refreshingly cool, air-conditioned experience on these recent hot days, even though many of his landscape paintings depict tropical vegetation and sunlit Caribbean beaches. In her catalogue essay, 'Home and the World: The Britishness of Hurvin Anderson's Diasporic Landscapes', Gillian Forrester…
Mrs Fox with her Stormy Landscapes Here is a landscape painter I have never featured before, Mrs Fox. Her stormy landscapes (painted in miniature by Turlo Girffin ) are in the Design Museum's Wes Anderson exhibition, which I visited recently with my son Torin, an art student and Wes aficionado. As you can see below, there were also miniature landscapes on a vending machine from Asteroid City, a…
I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to…
The Epic of Everest (1924) is an extraordinary landscape film - mainly shot in black and white but sometimes tinted in vivid colours, including pink, as you can see above. It was shot by John Noel, 'a soldier by profession but an artist in spirit', as Wade Johnson says in an excellent Sight & Sound essay He was heavily influenced by Herbert Ponting's footage of the equally ill-fated Antarctic…
Michael Snow, still from La Région Centrale , 1971 I thought I would focus here on a fascinating work of landscape art that I have only briefly referred to previously . In the late sixties, Michael Snow created three seminal 'camera motion' films which influenced later structural and minimal cinema. La Région Centrale was the third of these, made in the Canadian wilderness using a Camera…
