some LANDSCAPES

Monday, August 29, 2011

Rain-saturated, churning, chanting thunder

›
The education in Latin shared by English gentlemen was obviously an influence on their landscape gardening.  As Tim Richardson puts it in Th...
Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

›
Jonathan Tyers, the owner of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens , had his own private estate at Denbies in Surrey.  There he named an 8-acre woodlan...
Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Back Bay Fens

›
Frederick Law Olmsted, Plan for the Back Bay Fens, 1887 Source: Wikimedia Commons Within the essays and conversation that make up Lan...
Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Theoryscapes

›
Landscape Theory (2008), edited by Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, is Volume Six in the 'Art Seminar' series , which addre...
Friday, August 05, 2011

Landscape from Finnmark

›
This week I popped into the National Gallery to see an interesting new exhibition: ' Forests, Rocks, Torrents : Norwegian and Swiss Land...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 28, 2011

Climbing Mount Kagu

›
Among the 4,500 poems which make up the Manyōshū (' Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves'), there is one attributed to the Emperor Jo...
Friday, July 22, 2011

Face to face with sheer mountains of water

›
The main reason the last three posts have featured both James Wright and German literature is that I've been reading Wright's tr...
Saturday, July 16, 2011

Rome must be like the clouds

›
A reference to one of Joseph von Eichendorff's poems in that last post reminds me that I've not previously mentioned here one of...
Friday, July 15, 2011

From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower

›
One of the James Wright poems in The Branch Will Not Break that I didn't mention in my previous post is 'From a Bus Window in Centr...
4 comments:
Friday, July 08, 2011

At William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

›
One poem I've never managed to persuade my wife to like is James Wright's 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pin...
3 comments:
Friday, July 01, 2011

Great green reflections in the blue satin of the sea

›
John La Farge, Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti , c1891 Source: Wikimedia Commons   There was an interesting article recently by ...
2 comments:
Saturday, June 25, 2011

A rain-swept valley and two lines of sheep

›
I have been watching the DVD of Gideon Koppel's acclaimed film sleep furiously (2009), a remarkably poetic documentary shot over the co...
4 comments:
Friday, June 24, 2011

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths

›
'The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,' writes Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost .  Blue is 'the color...
1 comment:
Friday, June 10, 2011

To repeat the forest

›
Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone both came to prominence in the late sixties making art in the landscape, and their most recent work is curr...
4 comments:
Wednesday, June 08, 2011

The Morning Glory

›
If I hadn't been so busy at work I might have tried to get to the Aubin & Wills Literary Salon this evening, where Travis Elborough ...
Sunday, May 29, 2011

Animated Landscapes

›
After the aesthetic pleasures of Barcelona's victory against Manchester United last night it seemed fitting to head down this morning to...
Saturday, May 21, 2011

The Mountain That Had to Be Painted

›
Contemporary artist Iwan Gwyn Parry tackling Arenig in 'The Mountain That Had to Be Painted' This week I've been unable t...
3 comments:
Sunday, May 15, 2011

Tortoise above the Venetian lagoon

›
A year ago in the LRB Marina Warner wrote a fascinating review of Erik Fischer's monumental four-volume catalogue devoted to the work ...
2 comments:
Friday, May 13, 2011

Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles

›
Two photographs in magazines I’ve been reading this month caught my eye.  The first, from Tate etc. (Summer 2011) is Magritte’s Les Idée...
7 comments:
Monday, May 09, 2011

The Englishman's Home

›
Garden on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall To the South Bank Centre yesterday where the sixtieth anniversary of The Festival of Britain...
2 comments:
‹
›
Home
View web version

About this site

My photo
Plinius
This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film... I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. For the first year I did several short entries each week; since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. Of course it will always only cover 'some' landscapes, even though I occasionally like to think of it as an expanding cultural gazetteer. There are some maps and a chronology of posts that I did a while back but the best way of exploring is through the search function, labels or just browsing old posts. I started writing this blog using the name 'Plinius' (a little tribute to the younger and older Plinys) and am now rather attached to it as a 'nom de blog'. Comments are very welcome but are moderated to prevent spam. I used to post landscape stuff on Twitter but now use Bluesky: @andrew-ray.bsky.social.
View my complete profile
Powered by Blogger.