10/11/2023 0 Comments Contemporary landscape paintingsDOIĪre there pictures we might be thinking about more keenly in this vital phase of debate about how we understand and inhabit our surroundings? I’m not (not really) suggesting that artists and art historians release their “nature classics” with new introductions in a big book or exhibition or website. I was grateful for Compton Verney’s gathering of new work in Creating the Countryside, a glimpse of what artists are doing and have done with profoundly visual subjects, but I wanted more. ![]() Read the fine essays on rural eeriness in which Robert Macfarlane gauges the obscure sense of threat in work by artists from Alan Reynolds to Derek Jarman. Look at the scale of the Tate’s Paul Nash exhibition, look at the Royal Academy opening its new doors to Tacita Dean’s Landscape, and the National Gallery (with Tim Barringer as curator) asking us to think carefully about the colonial dreamlands of Thomas Cole. In many respects, landscape art is a well-acknowledged source of inspiration and a guiding force in contemporary thinking. ![]() Where are the most fertile connections being made with the landscape tradition in art? Is it possible to think through our most pressing questions in relation to pictures, or is landscape in two dimensions now most widely recognised as the orientation of paper in a photocopier? DOI I don’t want to make a mixed parliament sound like a monolithic entity, but it seems fair to speak of a cultural phenomenon. There are clear lines of connection with other art forms, especially with folk-inspired music, and with film-making. ![]() Places are taking readers to books (loved plots, threatened habitats, newly discovered margins) books are showing readers possible new ways of seeing their environments. Non-fiction with a strong element of memoir is the defining form here, though to my mind some of the most powerful place-writing has been in fiction. John Stuart Collis is once more back in his wood, jacketed with the red spine of a Vintage Classic, his voice coming from the 1940s to introduce the contrasting pleasures of farm work and forestry. Hudson, Edward Thomas, and George Ewart Evans accompanying original monographs by Tim Dee this year on the birdlife of landfill sites, and Fiona Sampson on limestone country. The list of the independent publisher, Little Toller, swells with a harvest of new editions each season, with writing by W.H. ![]() A wealth of fine contemporary work has been joined on the bookshop front tables by reissues of books, which formerly had slipped quietly out of print. The surge of interest in writing about nature, place, and environment has been one of the great literary stories of the last twenty years. Work on the history of landscape art has influential roles to play today more than ever, so please do join this conversation about the place of art and the history of art in national understandings of landscape now. Questions of what landscapes mean to us, who sees them, and what they are for are all being debated now with an intensity perhaps unmatched since the first great age of domestic tourism, landscape painting, and aesthetic philosophy in the late eighteenth century. We are in the midst of a new era of place perception in Britain.
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