The Index to Some Landscapes

Just a brief post to let readers know that I have now completed a new version of the index to this blog.  I had realised that I was no longer able to remember who all the artists mentioned here actually were and so this new index includes their nationality, dates (where known) and an indication of their field of activity.  At the moment it stretches from Tiglath-Pileser I, the Assyrian king and garden designer (reigned 1115 - 1076 BCE), to Levi Van Veluw, the Dutch artist born in 1985. The result is almost the size of a small book: 15,000 words long - goodness knows how many words the blog itself now amounts to.  Walter Benjamin, writing about the urge to catalogue a library, refers to a 'dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder' and this index represents an attempt to retain some control over the unpredictable rhyzomic growth of the blog.  I'm hoping it will be a pleasure to browse in itself (it certainly is for me).  If you're so minded you could search for every 'painter' or 'Swiss painter', or for a 'Swiss painter' born in '1853' (you'd strike lucky with Ferdinand Hodler).  But it is not a sophisticated database or an attempt at a comprehensive Companion to Landscape in the Arts. I can't help noticing that there are still big gaps: I haven't got round yet to writing anything about Robert Frost or Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver or many other well known figures.  But the list keeps growing and my next post will add a new name near the start of the index: Jananne Al-Ani.  She'll be going in just before Seyed Alavi, Leon Battista Alberti and Alcman, and just after Eileen Agar, César Aira and Yamabe no Akahito...