A Tour to Aavasaksa

It is possible that you are not a regular reader of Finnish gaming website Playlab! and so may have missed an article they ran by Sini Jaatinen on 'Lustfärd till Avasaka', the oldest Finnish board game. It is set out like Snakes and Ladders and players start with 25 marks each which they spend or augment on their journey - the first one back to Helsinki wins everything in the bank.

'The game is quite simple and not so exciting but the nostalgic elements make it interesting and you want to play it more than once. ... Each frame represents place in Finland in 1862, for example Tampere, Vyborg, Tornio and Oulu. There is some small information about the place and the actions that you should take in the rule book. ... Some of the facts that are given are now outdated, for example Tornio is not the most north city of Finland at the moment and Vyborg is not part of Finland. When playing with the children I feel that it is important that the adult sets the facts right. But the historical facts are still valid and you can also learn about the living in 1862.' 

This article doesn't mention that the game was designed by Hilda Olson (1832-1916), an artist who features in the exhibition 'Crossing Borders: Travelling Women Artists in the 1800s', currently showing at Helsinki's Ateneum. The photo above is a page from the exhibition catalogue showing her board game and its fifty six landscapes. I couldn't see anything about her in this catalogue, which I flicked through while drinking tea in the museum cafe, but one of the wall texts next to an illustration of a spider had this to say.

'Hilda Olson was the first Finnish woman to work as a scientific illustrator. She took part in expeditions led by Professor of Zoology Alexander von Nordmann to Aland, to Crimea and other parts of present-day Ukraine and southern Russia. Olson translated short stories from English for newspapers while also designing lottery tickets and Finland's first board game, A Tour to Aavasaksa. After the deaths of von Nordmann and her mother, Olson moved to London and supported herself by drawing models for a wallpaper manufacturer. In her spare time, she travelled in England, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and painted landscapes.'

I wondered where she lived in London and found online a short biography of her that says she died at 40 Whitehead's Grove in Chelsea. 'When she moved to England, she seems to have acclimatized herself to her new homeland quite quickly. In a letter, she says of the London air: "Fog and wet every day, but we are so used to those things and hardly notice the sky."' However, her work as a pattern-maker didn't leave much time to develop her painting. She may not have become a major artist but she is certainly an interesting figure, who left the small, insular town of Nykarleby to forge a new life in Helsinki and then travelled throughout Europe. Hilda Olson may be having a moment this year because there is also a small exhibition in Helsinki's Natural History Museum, 'Hilda's Spiders', featuring illustrations she did for von Nordmann in Russia.  

I will end this post with a photograph I took in the Ateneum of a screen that allows visitors to experience Lustfärd till Avasaka (apologies for the reflections). Here we have landed on square 32, Aavasaksa (spelled with two As now). This had become tourist destination, known as one of the southernmost points where you could see the midnight sun. The game board caption reads 'Hurrah, three cheers for Aavasaksa and the Northern Midsummer Night's Sun! See the Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Russians sitting and marvelling at a sun that shows us its golden orb all through the night. A rich Englishman buys your fishing rod for 2 marks.'

Latticework landscape

This latticework landscape is currently on display in Kensington High Street at the Japan House exhibition The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests. It was made five years ago by Sakae Tategu Kogei, the firm founded by Eiichi Yokota, a master of kumiko craft. 'The origins of kumiko likely date back to the Kamakura period (1185–1333), with techniques passed down through generations. The central process involves crafting thin, delicate pieces of wood and assembling them in various geometric patterns to form a seamless surface.' The different coloured woods include Japanese whitebark magnolia, Chinese pyramid juniper, lignitized Japanese castor aralia and Kiso hinoki cypress. The delicate shapes used to make the components of the landscape range from a basic triangle joint to the yae asa-no-ha (eight-layer hemp leaf) and dahlia patterns.   

The fact that some of these wooden patterns are named after natural forms does not of course mean that they are designed to signify dahlias or hemp leaves. My photo above shows the dahlia pattern and you can see this used in the mountain landscape for the third-from-bottom slope on the left. There is an interesting semiotic effect here, where flower shapes are used not to imply anything about vegetation in the scene. Instead they suggest the complexity of light and shade or strength of shadow on a particular slope. This reminds me of a broader feature of Chinese and Japanese arts where the names for technical components often evoke specific natural effects, but could have been used freely. To paint a whirlpool you could use the brush stroke tan wo ts’un ('like eddies of a whirlpool'), but maybe it would be more interesting to deploy the luan yün ts’un ('like rolling billows of cloud').   

We use kumiko coasters every day to put drinks and pans on but I don't remember seeing the technique used to create a landscape before. I would love to know more about the history of kumiko used in this way, but information online is scant. Simpler kumiko lattices (square and rectangles) are used on shoji screens which could themselves have landscapes painted onto them, although surely it is preferable to leave them blank. As Tanizaki said in praise of shadows: 'the light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.' The garden and landscape beyond can then be revealed by sliding the screen doors open. 

Sahara Project

Tate Modern's Electric Dreams exhibition includes the film Tele-Mack, shot in 1968, featuring the work of West German artist Heinz Mack. It starts in black and white with him driving an E-type through a city, looking like David Hemmings in Blow-Up. Then it leaps into colour - Mack is now in a silver suit carrying an aluminium disc into a stretch of water (accompanied by 'tense music', as you can see from my photograph above). The voice on the soundtrack tells us this is a kind of artificial sun and is an experiment related to the artist's Sahara Project. Next we see him planting fragmented mirrors in a field (a kind of landscape art I've written about here before). Then we see an installation of kinetic sculptures made of aluminium foil and coloured Plexiglas - Mack is wearing a cool sixties suit while a groovy young woman in plastic orange raincoat and hat takes photographs of him. From this Warhol-like scene we are transported to the Tunisian desert, where the artist in his silver suit resembles an astronaut, setting up aluminium sculptures that face into the sun. Here we are witnessing the culmination of his long-planned Sahara Project. There are only two colours - the blue of the sky and the white-brown of the sand, until Mack places a pink translucent sheet in front of the camera. Finally he creates an artificial garden of metal-winged sculptures, the kind of thing you might see in J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971). 

You can watch a short video about the Sahara Project on the Guggenheim website. Mack conceived it in the early fifties when he and his wife drove their VW Beetle into the desert and first experienced its intense light. Curator Valerie Hillings says Mack told her a story about how he broke off the mirror in his hotel room and 'took it into the desert to see what happened.' Mack himself describes the attraction of a place with no distractions, the perfect setting for sculptures: a landscape unspoiled by the "fingerprints of civilisation." By 1959 he had worked out his thoughts on paper and exhibited them as a concept, years before the American land artists came up with similar ideas of using remote locations and mirrors. Although light and reflection were central to the work he was making in the sixties, it wasn't until the Tele-Mack filmmakers suggested going out to Tunisia that he got to take these sculptures and set them up in the desert. The key difference here between Mack and earth artists like Michael Heizer was that his work was temporary. He left no trace behind - Sahara Project was thus as ephemeral as a walk by Hamish Fulton (and can thus be viewed as relatively environmentally sensitive). It was also a one-off performance, only preserved on the medium of film. And what an excellent film Tele-Mack is -  I'm not at all surprised it got an honourable mention at the 1971 Venice Film festival.

Postscript 14/3/25

A week after writing this I have realised that Tate Etc. magazine carried an interview with Heinz Mack in which he discusses the film and Sahara Project. 

'The gravity of the desert, its absolute tranquillity, its endless dimensions – all this radiated mystery. In this landscape, infinitely vast and untouched, I now experimented with my comparatively small models and sculptures. This was inspired by the question of whether my art could stand up to this open landscape or would be lost in it. I discovered that, despite the contradictory proportions, something could be created there that had a poetic radiance.'

An Outcrop in the Campagna

 Frederic Leighton, A Nile View, 1868

'The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow; the latter perhaps especially, deep and powerful near the eye (the local brown slightly overruling the violet), but fading as it receded into tints exquisitely vague, and so faint that they seem rather to belong to the sky than to the earth. At this time of year the broad coffee-coloured sweep of the river is bordered on either side by a fillet of green of the most extraordinary vivacity, but redeemed from any hint of crudity by the golden light which inundates it.' - Leighton's travel journal, October 1868

This panorama is one of the highlights of Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature, an exhibition of oil sketches which we saw at Leighton House last month. It was painted on the first of three trips he made to Egypt - Leighton was a lifelong traveller and, having grown up on the continent, was fluent in several languages. A wealthy bachelor, he was also extremely well connected and for this trip was provided with a steamer to take him up the Nile. He evidently took pleasure in making oil sketches but didn't do them on every trip, or at least so it appears - we don't have a record of them all and he mainly kept them private, only showing some of them late in his career. His modesty about them can be explained in terms of his self-image as President of the Royal Academy, engaged in the highest-regarded genre of history painting, but it still seems extraordinary.

There is an excellent catalogue which apart from anything else smells delightful (mine still has that fresh paper new book aroma!) The main author is Pola Durajska who did a PhD at York on Leighton's landscapes. She and the other authors point out some interesting features of his sketches:

• He experimented with different shapes of canvas (cutting them to size himself) and varied his technique from impasto to thin wash-like effects. 
• He looked for interesting light effects at different times of day and studied the intense shadows and bright white buildings of north Africa.   
• His interest in architecture influenced his choice of landscapes, with castles and towns blending into their surroundings and rock formations shaped like ruins.
• He rarely included figures or local colour and did not record where the sketches were done, making the locations of some of them hard to pin down.
• He also avoided the obvious, painting unregarded corners of cities like Venice and Jerusalem, or framing famous vistas differently to earlier artists.   

I'll end here with one of the Gere Collection paintings normally on display at the National Gallery. The wall text at Leighton House says that 'it is not easy to understand exactly what attracted Leighton to paint this particular grassy, hillside slope in Italy. Without any discernible focal point or distinctive feature, other than a flash of yellow sandy soil in the foreground, perhaps its appeal was in the simple combination of the green mass of the landforms against the deep blue of the sky. This apparently unpromising combination of elements typifies Leighton's approach to finding a subject.' 

Frederic Leighton, An Outcrop in the Campagna, probably 1866

Lagoon city

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo I've not read, written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall, which describes the ceiling of the Gesuati, painted in 1738. The surrounding roofscape reflects and absorbs light and 'Alpers and Baxendall seem to have spent days observing the resulting fluctuations in illumination, such as occasionally visible 'moving ripple of light' bouncing up from the waves of the Canale della Giudecca, the wide expanse of lagoon that lies in front of the church. There is also 'an electrifying occasional five minutes in late afternoon when the sun is low enough in the west both to shine direct through the west windows and to reflect back strongly from the east wall on which it falls.'' Venice has been painted by countless topographical artists but here is an example of the way light and the cityscape transform even the art inside its churches.

Paul Klee, Lagunenstadt, 1932

I could talk here about some of the landscape paintings Gayford discusses by Canaletto, Turner, Ruskin, Whistler or Monet, but instead I'll just features this one by Paul Klee, because I particularly like it. Klee's visit was 'the most fleeting of all the artists chronicled in this book' - just a few days in the autumn of 1932. Lagunenstaft (Lagoon city) 'is in its modest, whimsical way one of the most perceptive of all the vistas of this most painted of places.' The confusing city streets are conveyed by those rectangles at the bottom. Above them 'a few higher and more separated trapezoids' probably represent the structures around the Piazza San Marco that Klee described as 'a unique creation in stone'. And above and beyond these are the water and the sky.

Mirror of Holland

This morning I walked along our local canal, with bright sunny weather creating reflections of the barges and bridges, the buildings of Hoxton and Haggerston, a few trees and many joggers pounding down the path. This evening I watched Mirror of Holland, made up entirely of shots of canal reflections, which won the short film Palme d'Or in 1951. It begins with the windmill below and a young lad who bends down to see the image the 'right way round' - the rest of the film continues in this way, with the reflections turned into water-blurred moving images of farms, gabled houses, a church tower, locks and canal boats. The director Bert Haanstra went on to make many other documentary films - his other big success was based on another reflective medium, Glass (1958).

Mirror of Holland put me in mind of Haanstra's Dutch contemporary M.C. Escher, whose compositions like Puddle and Three Worlds are interested in how water can contain a landscape. There are some abstract moments in the film that look like Escher's Rippled Surface which also dates from 1950. Of course there are reflections in Dutch Golden Age paintings too and you could probably make a version of Haanstra's film by montaging these together - the example below is in Jan Van de Heyden's Country House on the Vliet near Delft (1665). 

Renamed City

Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I wonder when that might be possible again... I have never been, but I've always assumed I would go one day. I’m not sure I associated Leningrad with anything much when I was a child - it was when I started to read Russian literature that St. Petersburg came into focus, accompanied by a shock of recognition. In Gogol, men ‘scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live.’ When I first read his stories, I too was a lowly, alienated civil servant living in shabby accommodation. And then there was Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, ‘full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city’s cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle that made people sick’ (Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance).

 

 Vasily Sadovnikov, Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, 1830s

 

In his 1979 essay 'A Guide to a Renamed City' Joseph Brodsky talks about how the city has been reflected in Russian literature. The presence of the Neva means that St. Petersburg's 'architectural landscapes' are already reflected in water, 'as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images.' But behind these surfaces, it was the interior of the city that became the subject of Russian poetry and novels. And as this was happening, St. Petersburg itself grew and changed at extraordinary speed, until the Revolution came and it entered a long period of stasis and decline - 'quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of the seasons.' Brodsky concludes his essay with Russia's literary city preserved in the memories of Soviet school children, as they learn verse and re-read nineteenth century prose. He ends with a memorable final paragraph, that describes the cityscape in June...

A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours - a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it is too light and because any dream will be inferior to reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

Grass pillow

Natsume Sōseki's Kusamakura ('Grass Pillow'), published in 1906, was an attempt at a haiku-style novel, a reaction against the enthusiasm for European-style naturalism that had recently entered Japanese literature, and it works so beautifully (at least, to my mind, in English translation) that it is disappointing he didn't try anything like it again. Maybe one luminous book is enough. Its narrator is an artist escaping fast-modernising urban Japan for a solo-walking tour in the mountains, where he stays at a hot-spring resort and encounters a beautiful and enigmatic young woman, Nami (which means 'beauty'). His project is to see the world in aesthetic terms and experience everything he encounters as if it is a poem. Like Sōseki, he is at home in Chinese, Japanese and Western literature and over the course of the novel he quotes Basho, Wang Wei and Shelley. I should probably refer here to the parts of the novel where he theorises natural beauty and discusses landscape art (at one point he describes British painters' inability to paint light - 'nothing bright could be produced in that dismal air of theirs'.) Instead I will include one of his paragraphs of word painting. This is from near the end of the book, where the narrator lies down on the grass among wild japonica bushes, sensing as he does so 'that I am inadvertently crushing beneath me an invisible shimmer of heat haze.'

'Down beyond my feet shines the sea. The utterly cloudless spring sky casts its sunlight over the entire surface, imparting a warmth that suggests the sunlight has penetrated deep within its waves. A swath of delicate Prussian blue spreads lengthwise across it, and here and there an intricate play of colours swims over a layering of fine white-gold scales. Between the vastness of the spring sunlight that shines upon the world, and the vastness of the water that brims beneath it, the only visible thing is a single white sail no bigger than a little fingernail. The sail is absolutely motionless. Those ships that plied these waters in days gone by, bearing tributes from afar, must have looked like this. Apart from the sail, heaven and earth consist entirely of the world of shining sunlight and the world of sunlit sea.'

On a sunlit day

I recently read Jeremy Noel-Tod's excellent anthology The Penguin Book of Prose Poetry and it prompted me to get down a few books from our library and look up some examples of prose poems.  James Wright, for example: in Above the River: The Complete Poems there are several short prose pieces written during the seventies, when he and his wife were spending their summers in Europe.  I have chosen seven of these in order to quote brief imagistic landscape descriptions; but as usual when I do this kind of thing, I need to apologise for taking such descriptions out of context and failing to do convey the actual point of the poems.  Still, as I sit writing this in London under lockdown, these fragments of text are a pleasant reminder of the light and beauty of Italy, and an excuse to include again a photograph of the Colosseum from our 2014 trip.

The Colosseum, Rome

As Donald Hall notes in his introduction, James Wright's Italy was a literary place: the landscape of Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, of Goethe's Italian Journey, Keats and Shelley, and the American novelists - Henry James, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells (who was 'the other literary figure born in Martins Ferry, Ohio').  Sometimes thoughts of Ohio comes to Wright when he writes about Italy.  In the poem 'One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain', he imagines the Ohio river once looking something like the Adige, 'to the people who loved it / Long before I was born'.  Verona was, for Wright, 'one of the earth's loveliest places' and I will begin and end my quotes there.

On a sunlit day its pink and white marbles glow from within, and they glow from within when it is raining.

- The Arena, Verona

In all directions below us were valleys whose villages were just beginning to appear out of the mist, a splinter of a church here, an olive grove there.  It was a life in itself.

- San Gimignano

The fragrance of the water moves heavily and slowly with mussel shells and the sighs of drowned men.  There is nothing so heavy with earth as the sea's breath and the breath of fresh wilderness, the camomilla fields along the shore.

- Bari

All over Apulia, currents of sea air snarl among winds from the landwise mountains.  I can see thistle seeds tumbling everywhere, but I lose their pathways, they are so many.

- Apulia

At noon on a horizon the Colosseum poises in mid-flight, a crumbling moon of gibbous gold.  It catches an ancient light, and gives form to that light.

- The Colosseum, Rome

It is only the evenings that give the city this shape of light; they make the darkness frail and they give substance to the light.

- Venice

Its shape holds so fine a balance between the ground and the sky that its very stones are a meeting and an intermingling of light and shadow.  At noon, even the fierce Italian sunlight cannot force a glare out of the amphitheatre's gentleness.

- The Arena, Verona

There is one of Wright's prose poems written in Italy that I particularly like, 'The Lambs on the Boulder'.  It is about Cimabue and the story of how he 'discovered' Giotto, then just a shepherd boy, scratching sketches of lambs on a rock.  I always like the idea of treating such fanciful stories seriously (a different example of this impulse is Eric Rohmer's serious treatment of pastoral in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon).  'One of my idle wishes,' Wright says, 'is to find that field where Cimabue stood in the shade and watched the boy Giotto scratching his stone with his pebble.'  He imagines the way Cimabue would have observed the boy:

    I wonder how long Cimabue stood watching before he said anything.  I'll bet he waited for a long time.  He was Cimabue.
    I wonder how long Giotto worked before he noticed that he was being watched.  I'll bet he worked a long time.  He was Giotto.
    He probably paused every so often to take a drink of water and tend to the needs of his sheep, and then returned patiently to his patient boulder, before he heard over his shoulder in the twilight the courtesy of the Italian good evening from the countryside man who stood, certainly out of the little daylight left to the shepherd and his sheep alike.
    I wonder where that boulder is.  I wonder if the sweet faces of the lambs are still scratched on its sunlit side.

Gaetano Sabatelli, Cimabue and Giotto, 1846

Hanging Gardens of Rock City

A detail from Hanging Gardens of Rock City (1970) by Liliane Lijn

In the British Museum at the moment you can see Hanging Gardens of Rock City, a collage by Liliane Lijn. It was one of four she made in 1970, imagining aerial walkways and parks among the rooftops of Manhattan. Of course these can now be seen as anticipating The High Line.  The museum caption quotes her as saying 'I have always found the rooftops of the buildings in Manhattan exciting and strange as if their architects had allowed their fantasies free at that distance from the ground.'  In her collages, the public has access to these private buildings and can be seen sunbathing and walking around, far above the streets of the city.

In the sixties Lijn moved from New York to London, where she was married to Takis, who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern earlier this year.  In the course of her long career she has worked in all media, from performance to prose-poems and made plastic sculptures, poem machines, 'vibrographs', cone-shaped koans, kinetic clothing, light columns, biomorphic goddesses and solar installations in the landscape. The last of these is of particular interest here.  They are collaborations with astronomer John Vallerga in which powerful prisms reflect sunlight of different colours, depending on their angle.  Getting permission to install these has not been easy and ensuring they are protected from damage is also a challenge.  The video below shows a couple of these artifical suns on the hills behind the Golden Gate Bridge.  Another, Sunstar, has been shining from the summit of Mount Wilson - the Los Angeles Magazine reported on it last year.  Here is some information from the Mount Wilson Observatory website.

'An array of six prisms, Sunstar takes incoming sunlight and refracts it, bending the light and spreading it into a spectrum–all the colors of the rainbow. It is mounted near the top of the Observatory’s 150-foot Solar Telescope Tower. With motion controls, it can be remotely directed to project the spectrum to a specific point in the Los Angeles basin. An observer below will see an intense point of light in a single wavelength, shining like a brilliant jewel from the ridgeline of Mount Wilson, 5800 feet above in the San Gabriel Mountains. [...] 

The prism will be beaming daily to various sites around the Los Angeles basin — Griffith Observatory, the Rose Bowl, Pasadena City Hall, Memorial Park by the Armory, Elysian Park, the Music Center, wherever there is a view of Mount Wilson.  If you see it, please let us know what you think. Requests to have it beam your way can often be accommodated. Email: concerts@mtwilson.edu. Include the time you’d like to see the beam and your location’s address, or geographic coordinates if you prefer.'

Solar Hills by Liliane Lijn

Roden Crater

I thought I would follow up my last post on Katie Paterson with something about James Turrell, whose light works I was reminded of when looking at her Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008).  I have been reading James Turrell: A Retrospective, a sumptuously produced book which I should think gets as close as possible to giving a sense of what his artworks look like, even though they are nearly impossible to describe in two dimensional photography and words on a page. It is interesting how often the word 'landscape' is used in the book, even though what is usually being described is a perceptual environment or spaces from which to observe the sky.  Of course Turrell is a contemporary of the American land artists and it is easy to relate his magnum opus, Roden Crater, to their more monumental earthworks.  Turrell himself has said, 'I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.'  But works like Observatory by Robert Morris (1971) and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973-6), which are aligned with the solstice, can be seen as precursors to Roden Crater.

Roden Crater

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was clear from the book that Turrell's career hinges on that famous flight in 1974 when he located the setting for what has become his life's work. An experienced pilot, Turrell used a Guggenheim Foundation to fuel his plane and scoured the western states to find 'a solitary cinder cone or a butte' that would allow him to create the perfect space from which to experience the phenomenon of 'celestial vaulting'.  Work continues at Roden Crater - there are plans for a Fumarole, for example, which will look like a giant eye.  A pool will act as a lens and light from the sky will pass over it through an aperture.  'At night, the still water will focus images of the stars onto a floor of black volcanic cinder underneath such that a visitor might have the experience of walking on light from the stars.  The bowl shape of the bath's bronze-and-glass bottom is complemented by a small invisible antenna on the aperture's edge that effectively turns it into a simple radio telescope.  Bathers will be able to submerge their ears under the water to hear the ancient static radio noise emitted from the portion of the sky visible through the aperture.'

Some of the inspirations for Turrell's work, and some of the phenomena he has explored in his art:

Skyspaces - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - blackout curtains - the desert landscapes drawn by George Herriman in his 1940s Krazy Kat cartoons - the view from the Apollo spacecraft - Plato's Cave - Ganzfelds - Minimalism - Perceptual Cells - Blake's 'doors of perception' - Quakerism - the temple at Borobudur - Mesoamerican pyramids - emblemata depicting effects of light in a 1636 book by Guilielmus Hesius - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows - Buddhism's 'embrace of the void'...

Of course Turrell is familiar with the ways light has been used in the history of art, but his whole practice has been to work with light, rather than merely representing it.

According to the Christine Y. Kim in James Turrell: A Retrospective, there are now more than seventy-five Skyspaces around the world, enclosed chambers with an opening that lets visitors contemplate the sky.  You can find photographs of these online - the one I have included below is in Switzerland and actually shows the view out through its door (I guess if the spectacle of the sky starts to pall, you can still contemplate the Alps).  There are some spectacular looking Skyspaces in sunny places like Napa Valley, California.  Photographs of the Skyspace in Yorkshire Sculpture Park (which I mentioned here once before) show a damp patch of floor where the rain has entered.  Another British example is Cat Cairn (2000), in Northumberland, built with natural stone to blend into the landscape (the Kielder website explains that Turrell has recently upgraded the lighting system for this work).  Back in 2000 Monty Don wrote in The Observer about his experience of Cat Cairn.  'The experience of sitting quietly (albeit freezing) is enormously satisfying and enriching, even though sensation is stripped down and pared back as far as it will go without being diminished. All superfluities are abandoned. I would love this in my garden.'

James Turrell, Skyspace, Piz Uter, (inside) - 2005

Source: Wikimedia Commons: Kamahele

A place that exists only in moonlight

Katie Paterson, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, 2010

Photography was permitted: this is my photograph of her photograph

We recently took the train down to Margate to see the exhibition A place that exists only in moonlight: Katie Paterson & J.M.W. Turner.  I last mentioned Paterson's work here nearly ten years ago when I saw her talk at a conference:

She described a work completed only last week, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, which had involved returning to the Sahara desert a grain of sand that had been chiseled to 0.00005mm using the techniques of nanotechnology.  At extreme magnification the grain of sand resembled a planet and presumably the chiseling process could have created some nano-land art - a microscopic Spiral Jetty or near invisible Double Negative.  The point was made (by Brian Dillon) that she brings a necessary sense of humour to art that deals with cosmic scales of space and time. 

As can be seen above, the Turner Contemporary exhibition included a large black and white photograph of this work, showing the artist returning her tiny artwork to the desert.

Most of Paterson's work has been on a cosmic or planetary scale and therefore doesn't really qualify as landscape art.  For example,

• Fossil Necklace (2013), my favourite piece in the show, in which time is considered as a circle of beads, charting the evolution of life on earth from its monocellular origins. You can view every bead individually on the artist's website. 
 
• Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007), where Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was translated into Morse code and sent to the Moon and back. Craters on the moon fragmented the signal, leaving gaps in the music.

• The Cosmic Spectrum (2019), a colour wheel designed to show the colour of the universe at each point in its development (the exhibit was broken and didn't rotate when we were there, but this might have made it easier for us to study it).  It resembles Olafur Eliasson's Turner Colour Experiments, shown at the Tate in 2014 (see my earlier post).

Turner's work was interspersed with Paterson's and included some marvellous studies inspired by light, such as Moonlight on the River (1826) and ? Boats at Sea (c. 1830-45), both from the Tate's collection.

 J. M. W. Turner, Moonlight on the River, 1826

 J. M. W. Turner, ? Boats at Sea, c. 1830-45

There is also a new book, A place that exists only in moonlight, published to coincide with the exhibition but oddly not on sale at the gallery itself (you have to send off for it and I have not (yet) done this).  It comprises short texts that describe artworks that can exist only in the imagination.  Some were placed on the wall, like the one below, which reads like a landscape haiku.  These reminded me of the work of her fellow Scottish artist-poets Thomas A. Clark and Alec Finlay.  As instructions for art projects, they are like the walking proposals of Richard Long, or indeed any of those texts of conceptual artists, writers and composers who have been interested in exploring space and time, light and substance.  Just one example that springs to mind as I write this: La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #15: 'This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean.'  Someone could compile an anthology of such works, although they would probably seem less inspiring out of context.  Among the 'Ideas' on Katie Paterson's website, I particularly like A beach made with dust from spiral galaxies, Gravity released one unit at a time and, of course, A place that exists only in moonlight.

Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow

The Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli (1127–1206) currently has a mere three-line entry on Wikipedia and there is no anthology of his verse in translation currently in print.  However, it is easy to pick up a copy of Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow second-hand - something I've done, as you can see above. The book's title comes from a four-line poem which begins 'the pure wind makes me chant poems, / the bright moon urges me to drink.'  There is quite a lot of drinking in these poems (the translations by Jonathan Chaves, published in 1975, perhaps indicate their age by the way he describes this as getting high).  A love of poetry also comes through - for example in the lovely short poem 'Reading by the Window', in which Yang opens a book of Tang Dynasty poetry to find inside a peach blossom petal, still fresh, that had been caught inside the previous spring.  But nature is his main theme and there are examples in this book of what can unhesitatingly be described as 'landscape poems', recalling a view seen from a boat, a mountain temple or a moon viewing terrace. 

Landscape poems like these may frame the world like a painting but their words are able to convey sound and motion and time passing.  There are two 'Evening Lake Scenes' for example, in the first of which Yang watches geese in Vs and crows in flocks, flying over a lake and taking their time settling down for the night.  In the second he describes the sunset:

I sit watching the sun set over the lake.
The sun is not swallowed by mountains or clouds:
it descends inch by inch, then disappears completely,
leaving no trace where it sinks into the water.

In his introduction, Chaves highlights Yang's 'obsession with capturing the momentary changes in natural phenomena'.  This is from a poem recording his impressions as he crossed between Zhedong and Yongfeng on a spring day in 1179.

The sunlight must be moving the waves by itself;
the sky is calm, and there is no wind.

Wu Zhen, Fisherman, c. 1350

One of the Chinese paintings reproduced as illustrations in Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow

Yang Wanli is the last poet in David Hinton's anthology, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poets of Ancient China. Hinton says that 'with him China's rivers-and-mountains poetry had opened up virtually all of its possibilities'. He highlights Yang's adherence to Ch'an Buddhism and the way it gave rise to a 'crystalline attention to things themselves ... The rivers-and-mountains realm was the natural terrain for this attentiveness, as its grandeur so easily calls one from the limitations of self to the expansiveness of a mirror-like empty mind that contains all things.'  Here, to conclude, are four lines from Hinton's translation of a poem Yang wrote after a hike to Universal-Completion Monastery. 

As our boat lacing mists angles off the cove's willow shores,
cloud mountains appear and disappear among the willows.

And the beauty of climbing a mountain while adrift on a lake?
It's this lake's mind - that gaze holding the mountain utterly.

On the Banks of the Yangtze

Isabelle Bird, Trackers Houses on the Banks of the Yangtze, 1896

Source: The Ammonite Press.

In sketching, a landscape is represented by signs on paper, but in photography the actual view is imprinted as an image by the light that shone at that moment in time.  What, though if this 'indexical' process of signification went beyond just the action of light?  An article I was reading in the New York Review of Books this week suggests further possibilities.  Here Colin Thubron is discussing the journey into China of the nineteenth century photographer, Isabella Bird.

'After sunset she would set about developing the glass-plate negatives and toning her prints. Her darkroom was the Chinese night, but she had to block up chinks in the cabin walls to keep out the light of opium lamps. Then she cleaned the chemical from her negatives in the river and hung the printing-frames over the side of the boat. A faint trace of Yangtze mud survives on a few of her prints.'

So, in addition to light, her landscapes were imprinted with Chinese soil, dissolved in its great river.  All four elements could be said to have gone into the formation of these photographs.  The river's form was traced by light, purified by water and earth, and then fixed into permanence by the air that passing over its surface.

Isabella Bird, Hsin Tan Rapid on the Yangtze River, 1896

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Yangtze River that the sixty-four year old Isabella Bird travelled had no modern dams or steam boats.  Thubron admires her courage in ascending its gorges in a shallow-bottomed houseboat, rowed by sixteen men who would 'heave against the current and curl into wadded quilts at night, lost in opium sleep'.  It was a perilous and uncomfortable journey. 'Where perpendicular cliffs constricted the Yangtze into a fearsome torrent, big junks and sampans were hauled upriver by teams of trackers sometimes four hundred strong, threading precipitous paths and rock-cut steps with the din of drums and gongs and the explosion of firecrackers to intimidate the spirit of the rapids ... The steep shores and inlets were littered with ships’ remains, and with human skeletons.'  But this was also a world of beauty, barely known to Western travellers. 'With its canopied bridges and watermills and temples rising from bamboo and cedar groves, it intoxicated Bird by its sheer luxuriance, and by its conformity to some childhood expectation (the word “picturesque” recurs), as if she were traveling through a timeless Cathay.'

Isabella Bird, A Bridge at Wan Hsien of the Single Arch Type, 1896

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The sun is slowly eclipsed

I wrote here a few weeks ago about two of the Tacita Dean exhibitions in London this year; this post is about the third one, 'Landscapes', at the Royal Academy.  The first thing that will strike any visitor is the venue itself, the new RA extension, and (if you're my age) a feeling of déjà vu as you realise you're entering what was once the Museum of Mankind.  Then, the first room is full of clouds.  They were all created on slate, using spray chalk, gouache and charcoal pencil.  These obviously stand in the long tradition of artist cloud studies - Cozens, Constable, Stieglitz - but are immediately recognisable as the kind of blackboard drawing she became well known for in the nineties (her Turner Prize nomination was twenty years ago).  One cloud triptych is called Bless Our Europe and another Where England?  I found myself thinking about the chalk cliffs I wrote about in Frozen Air and the way clouds float freely over national borders. 

Beside these cloud studies, a whole wall is taken up by one of Dean's large-scale mountain drawings, The Montafon Letter (2017).  Here the brief textual annotations, which are a feature of her work in different media, come from the account of a devastating avalanche that took place in 1689.  A priest tending to the dying was buried by falling snow, but then unburied when another avalanche struck, and survived.  There is a photograph of Tacita Dean working on this, accompanying an interesting Guardian interview prior to the opening of this exhibition.  Another mountain scene dominates the second room: Quarantania (2018).  This shows a forbidding rock wall under a blood red sky - Mt. Quanrantania is the site in the Judean Desert where the devil is said to have tempted Jesus.  The image was constructed by manipulating early photographs and above the desert floor there is a kind of blurred mirage effect.  

In the final room you can watch Antigone, a new hour-long film which Tacita Dean has finally completed after one false start and many years reflecting on its underlying themes.  Landscape footage (which is of most relevance to the subject of this blog) is set alongside various approaches to the story of Antigone and her father, so that, for example, two bubbling volcanic vents remind you of the blind eyes of Oedipus.  In the catalogue she explains that: 

'Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent blindness of film. Using masking inside the camera's aperture gate, I filmed one part of the film frame before rewinding the camera to film another part. This meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame. So Bodmin Moor under February drizzle sat in blind relationship with the shores of the Mississippi or geysers in Yellowstone with the total eclipse of the Sun. Only when I returned to California in the late Summer of 2017 and processed and printed my rolls of negative, did the film revealed itself to me.'

Sunlight on the catalogue for Landscapes, showing pages related to Antigone 

Adrian Searle, in his Guardian review, said that 'it is impossible to do justice' to this film. 

'We visit the floodplains of the Mississippi in Wyoming, the town of Thebes, Illinois, and the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced. Here we meet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane.  For much of the film, Dillane is an Oedipus blinded by tinted glasses made for viewing the eclipse, and wearing a huge, straggly beard. He maunders across the world as though without purpose, at one point followed by a pair of curious dogs. As he walks out of frame, the dogs start copulating. Think ZZ Top. Think Saint Jerome. Think Harry Dean Stanton in the film Paris, Texas. A man on a mission, escaping his fate. Eagles circle the sky, their call a distant mewing. There are vultures and a crow stalks the horizon. Every moment of Antigone is a confusion, a complexity and a delight – a rich muddled stew of words and images, places and atmospheres. And through the imaginary day on which everything takes place, the sun is slowly eclipsed.'

I know what he means about ZZ Top, although I was thinking more of Warren Ellis from The Bad Seeds.  Those eclipse glasses were like the distinctive sun goggles in Herzog's Fata Morgana and the split-screen wandering of Oedipus reminded me of Ori Gersht's film about the last walk of Walter Benjamin, Evaders.  The idea of filming in Thebes, Illinois may seem a bit forced, but its old courthouse was a wonderfully atmospheric setting.  The whole film is worth seeing just for the way the early evening light falls on its old books and floorboards, and for the view across the river of the sun glowing and setting behind distant trees.  I would recommend arriving at the start (there's a showing every hour) and trying to get a front seat.  We did, and were engrossed by Antigone from start to finish.

Trodden by the feet of gods

I've been twice now to see Charmed Lives in Greece, a highly enjoyable (free) exhibition at the British Museum celebrating the creative lives of Patrick Leigh Fermor, John Craxton and Niko Ghika.  In between these visits, we actually had a holiday in Greece (this wasn't planned, but in his review of Charmed Lives Alastair Sooke wrote that it will 'make you itch to book a holiday beside the Aegean Sea, because the Hellenic fantasy it offers is so irresistibly compelling.')  Whilst I'm sure readers of this blog will be familiar with Craxton and Leigh Fermor, Niko Ghika is perhaps less well known.  His paintings are as colourful and appealing as those of Craxton - nothing ground-breaking but very redolent of a time when the art world was still coming to terms with the influence of Picasso and Matisse.  The exhibition includes photographs, letters and wall quotes that convey the joie de vivre and intellectual curiosity you experience in reading Leigh Fermor...

Of course Leigh Fermor's 'charmed life' in Greece was facilitated by his partner Joan's private income and loyal, emotional support.  He and Craxton also made use of their friend Ghika's house on Hydra (there's a nice photograph of Craxton sketching there on the British Museum's blog post about the exhibition).  It was on Hydra that Leigh Fermor wrote Mani (1958), his digressive account of a journey round the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese.  Here is a passage from my favourite chapter, 'Short Summer Nights'.  It describes the unique sharpness of the sunlight in Greece.

...'All the vapours that roam the Italian atmosphere and muffle the outlines of things are absent here.   A huge magnifying glass burns up the veils of distance, making objects leagues away leap forward clearly as though they were within arm's length.  The eye shoots forth a telescopic braille-reading finger to discern the exact detail and texture of a church, a wood or a chasm ten miles off.  Things in the distance co-exist on equal terms with those hard by; they have a proprietary and complementary share in the patterns that immediately surround one.  A distant cordillera completes a curve begun by the vein along the back of a plane-tree leaf, a far-off belfry has the same intensity as a goat's horn a few yards away, a peninsula leans forward to strike the stem of a dried up thistle at right angles.  Mountain ranges that should melt with the heat-haze and recession, lean forward and impend till one is at a loss to say whether a hill is a small nearby spur or a far-away Sinai...'

This long paragraph continues with further examples before progressing to other properties of Greek light, such as the way it seems to sprinkle surfaces with 'a thin layer of pollen like the damask on a moth's wing.'  These surfaces retain light in the same way that they retain heat. Shadows appear more real than the phenomena they echo.  And 'it is probably because of all this that a strong mystical and sentimental significance pervades the actual surface of the earth, the rocks and the stones of Greek mountains.  The adjective theobadiston, 'trodden by the feet of gods (or God)' in ancient Greek and in the Byzantine liturgy comes to mind.'  All of this, he concludes, has a strange effect on the Greek landscape.  Nature becomes supernatural and 'the frontier between physical and metaphysical is confounded.'

John Craxton's cover for Mani

Pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow

As I mentioned in January, finding female landscape painters to highlight in my 'tweet of the day' has been quite difficult, partly because social restrictions reduced their ability to go out sketching and painting in the open air.  The two quotations below, from the diary of the nineteenth century artist Marie Bashkirtseff (1859-84), illustrate the point.  Born in Ukraine, she moved to Paris with her family at the age of twelve and began exhibiting at the Salon after studying at The Académie Julian (women were not permitted to attend the École des Beaux-Arts).  Her frustrations here as a twenty-year old aspiring artist have an added poignancy, because just five years later she succumbed to tuberculosis. 

Thursday January 2nd 1879 — What I long for, is the liberty to ramble alone, to come and go, to seat myself on the benches in the garden of the Tuileries, and especially of the Luxembourg, to stop at the artistic shop- windows, enter the churches, the museums, to ramble at night in the old streets, that is what I long for, and that is the liberty without which one can not become a true artist. Do you believe that we profit by what we see when we are accompanied, or when going to the Louvre, we must await our carriage, our chaperone or our family?
   Ah! heavens and earth! that is what makes me so angry to be a woman! I will dress myself like a woman of the middle class, wear a wig, and make myself so ugly that I will be as free as a man. There is the liberty that I want and without which I shall never succeed in being anything.
   One's thoughts are fettered by this stupid and enervating constraint; even if I disguise myself and make myself homely, I am but half free, for a woman who roams about is imprudent. And in Italy, in Rome? The idea of going in a landau to visit ruins!
   "Where are you going, Marie?"
   "To see the Coliseum."
   "But you have already seen it! Let us go to the theatre or take a drive, where there will be a crowd."
    And that is enough to bind one down to the earth. That is one of the great reasons why there are no women artists. Oh, sordid ignorance? Oh, savage routine! It is horrible to think of it all!

Marie Bashkirtseff, Autumn, 1883

'What I long for, is the liberty to ramble alone' - this has a familiar ring from many recent critiques of androcentric nature writing and male psychogeographers.  Marie Bashkirtseff may not have lived to paint the Coliseum, but she did complete the view of Paris in Autumn that I have reproduced here (now in the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg).  There is something sad about that empty road, with its litter of leaves and the bench knocked over so that nobody can sit on it.  However, what really leaves an impression, assuming this reproduction resembles the real painting, is the intensity of that sunlight in the distance.  Perhaps it was affected by her yearning for the brightness of southern Europe.  Here is a second entry from her diary, in which she puts down a volume of Gautier to dream of travelling to Spain.    

  Wednesday June 20th, 1882 — Well! nothing new. A few calls exchanged and painting — and Spain. Ah, Spain! A volume of Théophile Gautier is the cause of all this [...] Ah! how short is life! Ah! how unhappy we are to live so little! For to live in Paris is only the point of departure for everything. But to make these sublime, artistic journeys! Six months in Spain, in Italy! Italy, sacred soil; divine, incomparable Rome! it takes away my reason.
   Ah! how women are to be pitied; men are free, at least. They have absolute independence in ordinary life, liberty to come and go, to start out, to dine at a restaurant or at home, to go on foot to the Bois or to a café; that liberty is the half of talent and three-quarters of ordinary happiness.
   But, you will say, superior woman that you are, give yourself that liberty!
   It is impossible, for the woman who emancipates herself thus — the young and pretty woman, be it understood — almost has the finger pointed at her, she becomes singular, commented on, insulted, and consequently still less free than before she shocked idiotic custom.
   So there is nothing to do but deplore my sex and return to dreams of Italy and Spain. Granada! Gigantic Arabs, pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow, peace, calm, harmony, and poetry!

This translation is by A. D. Hall (1908).  I see that another early translator, Mathilde Blind (1890), rendered the last sentence 'Granada! Gigantic vegetation! pure sky...'  Whatever the 'gigantic' thing was that Marie Bashkirtseff longed for, along with the rose laurels (oleander), sunshine and shadows, it was never to be...

Bellevue

Robert Zünd, Buchenwald, 1887

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In English the word 'Buchenwald' is synonymous with horror and darkness, but in German it still denotes one of nature's most beautiful things, a beech forest.  This is a painting by a nineteenth century artist who became known as The Master of the Beech Leaf for his meticulous views of woods.  Robert Zünd (1826-1909) walked and sketched in the forests around Lucerne, producing highly finished landscapes back in the studio that came in different sizes to suit the budgets of different potential buyers.  His work can be found in most Swiss museums but is currently the subject of an exhibition, Bellevue, at the Kunstmuseum Luzern which pairs his paintings with large format analogue photographs by Tobias Madörin.  Madörin is based in Zürich but has travelled widely working on a project called Topos which examines 'communal spaces, the outskirts of metropolises, waste disposals sites, and landscapes marked by agriculture and mining.'  For Bellevue he has taken photographs around Lucerne, based on the compositions and methods of Robert Zünd.

Shows in which contemporary artists respond to old paintings that have hung for decades on museum walls are are very common these days.  Just to mention one other example, I wrote here last year about George Shaw's Back to Nature at the National Gallery.  Publicly funded institutions have a mission to make their collections engaging and accessible, which is why we don't really see the same phenomenon in other more 'private' art forms (though it is easy to imagine an anthology interspersing, say, tales by Poe with stories by a modern weird fiction writer, or an album juxtaposing nineteenth century études with a young composer's new works on similar themes).  The key to making these exhibitions work, I think, is for the artist not to go down the obvious route of producing a kind of 'negative' version of the earlier art.  As you can see above,  Madörin has partially done this in photographing the effects of logging on Zünd's woodland, exposing the economic role of the landscape and questioning the idyllic impression of the original scenes.  But he has also taken pains to produce photographs in tune with Zünd's desire to capture the splendour of natural phenomena.  Zünd could paint a rainbow at leisure in his studio whereas Madörin had to wait for the real thing, pitching a tent and being prepared for a moment when light would shine forth from the stormy sky.

Hoar Frost

 Camille Pissarro, Landscape, St. Thomas, 1856

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was reading in the news the other day about a forthcoming Tate exhibition, Impressionists in London, French artists in exile (1870-1904), which will include two views of Kew by Camille Pissarro that have never been shown in the UK before.  I'm sure it'll be interesting, but I'd have been much more curious to see an exhibition that has just finished at Ordrupgaard in Denmark: Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas.  This 'meeting' was with the Danish Golden Age painter Fritz Melbye, who arrived seeking inspiration on St Thomas - now one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, then part of the Danish West Indies - around 1850.  The young Pissarro had been sent away to school in France but was back working for his father whilst aspiring to become an artist.  The two of them became friends and in 1853 they headed off to Venezuela, where they would spend two years sharing a studio before parting company - Pissarro for France and the birth of Impressionism, Melbye for further adventures in the Caribbean and Far East.  

Pissarro is also the subject of an excellent New York Review of Books article by Julian Bell which discusses two more exhibitions dedicated to his work in Paris.  It begins with one of the paintings that appeared in the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, Gelée blanche.  This is now in the Musée d'Orsay, who quote the most scornful response from a contemporary reviewer, Louis Leroy: 'those are sheer scratches of paint uniformly put on a dirty canvas. It has neither head or tail, neither top or bottom, neither front or back.''  It is hard to imagine any treatment of this humble motif that would have pleased such critics, but Pissarro's winter earth, painted without earth colours, must have seemed particularly off putting.  You can't simply enter into this landscape, letting the eye be led into the distance.  Hoar Frost is a world away from Pissarro's carefully composed view of St Thomas.  Its rough paint surface is hard going, like the frosty ground beneath the peasant's feet.

Camille Pissarro, Hoar Frost, 1873

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The whole of Julian Bell's article on Pissarro is well worth reading, but here is how he explains the particular magic of Hoar Frost.  

'Oil painting can turn shadows from nothings into palpable somethings: slabs of rich color. The gently rising Île-de-France farmland depicted in Hoar Frost (Gelée blanche à Ennery) becomes an intricate weaving of russets, blue-greens, umbers, and pale yellows as morning sun shines on it from behind a row of poplars. As you approach the canvas, the bristles that have scuffed it with stiff, clotted brushloads seem to rasp your skin, and you are jolted into a poetry of chill January: a poetry sustained by close plein air observation and resolved with a scrupulous completeness.

'At the same time, you may perhaps register the oddness of the operation. Those long stripes of shadow criss-crossing the ruts and country road are cast by no visible object. The colors of what’s sunlit and the colors of what isn’t meet in stout equivalence on the canvas, but for anyone on the scene—say that trudging peasant with his load of sticks—the former would have priority. We expect grass to be green more than we expect it to be blue. In effect, the shadows spook the comfortable farmland, nagging us with the consideration that a further unseen presence stands beneath the poplars, that of the observing artist.'