A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain

Three years ago the Folio Society published a new edition of William Daniell's A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain.  The original book came out in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, contained 308 hand-coloured aquatints and sold for £60 ('one and a half times what a fisherman or sailor aboard a merchant ship could expect to earn in a year at the time').  A second hand copy of the Folio version (in the excellent Much Ado Books shop) cost me rather less than this.  It includes only 114 of the best aquatints and cuts out almost all of the rather dry commentary Daniell wrote, replacing it with extracts from the writings of contemporary travellers.  The original intention was for Richard Ayton, an aspiring writer and friend of the family, to accompany Daniell on his travels.  But the two of them parted acrimoniously after the first year, having got as far as southern Scotland (the Voyage commenced at Land's End). Daniell pressed on alone, returning to his coastal journey every summer, delayed only by famine in Scotland (1816) and economic crisis and fear of revolution in England (1819).  Ayton never did become a successful author and his short life came to a sad end the year Daniell finally completed his great project.  The cumulative achievement of the Voyage was recognised by the Royal Academy, who elected Daniell a full member in 1822 - as C. J. Shepherd notes in his introduction, 'the artist that he beat to secure his lifetime's ambition was John Constable'.

Among the texts assembled to accompany Daniell's aquatints in this edition, the most vivid impressions of the coastal landscape are provided by writers like Keats, Southey, Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose travels in Scotland I have discussed here before).  But the book encompasses many other interesting voices - Joanna Schopenhauer at Lancaster, Jane Austen at Lyme, the 'exquisitely fashionable' Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in Brighton, James Johnson, author of 'An Essay on Indigestion; or Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels', in Liverpool, a gentleman called Charles Cochrane who for some reason went to Margate disguised as an itinerant Spanish gypsy guitarist, the ornithologist Charles Fothergill who visited Flamborough Head 'resplendent in 'white and green hat; a Belcher neckcloth with my short collar appearing over it; a dark green jacket with silver buttons; [and] sky blue pantaloons'', composer Felix Mendelssohn, who sent home a few bars of music which would become the Hebridean Overture, and the 'excitable young Polish tutor and future revolutionary' Krystyn Lach-Szyrma, who was so overwhelmed by Fingal's Cave, a 'glorious cathedral made by nature's hand', that he threw himself into the sea.

Cover by David Eccles,

after William Daniell's In Fingal's Cave, Staffa

In his Preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane writes that seeing Daniell's aquatints leads us to imagine Britain only by its outline.  'The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame.  And what a frame it is!  Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from 400-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats.'  With this in mind it is clearly impossible to pick out a typical view - the two shown below I liked for the non-naturalistic regularity of their rock formations and the precisely distributed seabirds and grazing sheep.  Yet despite their variety all of Daniell's aquatints have the same harmonious, muted palette of slate blue, grey green and pale browns.  He may, as Macfarlane says, portray all kinds of meteorological conditions - 'a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead' - but the weather somehow always looks British.    

 Near view of one of the Shiant Isles

Needles Cliff and Needles, Isle of White

William Daniell's journeys coincided with the rise of picturesque tourism and bathing resorts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Highland Clearances and the rapid development of industry and infrastructure.  Robert Southey, for example, toured the Highlands with Thomas Telford, whom he nicknamed Pontifex Maximus, the great bridge builder. In one of this book's extracts from Southey's Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, the conversion of the Marquess of Stafford's estate's into extensive sheep-farms is criticised: 'a quiet, thoughtful, contented, religious people' forcefully transplanted from the glens to the sea coast.  At the other end of Britain, Dover had recently been scarred by vast new fortifications to keep out the French, a fact that William Cobbett found perplexing - 'what the devil should they come to this hill for, then?'  He concluded bitterly that 'more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex!' Shakespeare's Cliff (which I have written about here before) was also visited by artist Benjamin Robert Hayden who stood looking at it, 'almost lost in the embruno tint of twilight'.  There he imagined 'a Colossal Statue of Britannia' built on top of it, 'surveying France with a lofty air.'

I could go on, but I'll end this post at Lulworth Cove, where Daniell painted the rocky outcrop of Stair Hole with its striking recumbent folds.  The book includes an extract from the recollections of the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe who spent a summer at Lulworth with his children.  As soon as he arrived, O'Keeffe set off with his son, called Tottenham, to explore the Cove itself and the craggy rocks above.  At the end of the day 'we returned to our abode with appetites sea-sharpened, and sat down to a roast loin of lamb, delicate boiled chickens, tongue, green-peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine.'  Next morning they were off again, climbing Hanbury Hill where O'Keeffe recorded two of the local landscape terms - patches of land called 'knaps, larger or smaller, each divided from the other by a grassy rising, termed a launchet.'  Tired from the climb, he and Tottenham sat down to look at the view - 'before us, the great expanse; above, the blue serene; around, the melody of birds; scarce a breath from the still bosom of the deep, and the vertical sun shedding his glories on the scene.  Neither the scream of sea-gulls, crows, and puffins, could prevent me falling into a slumber, and, in a sort of sweet demi-dream, I could hear the rushing pinions of birds that must have flown by very near me, and felt the rabbits that I fancied ran over me.'

The kill of New York is a brook in New England

BRANCH – RUN – FORK – BROOK – KILL – STREAM – BAYOU – SWAMP – SLOUGH – WASH – CAÑADA – ARROYO - RIO 

I came across Derek Watkins' excellent map, showing the distribution across America of different toponyms for 'river', on the Spatial Analysis blog (where James Cheshire has added his own UK version).  It reminded me that I have been meaning for some time to do a post here about Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney and compiled by a team of writers between 2002 and 2006.  Robert Macfarlane described this book in a wonderful essay published last year ('A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook'): 'Its ambition was to retrieve, define and organise nearly 1,000 terms and words for specific spects of landscape.  Its ethical presumption was that having a language for natural places is vital for two reasons: because it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it allows us to fall into the kind of intimacy with such places which might also go by the name of love or enchantment, and out of which might arise care and good sense.'

So what does Home Ground have to say about these river terms?  For the first one, BRANCH, the reader is referred to FORK and the entry, written by Bill McKibben, describes some of the geographical variation evident in Derek Watkins' map.  Easterners are likely to call forks branches, tributory is used elsewhere, 'and those in west Texas would call smaller forks prongs.'  His example of a 'prong' is the North Prong of the Little Red River Fork in Briscoe County Texas.  RUN, according to Kim Barnes, always denotes movement and 'can refer to any small stream, brook, creek, rivulet, channel, overflow, or swiftly flowing watercourse.'  Early Virginian settlers, naming the landscape, came to think in terms of a hierarchy by size: rivers > creeks > runs.  BROOK needs no explanation, but KILL?  It is the Dutch word for brook and appears in the name of landforms of the Hudson and Deleware Valleys, most famously the Catskill Mountains.  The term is not seen in the lower Hudson Valley, probably because, as Jan DeBlieu explains in Home Ground, the Dutch colony was subsumed into the surrounding English speaking culture after the capture of New Netherland in 1644.

Often the authors of Home Ground include illustrative quotations from American literature, like the 'dark stream shooting along its dismal channel' in Melville's Typee.  Gretel Ehrlich's entry on STREAM describes it as a dynamic force that 'receives, and thus reflects, the abuses that have taken place on the land.'  The next few terms, BAYOU, SWAMP and SLOUGH, sound aything but dynamic.  'The bayous are spaces of open water, sluggish or stagnant' and a slough 'is a narrow stretch of sluggish water in a river channel'. The city of Chicago is built on filled sloughs. The word bayou is derived from the Choctaw word for a small stream, bayuk.  Okefenokee Swamp gets its name from a Creek Indian word meaning 'Land of the Trembling Earth'.  A Harry Crews quote explains why: 'most islands in the swamp - some of them holding hundreds of huge trees growing so thick that their roots are matted and woven as closely as a blanket - actually float on the water; and when a black bear crashes across one of them, the whole thing trembles.'

With the word WASH we move into the American Southwest : Carrizo Wash in Arizona, Hunter's Wash in New Mexico. These are areas of land over which 'subtle contours allow water to flow, or "wash", from elevated to lower zones.'  ARROYO can be used to describe the same general feature, or, more specifically, a steep-walled, flat-bottomed creek.  Either way it is ephemeral, 'carrying water only briefly during such events as spring runoff or the summer monsoons.'  Two more Spanish terms complete the map: RIO and CAÑADA, 'a wetland rich with river reeds'.  The words RIVER and CREEK are also included but, are so common that they have been coloured grey.  Here in Britain, a creek is a saltwater inlet or the estuary of a stream.  In the entry for 'creek' in Home Ground, novelist Charles Frazier explains that the term spread to mean any flow smaller than a river.  'In a few places, though, a distinction was retained.  M. Schele DeVere, in his 1872 Americanisms: The English of the New World, put it succinctly: "The kill of New York is a brook in New England, a run in Virginia and alas! a crick or creek, almost everywhere else."'

Walter Benjamin's Grave

'The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls.  It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.'

- Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940

Michael Taussig's essay, 'Walter Benjamin's Grave: A Profane Illumination', describes the cemetery of Portbou, the small town on the border of France and Spain where Benjamin died in 1940.  Carrying his possessions in a heavy black briefcase, Benjamin was led there over the mountains by a young woman, Lisa Fittko.  'It was the first time she had made the trip.  Benjamin was her first refugee ... She got lost.  They backtracked.  Then they found their way to the summit: "The spectacular scene appeared so unexpectedly that for a moment I thought I was seeing a mirage ... the Vermillion Coast, an autumnal landscape with innumerable hues of reds and yellow-gold.  I gasped for breath - I had never seen such beauty before."' But the the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and on the night of September 25th Walter Benjamin, fearing repatriation, took an overdose of morphine tablets.  Hannah Arendt, then still in the South of France, came to look for his grave soon afterwards. Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans continued the dangerous work of escorting refugees across the border.  Hans took to wearing a Basque cap and sandals to blend in with the locals.  Sometime he would sit for hours on a cliff projection looking out to sea.

Dani Karavan, Walter Benjamin Memorial at Portbou, 1994

The beauty of this place, which so struck Hannah Arendt and Lisa Fittko, seems at variance with its  history of displacement and disappearance.  Michael Taussig first visited Portbou in 1987 and found the whole town a sad monument to Benjamin's death - 'cold, nasty, and enigmatic.'  But now, on returning fifteen years later, he comes upon the new monument to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani Karavan, an artist from Tel Aviv.  An iron triangle forms a doorway leading to steps that take you down the slope of the hill towards the sea.  At the bottom there is a thick pane of glass inscribed with Benjamin's words: 'It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.  Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.'  The words could be taken to refer as much to the victims of Franco as to the Nazis.  Looking back up the stairs, the doorway frames a rectangle of blue sky, echoing the view of the breaking waves below.

Later, inside the cemetery itself, Taussig is struck by a virtually identical set of steps, leading from the graves to the chapel.  He recalls Benjamin's surrealist conception of the 'profane illumination', where something provides a new kind of experience whilst retaining the trace of the kind of religious illumination it has surpassed. In the cemetery at Portbou there are niches bearing the names of the dead and a common grave, the fosa común, in which Benjamin's remains may actually lie.  The monument, by contrast, is a profane illumination, which 'gathers its strength through the open expression of namelessness as empty space, sea and sky.  It truly is an emphatic statement on the weighting of the world by its nameless dead.'  Standing on the headland Taussig feels the full force of the transmontaña wind.  'Can we imagine a state, a religion, or a community bound to remembrance which would have thye courage or craziness to call a wind a monument?'  Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best way to light a cigarette is with a flintstone and fuse.  'The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.'

Ice Music

Terje Isungset, the Norwegian percussionist renowned for his ice horns, is here in Britain again.  We went to see him last night at LSO St. Lukes in a concert that began with the solo percussion piece called Tribute to Nature.  This was played on his special drum kit, featuring sheepbells strung up with rope, a ride cymbal on a weathered stick, bundles of clave-like arctic birch sticks and pieces of granite. It started quietly with the tapping of sticks and the scraping of stones, grew louder and more expressive with horns and Jew's harp, and ended with a long sigh of breath. He then left the stage to be replaced by the LSO's Wind Ensemble, who performed Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922).  A film collaboration between Isungset and Phil Slocombe, 'The Idea of North', was supposed to be played at the interval but never materialised - instead we waited expectantly for the appearance of the ice instruments.  Eventually they emerged - two white blocks carried onto stands and adjusted by a sculptor-roadie, wrapped up in a parka and woolly hat.  The ice had been driven here from Norway; the first clip below shows Terje Isungset carving his instruments directly from the frozen landscape.

Ice Music, the second part of last night's concert, featured Isungset's regular singing partner Lena Nymark (you can see them on stage together towards the end of the second clip above).  She is evidently pregnant, prompting my wife to speculate on the benign influence this music was having on the unborn child.  Isungset began by crunching and tapping one of the ice blocks before moving on to an ice xylophone which he played with ice sticks and bare hands (as he says in the clip below, ice has a surprisingly warm sound when tapped with the finger).  The ice horns only came out for a short time - but since they melt whilst being played this was not too surprising.  At the end of the concert I went up to the stage and held a shard of ice lying on the floor, wondering if this had come from the 600 year old Jostedalsbreen glacier.  Terje Isungset has said that the instruments he makes are eventually returned 'back to nature where they belong.'

After the concert - ice remnants

Gausta Peak

I mentioned Peder Balke in connection with the National Gallery's 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents' exhibition but thought I would add another post because he is an interesting example of that not uncommon phenomenon, the rediscovered landscape artist. Christopher Riopelle says in the catalogue that Balke is only emerging now 'in international eyes as a master of Norwegian landscape, the subject of exhibitions, scholarly publications and bidding wars in auction rooms.'  The National Gallery recently bought a small seascape The Tempest -  the first Balke painting to enter a British public collection.  Riopelle compares Balke to August Strindberg, whose landscape painting (see my earlier post) has also only come to prominence in recent decades.  'Like Strindberg, Balke was blithely convinced his work sat squarely in the mainstream,' whilst for us the paintings look more like forerunners of expressionism.   From the 1860s Balke gave up trying to make his living as a painter and turned instead to real estate (a sad fate for a landscape painter, one might think).  When he died in 1884 his art was forgotten, but in his spare time Balke had continued to produce experimental landscape paintings, drawing on the memories of his travels, and 'small black and white improvisations' like The Tempest.

Peder Balke, Gausta Peak, 1877

Another Nordic artist I've discussed here before, Per Kirkeby, wrote a book about Peder Balke in 1996 which in turn inspired a joint exhibition two years ago.  I have not had the opportunity to read this book but the website for Norwegian artist Espen Dietrichson includes a description.

'Kirkeby writes that, by looking at artists such as Balke, Turner and Delacroix, we can discover an alternative historical realism. This depends on identifying a range of painters’ ‘dirty tricks’, such as how texture can be used to create calculated, dramatic effects, and how experimentation with new perspectives can change perception. Kirkeby maintains that the pervading art historical distinction between pure abstraction and less honourable effects has traumatised art in relation to its history. This is why he finds it so important to solve the enigma of Peder Balke and to thereby understand why the elevated and sublime can only be achieved through the ‘dirtiest of means’. For example, Balke’s outsider position as a small-town painter-decorator [i.e. his early background, before training as an artist] allowed him to eschew the codified illusionism of (Norwegian) national romanticism, and hence to make use of techniques that differed radically from those of his contemporaries – marbling, or the use of sponges or combs on wet paint – which would have seemed a profanation of academic dogmas.'

The waving moorland and the level beach

I have been listening to the audiobook of The Woman in White, read by Ian Holm (whose voice always takes me back to childhood memories of the Radio 4 adaptation of Lord of the Rings).  The novel begins with the narration of a drawing master, who is distracted from the landscape by the beauty of one of the young ladies he is supposed to be teaching. 'The most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade, as they flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach.'  There follows an interesting passage on Art and Nature which I thought I would quote here in full.  You could contrast the closing sentences with the way other writers have taken comfort in the thought that it is the landscape that will outlast humanity (see, for example, my earlier post on Robinson Jeffers).

'At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.'

- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1860

William Collins, the father of Wilkie Collins, 

Children on a Mountain Top, before 1847

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia

The Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Claude: The Enchanted Landscape, which I looked round yesterday, provides a good opportunity to compare the artist's drawings and sketches.  A preparatory sketch for Claude's last painting, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, shows the foreground figures standing out from their background and Ascanius (the son of Aeneas) just left of centre.  Trees, portico and people are all on a more realistic, less monumental scale.  In the painting, as Martin Sonnabend and Jon Whiteley point out in the catalogue, 'everything has been suffused with an air of fantasy.  The hunters are impossibly elongated - Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy - but even they are overwhelmed by the landscape, lit by a silvery sky, which arches over them and recedes far back into the blue, snow-capped hills.'

Claude Lorrain, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was curious to compare the two figures of Ascanius directly and so had a play on Photoshop, as you can see below.  It would seem facile to say this shows Claude could have painted more naturalistic figures if he'd wanted to, but the point is worthwhile because contemporaries criticised this aspect of his painting and Claude himself reportedly joked that when he sold his landscapes he threw the figures in for nothing.  Of course the figures in Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia can't be seen in isolation (or cut out from their setting); the painting's harmonius colours and soaring forms combine to convey a legendary time and place, dreamed from the poetry of Virgil.  Goethe summed up the nature of landscapes like this in 1829, when he said that Claude's paintings 'possess the highest truth, but no trace of reality.' 

The Valley of the Ladies

"Do not hold back," I cried, "I beg you, by Zeus and by Eros himself!  It will give me all the more pleasure if your tale is indeed like fiction."
And with these words, I took him by the hand and led him to a neighbouring grove, where the plane trees grew thick and plentiful, and the water flowed by cool and clear, just as it comes from freshly melted snow.  I sat him down there on a low bench, and sat myself next to him.
"Well, it is time to hear your story," I said, "A setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction."

- Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, Book 1, 2nd century CE (trans. Tim Whitworth)

What is the best kind of landscape in which to listen to a story?  I suppose it may vary according to genre, as Achilles Tatius implies, but a grove like the one Clitophon is led to, a locus amoenus of comfort, privacy and natural beauty, would seem ideal.  Here landscape is a gentle backdrop, not a distraction or a subject for discourse itself. 

In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates is taken to a similar location, but makes a point of reminding Phaedrus as they walk there: 'I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.'  He is nevertheless very pleased with the quiet location they find by the cooling water of the Ilissus, 'full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:--so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.'

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The history of literature is full of frame stories but the most famous to be set in a locus amoenus is surely The Decameron.  In fact Boccaccio's ten young Florentines find refuge from the plague in three such locations: two gardens, described on the first and third days, and then a garden-like landscape, The Valley of the Ladies, which they explore on the sixth.  Despite being outside the protecting walls of country villa, this valley has the essential element of seclusion - the only means of entry is a narrow path, beside which flows a clear stream.  The valley floor is so circular it seems to have been drawn with compasses, 'though it seemed the work of nature', and the valley's sides are terraced like a natural amphitheatre.  Vines and fruit trees grow on the south side, thick trees on the north.  The stream feeds a tiny lake so transparent that you can count the stones in it.  On discovering it the ladies are unable to resist a swim, the water concealing 'their chaste white bodies no better than a thin sheet of glass would conceal a pink rose.'  You can well imagine one of them echoing the words of Achilles Tatius, "a setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction."  And it is on a grassy spot by this lake that they resume their storytelling the following day.

Two Years at Sea

Ben Rivers' first feature film Two Years at Sea (2011) follows the solitary life of Jake Williams in his ramshackle house in the woods of Aberdeenshire.  It has a wonderful landscape sequence where Jake floats slowly across the frame on a home-made raft.  The film was shot using reclaimed 16mm Bolex cameras on Kodak Plus-X (which, if I remember rightly, was what Grant Gee used in Patience: After Sebald) and processed in the film-maker's own kitchen.  This film stock seems to add extra layers of fog to the low hills and fir trees.  Watching it on Friday, I was conscious at one point that I was seeing a view successively filtered through falling rain, a car windscreen, an old camera lens being shaken around as Jake drove up a track, and the grainy black and white film itself, hand-processed and then re-projected onto the cinema screen. The Q&A session after this London Film Festival screening revealed the extent to which the film constructs its own version of the real Jake.  Jake himself was there answering questions, dispelling some of the films' mysteries and revealing how far it was a collaboration: the raft idea, for example, had been a long-standing idea of Jake's but it was the presence of the camera that prompted him to construct it and paddle out onto that grey, misty lake.

Image from David Bordwell's site.

The Jack Pine

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven is another superb exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, following others I've described on this blog: Salvator Rosa, Paul Nash, Adam Elsheimer.  Reviewers (like Brian Sewell) will inevitably have to provide some background information on the Group of Seven, whose work has not often been seen in the UK.  In Canada, as Ian A. C. Dejardin says in the catalogue, their work has been endlessly discussed 'to the point of exhaustion.  Yet their visual legacy remains supremely powerful: many Canadians, raised with reproductions of the Group of Seven's most famous paintings on their classroom walls, still see their own country through the Group's eyes ... Few of us in Europe could point more than vaguely on a map to any of the locations these artists depicted.  These are painted woods, trees, lakes and mountains only.  Nonetheless, non-Canadians should be aware: we are on holy ground.'  As I know some readers of this blog are Canadian (see comments on my last post...) I'd better admit that a lot of these paintings were completely new to me.  

Tom Thomson in Algonquin Provincial Park, 1914-16

Source (all images here): Wikimedia Commons 

At the start of the exhibition, there is a quotation from Fred Housser, who wrote the first book about the Group of Seven in 1926: "This task [of expressing the spirit of the Canadian landscape in paint] demands a new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwacker and prospector; closes with his environment; paddles, portages and makes camp; sleeps in the out-of-doors under the stars; climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back."  The idea of an artist who 'closes with the environment' reminds me of recent British land artists who have walked in Algonquin Park and other landscapes explored by the Group of Seven.

When Tom Thomson died in 1917, his memorial described him as 'artist woodsman and guide'.  Photographs show him fishing and canoeing; one of these was the basis for Peter Doig's White Canoe (1992) (see also my earlier post on Doig's Figure in a Mountain Landscape paintings).  However, as Dejardin points out in the catalogue, Thomson was actually rather a snappy dresser when out and about in Toronto and he made a point of adding some expensive cobalt blue to the marine grey used in painting his canoe.  In 1919 the wealthiest of the group, Lawren Harris, had a boxcar fitted out as a travelling studio for a trip north on the Algoma Central Railway.  It sounds more comfortable than the floating studios of the Impressionists, but this didn't detain some of the artists: as A. Y. Jackson observed, sitting in the boxcar, 'the other chaps are all out sketching under umbrellas.  They are all trying to turn out four a day and can't stop if it rains.'

 Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, 1916

Tom Thomson's most famous paintings, The Jack Pine and The West Wind, are shown alongside their original sketches in the exhibition's first room.  Each is a majestic landscape visible behind the drooping form of a pine tree, its branches seemingly surrounded by a faint aura.  Pine trees seem to have inspired poets and artists all over the world so it seems surprising in retrospect that (according to Housser) the Canadian artistic establishment, unable to see beyond European and Hudson River landscape visions, considered their native Jack Pine trees unpaintable before Thomson came along.  There is a Pine Island in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and this exhibition includes two 1914 sketches of it by Thomson and a night scene by Jackson, where the trees stand over a pool of deep blue in which you can see the reflections of stars.
 

Six of the Group of Seven, plus their friend Barker Fairley, in 1920

From left to right: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris,

Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald.

In 1925 a critic noted that the Group had been 'tree mad', but also, successively, 'lake-lunatic, river-ridden, birch-bedlamed, aspen addled, and rock-cracked.  This year they are mountain mad.'  The exhibition's room of mountain views includes Frederick Varley's Hodleresque The Cloud, Red Mountain (1927-8) and Lawren Harris's stylised, almost art deco Mt Lefroy (1930), although I preferred the more direct, less abstract approach of J. E. H. MacDonald, especially a view of a small turquoise lake in the gathering snow with the Japanese-sounding title, Mountain Solitude (Lake Oesa) (1932).  The final room collects more of Harris's Theosophically-inspired landscapes from the late twenties - radically simplified mountains and ice bergs under grey skies, sometimes parted with shafts of light, reflecting his search for those 'moments in the North when the outward aspect of nature becomes for a while full luminous to her informing spirit - and man, nature and spirit are one.'

Cloud and light

Toshio Hosokawa's new opera Matsukaze, based on a Noh play by Zeami, has received a lot of praise this year.  The New York Times review explains that it begins with some field recordings: 'the tranquil sound of waves washing up on a beach, which he recorded off the coast near Tokyo in January. Two months later, when the cast assembled in Berlin to begin preparing for the opera’s premiere in Brussels, the waves had acquired an entirely different significance. “We heard those water and wind sounds, and we remembered at once the tsunami...”' 

Last month ECM issued a new set of Hosokawa recordings, Landscapes.  Despite the title this only includes one of his early 90s 'Landscape' chamber pieces (some of which are currently viewable on Youtube - see below).  It features a new expanded version of  'Landscape V' for shô and string orchestra; the other tracks are 'Sakura für Otto Tomek', 'Cloud and Light', and 'Ceremonial Dance'.  The Independent's Andy Gill pronounces the album 'exquisite' but The Guardian's Andrew Clements thinks it 'exquisite in a self-conscious way ... for a few minutes the effect is entrancing, but after that it begins to pall'.  In his liner notes Paul Griffiths says 'The interplay of shô and strings, and in particular their mutual imitation, is the driving force – or perhaps one should say ‘drifting force’, given that the music carries itself so lightly ...  its effect is of observing clouds in a largely peaceful sky, clouds that are mostly white but occasionally show shadows and briefly stir into more turbulent action.”

Daphnis and Chloe

There is a delightful sense of freedom in the lives of Daphnis and Chloe, as the young goatherd and shepherdess grow to love each other in the woods and fields of Lesbos.  Daphnis (Δάφνις) is named after the laurel bush and Chloe (χλόη) means the fresh green grass of spring.  They herd their animals together, share their food and milk and wine; Chloe picks stems of asphodel to make little cages for grasshoppers, Daphnis binds together slender reeds and learns to play the pan pipes.  In the summer they listen to the singing of rivers, the wind in the pines and the sound of the cicadas.  Two places in particular are special to them: a statue of Pan underneath a pine tree and, nearby, a cave dedicated to the Nymphs, from which a spring rises whose stream nourishes a meadow of soft grass. There is some hard work - for Chloe the wearisome job of churning milk - but after it is done the lovers have time to bathe, pick fruit and lie together kissing under an oak tree. 

Léon Samoilovitch Bakst, set design for Ravel's Daphnis et Chloë, 1912

Source: Wikimedia Commons

As you read about the passing of the seasons and the growing love of Daphnis and Chloe, it is easy to forget that the landscape Longus is describing is actually made up of the estates of rich men, living away in the city, and that Daphnis and Chloe are actually slaves.  Daphnis works on 'a very splendid property: it had mountains abounding in game, plains fertile in wheat, gentle slopes with vineyards, pastures with flocks, and a long stretch of shore where the sea broke on the softest sand.'  The last part of the novel, Book 4, begins with the news that the Master is returning to look over his property, including a large pleasure ground, containing cypresses, laurels, pines, and plane trees, fruit trees (apple, pear, pomegranate), beds of roses, lilies and hyacinths, and wild flowers: violets, narcissi, pimpernels.  In a description which reads like a blueprint for eighteenth century landowners, Longus writes that 'from there, a wide prospect opened over the plain and the sea beyond, and it was possible to see the peasants minding their flocks and herds, and the ships scudding across the bay - that view was another of the delights afforded by the pleasure-ground' (trans. Ronald McCall).

In the end, it turns out (to no great surprise) that Daphnis and Chloe are not the children of peasants - both had been exposed at birth by their real parents, suckled by a goat and a sheep, discovered and then brought up in the countryside.  But after they marry they return to their rustic idyll and own sheep and goats in great number.  They name their children Philopoeman ('friend to shepherds') and Agele ('herd').  It is a happy ending but to a modern reader it seems a shame that they go on to 'beautify' the Nymphs' cave with pictures and 'let Pan have a temple for his home instead of the pine tree'.  Such artifice is of course in keeping with the pastoral genre and indeed the entire novel is a kind of ekphrasis: its preface explains that Daphnis and Chloe is a story the author saw one day while he was out hunting in Lesbos, depicted in a painting, hanging in a grove sacred to the Nymphs.

Titian, The Three Ages of Man, c1512

It has been suggested that this may show scenes from Daphnis and Chloe

Source: Wikimedia Commons

There are other things I could say about landscape in relation to this book, but I'll confine myself to noting that there are three points in the story where aetiological myths are poetically retold to explain natural phenomena: the call of the wood pigeon, the origin of pan-pipes and the source of echoes. Chloe first experiences an echo while listening with Daphnis to the singing from a passing boat, down below them in a deeply curving bay.  Behind the level pasture where they stand there is a hollow coomb which receives the sounds and 'like a musical instrument' repeats them back again.  Chloe promises Daphnis ten kisses if he will tell her the origin of this phenomenon and so he begins his story, explaining that 'there are many kinds of nymphs - ash-tree nymphs, called Meliae, oak-tree nymphs, called Dryads, and nymphs of the marshes, called Heleioi. All are fair, all are makers of music.  Echo was born the daughter of one of these ... the Muses taught her to play the pan-pipes and the flute, to sing to the lyre and the cithara.'  She shunned mankind but Pan grew jelous and drove the shepherds and goatherds mad so that they tore her to pieces, still singing.  Earth gave these shreds of music shelter and now they are able to portray the sounds of people and animals, just as Echo once had done.  'When Daphnis ended his story, Chloe gave him not ten but ten-score kisses - for the echo had all but repeated what he said, as though to witness that he told no lie.'

To go out and walk far in the forest

Badelunda, Sweden

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was glad to hear that Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize and have been looking today through my copy of his New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton.  Here is my guide to some of the imagery you'll find in his poetry.

1. Snow.   In an earlier post I talked about a poem, 'From March 1979', in which Tranströmer goes to a snow-covered island and sees in the tracks of the deer 'language but no words.'  Language itself suffers in the still, cold February of another poem, 'Face to Face', where there is deep snow and 'footprints grew old out on the crust. / Under a tarpaulin language pined.'  But the onset of a snowfall can seem as joyful as music ('C Major') and when winter ends eventually, as in the poem 'Noon Thaw', the world has a new language: 'the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.'
2. Stillness.   In that dead winter of 'Face to Face', 'living stood still' and 'the soul / chafed against the landscape.'  But eventually, one day, colours flared and 'everything turned around. / The earth and I sprang towards each other'. Elsewhere in Tranströmer there are moments of quiet contemplation, 'Weather Picture' for instance, where the October sea glistens coldly and all sounds are 'in slow flight'.  'Breathing Space July' contains three moments of stillness, lying under a tree, looking into the water, and sleeping.  And in 'Slow Music' he writes of a day down by the water, 'among large stones with peaceful backs', where 'you can stand in the sun with your eyes shut / and feel yourself being slowly blown forward.'
3. Summer.   In a prose poem, 'The Blue House', Tranströmer stands in a dense forest under 'a night of radiant sun.'  'A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon.  Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass.'  But those sunlit Swedish summers will eventually fade until the sounds of the forest flow 'into a single melancholy murmer' ('The Cuckoo'). In 'Lament' the writer notices the slow coming of night. 'The moths settle on the window pane: / small pale telegrams from the world.'
4. Song.   In 'Song' Tranströmer recalls the legend of Väinämöinen, the eternal bard of the Kalevala, riding over the sea.  He also listens at nightfall to the abortive music of gulls on a dark skerry.  You can hear birdsong in many of his poems - 'Ringing', 'Morning Birds', 'Memories Look at Me', 'Early May Stanzas', 'The Nightingale in Badelunda'. The last of these describes a moment when time stopped as he listened to 'the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky's gleaming scythe.' 
5. Stars.  'Orion hangs above the ground-frost...'; 'Silent constellations.  And the cold ocean.' Tranströmer poems often take place at night, although the stars may merely be glimpsed, up through the grating of winter.  In an early poem, 'Epilogue', he describes the evening star like an X-ray, developing a hidden landscape of houses, trees and fences.  And then a storm comes in and the stars seem to signal for help, 'lit and quenched by headlong clouds / that only when they shade the light betray / their presence.'
6. Sleep.   In 'Tracks' a train stops in the middle of a plain - 'bright moonlight, few stars' - and far away there are the lights of a town.  It is like a dream that the sleeper will not remember. Sleep and dreams recur throughout Tranströmer's poetry and indeed the opening lines of the first poem in his first collection describe that moment of awakening when 'consciousness can grasp the world / as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.'  'The Man who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs' evokes that same feeling, when the sleeper 'begins / groping for attention's instruments'. 
7. Storms.  Sometimes the poet is woken by a storm.  In 'Autumnal Archipelago' he listens in the darkness to 'constellations stamping inside their stalls, high over the tree-tops'.  Similarly, 'A Winter Night' begins with this memorable image: 'the storm put its mouth to the house / and blows to produce a note.'  These experiences suggest a simile in 'Agitated Meditation': 'a storm drives the mill sails wildly round / in the night's darkness, grinding nothing. - You / are kept awake by the same laws...'
8. Silence.   Other times the nights are quiet: in 'Nocturne', the trees keep 'silence in concord with each other.'  In 'Five Stanzas to Thoreau', Tranströmer talks of silence slowly spiralling from the earth to grow 'with its burgeoning crown to shade his sun-heated doorstep.'  Thus silence seems sought after at times - in 'Along the Radius' he sits by an ice-bound river on an upturned boat 'swallowing the drug of silence'.  But in 'April and Silence' Spring lies desolate and 'the only thing I want to say / glitters out of reach / like the silver / in a pawnbrokers.'
9. Solitude.   In 'Alone', Tranströmer says 'I must be alone / Ten minutes in the morning / and ten minutes in the evening / without a programme.'  Earlier in this poem he is walking on the frozen fields of Östergötland and doesn't see a single person.  Other solitary artists appear in his poems - Thoreau 'disappearing deep in his inner greenness' and Grieg in his work-cottage, 'shut in with silence.'  In 'Solitary Swedish Houses' everything seems to stand alone and summer comes with 'flaxen-haired rain / or one solitary thunder-cloud / above a barking dog.'
10. Sunlight.  Finally, the transformative effect of sunlight is evident in poems like 'Landscape with Suns', where the poet takes the memory of a glowing sun back to 'the half dead grey forest /  where we have to work and live.'  'Further In' describes an evening when he is driving through thick traffic.  A low red sun streaming in through his windscreen makes him feel transparent, so that 'writing becomes visible / inside me'.  Right then, he knows he must 'get far away / straight through the city and then / further until it is time to go out / and walk far in the forest.'

At the Loch of the Green Corrie

Andrew Greig is a Scottish novelist, poet and mountaineering writer who I think I first read in Alec Finlay's anthology The Way to Cold Mountain (2001).  There he had a short prose piece called 'By the Loch of the Green Corrie' about a quest to find and fish in the loch that the poet Norman MacCaig (1910-96) had considered his favourite spot in the world.   The loch's location is revealed by an old friend of MacCaig and Grieg then heads off, accompanied by two friends (better fishermen than he) to try to find it.  'It's a gem all right.  Yes, green rough grass and screeds of grey scree.  Held in a bowl, secluded, quiet, its own world.  Quinag in the distance.  Nothing else.'  They fish all day but get no catches.  The mist comes in.  'Sounds of water, wind over grass, occasional shrill keek of a lone bird of prey.  The Loch of the Green Corrie began to sink into me.'  They stay for another day but still no luck. They pack up and leave.  'We're grubby, fish-free but feeling very alive, in touch, refreshed.  The homage is done, for this year.'

'The slope opposite rises like a breaking frozen wave of grey and green' 

Screen dump showing my own attempt to locate the Loch of the Green Corrie, whilst sitting here using Google Earth

A book-length homage, expanded from this original essay, appeared last year, the centenary of MacCaig's birth.  The account of the fishing trip is fuller and longer, with the addition of an extra day and digressions on poetry, geology, land-ownership and the right way to live.  I felt quite envious, never having myself camped out in the Highlands or experienced a Hemingwayesque fishing holiday (or even, come to think of it, met anyone who owns a fishing rod), but I did smile to myself when the trip ended with the three friends abandoning their tents to head off for some posh hotel food.  There they raise a glass to MacCaig, whose own poems and observations on the landscape are scattered through this book.  In 'Descent from the Green Corrie', for example, MacCaig describes the walk down 'on screes or boggy asphodel. / And the elation that for a moment fills you / Beside the misty cairn's that lesser thing, / A memory of it.'

The book ends with an account of Andrew Greig's return to the area in 2008, to interview some of Norman MacCaig's surviving friends and have one more go at catching the fish.  Again he spends hours there, until the far side of the corrie begins to lose colour and 'a pale spiral swirls and flattens, coming this way.  A rattling sound, then in a drenching blow the hail squall hits.'  So he leaves empty handed, but on his way home manages at last to catch a fish, in a loch of his own choosing.  And there the book ends, although Greig was back again last year, this time with Billy Connolly, fiddler Aly Bain and a BBC film crew.  A brief clip shows it to have been extremely bracing weather; after a massive overnight snowstorm Connolly is trying to put a fly on his rod and is heard to complain "Could Norman no'like Jamaica or something?"

City Links

I used to imagine, sitting at a screen in the city, some kind of remote aural connection to a wild landscape.  Perhaps this is now possible - some durable, unobtrusive, solar-powered device hidden in the cliffs at Zennor for example, transmitting the sound of waves to my computer here.  As long ago as 1967 the composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher set up microphones that could feed sounds back from five sites round the city of Buffalo.  Later she installed 'a microphone on a window overlooking the ocean at the New England Fish Exchange in Boston Harbour, transmitting the sound into her home studio continuously, sometimes using it as an element in other performances or exhibitions of City Links. “I would come in and it would be different according to different weather and changes,” Amacher told interview Leah Durner in 1989 ... She lived with the live transmission for three years. “I actually miss coming home to it,” she says now, some 20 years later.'  This quote comes from a 1999 Wire article; you can see a few photographs on the Maryanne Amacher Archive Project website (sadly it looks as if this has not been updated recently and a year ago they were asking for more funds).

It seems paradoxical to go to the trouble of listening to the world but played over the top of the 'real' soundscape surrounding you.  I wonder what John Cage thought of this?  Amacher worked with Cage on his Lecture on the Weather (1975), a composition 'for 12 speaker-vocalists (or instrumentalists), preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens, each using his own sound system given an equalization distinguishing it from the others ... The performance starts with the reading of the preface. In it Cage expresses his disgust with the institutions of American government. After that the work starts, the 12 men reading and singing text fragments by Henry David Thoreau, and/or play instruments (ad lib.). In part 1 this is accompanied by sounds (on tape) of wind and in part 2 by sounds of rain. In the third part the lights in the performance-space are dimmed and the performers are accompanied by the film and the sounds of thunder. The film consists of Thoreau drawings, printed in negative, the projection resembling lightning (white on black).'  Lecture on the Weather goes well beyond the simple notion of a soundscape.  It represents (in the words of Joan Retallack) a collision of political and environmental climates, like ' the complex chaotic condition of interpenetration and obstruction in which we live, a fragile balance of order and disorder, clarity and cacophony.'

High Arctic

I've talked here before about the ongoing Cape Farewell project which takes a group of artists and scientists each year to the Arctic.  Last year's trip sailed around Svalbard and among those on board were poet Nick Drake and artist Matt Clark of United Visual Artists.  They have now collaborated on an installation for the National Maritime Museum: High Arctic. It is described as 'an exhibition with no touchscreens, no static photographs, and no panels with text: instead High Arctic is a genuinely immersive, responsive environment. Ultraviolet torches unlock hidden elements, constantly shifting patterns of graphics and text that react to visitors approaching; an archipelago of thousands of columns fills the gallery space, each representing a real glacier in Svalbard; an artificial horizon borders the gallery as a seamless canvas of light, shifting in intensity and colour. A Max Eastley and Henrik Ekeus-designed generative soundscape flows through the gallery, weaving in the voices of arctic explorers across the centuries as well as the poetry of Nick Drake.'

The exhibition looks into a future where we will have to imagine the Arctic as it once was.  As you walk on what seem to be pristine snowfields dark patches spread around you, and ice-floes break up as if melted by your torch.  When the voices are silent you can hear the bleak sound of wind whistling over the ice.  Each ice column has the name of one of Svalbard's disappearing glaciers on it, which appears and then vanishes when you move the light over it.  These minimal white blocks and their arrangement in the museum space reminded me of Rachel Whiteread's Embankment at Tate Modern, which was a response to her own Cape Farewell trip in 2005.  I took my sons along to High Arctic today and they really enjoyed interacting with the lights and exploring the labyrinth of ice blocks.  I see that, according to an article in Wired, the scale of these was 'based on Lego models because, as team member Ben Kreukniet explains, “Lego is awesome.”'

Before the melt-waters

My copy of The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales has a landscape by David Jones on the cover, painted in the twenties when he went to live with Eric Gill and others at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains.  The book describes Jones' long poem The Anathemata (1952) as 'at once devotional and commemorative, a celebration of Christian mysteries and a recalling of the making - both geological and cultural - of Britain ... The poem draws its material mainly from Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits' underlying London and Wales, and from English literature.'  Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair have followed a similar path in their recent writings (London Orbital quotes 'The Lady of the Pool' section of The Anathemata, in which Jones uncovers the mythic strata of the City).  But before the poem reaches London, before following the waves of ship-borne settlers whose culture has shaped Britain, there is a section called 'Rite and Fore-Time' which describes the formation of the land itself.  What I like about these lines is the way they too contain 'Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits'', projected back onto Ice Age Britain, 'before the melt-waters / had drumlin-dammed a high hill-water for the water-maid / to lave her maiden hair.'

He says for example, that it is long ages since these melt-waters 'troughed, in solid Ordovician / his Bala bed for Tacitus. / Long, long ago they'd turned the flow about. / But had they as yet morained / where holy Deva's entry is? / Or pebbled his mere, where / still the Parthenos / she makes her devious exit?' A footnote explains some of these etymological references: Bala is also called Pimblemere, and in Welsh, Llyn Tegid, the Lake of Tacitus.  Jones adds that 'it may be noted that Tacitus was the name of Cunedda's great grandfather' (the kind of fact that these days we can find instantly and then pursue as far as we like).  He also explains in the footnote that the lake 'is formed of solid rock but the S. W. end at least is thought to have been influenced by morainic deposits.  At some remote geological period the outflow was southward whereas now the Dee flows northward through the lake, but, says immemorial tradition, the two waters never mingle.'

Lake Bala

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The poem goes on to describe the movement south of glacial material, 'heaped amorphous / out of Caledonia / into Cambria.' It was from the Southern Uplands, Jones notes, that 'geological deposits of the Ice Age and certain legendary and historical deposits of the sub-Roman age came to Wales.'  At the same time ice sheets from Ireland, Scotland and the Lake District converged into the depression of the Irish Sea and moved south, 'part thrust against the land mass of North Wales' (here Jones' footnote quotes Brit. Reg. Geol. N. Wales pp77-8).  Microgranites and clay-bonded erratics were wrenched away and carried 'with what was harrowed-out in via, up, from the long drowned out-crops, under, coalesced and southed by the North Channel.'  And then the description of glacial action ends with the strange image of St Brendan on his sea horse.  A footnote explains that glaciation extended 'just beyond the waters between South Wales and Ireland, which very many millenia later became associated with the marvel-voyages of the Celtic ascetics; such as the navigation-saint, Brendan, who in the legend rides the narrow channel on a marine creature and hails Finbar, mounted on David's swimming horse, with the words 'God is marvellous in his saints.''

Soft pink landscape

Earlier this week I was sad to read Waldemar Januszczak tweet 'Oh no, Richard Hamilton died this morning. That is a HUGE loss. Probably Britain's most important post-war artist.'  But, as he went on to say, 'Richard Hamilton was working on a big touring retrospective when he died. So at least there is that to look forward to.' Back in 1992 I went to a sizable retrospective at the Tate Gallery and have just been re-reading the catalogue. This reminded me that five years before his famous collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, Hamilton was helping to make large map-models of New Towns (Harlow, Basildon and Speke) for the Festival of Britain's Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research.  There is a small black and white photograph of one of these in the catalogue (like a Ghost Box album cover), where it is contrasted with Landscape (1965-6).  This later work is mixed media added to an enlarged postcard image of the South Downs - panoramic landscape as a 'self-reflexive, game-playing switching of representational codes, rather than as a mimetic, miniaturised simulation of the new Socialist Britain.'

In the early sixties Hamilton was struck by a new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet paper that featured photographs of girls posed in a forest glade.  He described the scene: 'Nature is beautiful.  Pink from a morning sun filters through a tissue of autumn leaves.  Golden shafts gleam through the the perforated vaulting of the forest to illuminate a stage set-up for the Sunday supplement voyeur.'  It is a masturbatory fantasy: 'the woodland equipped with every convenience.  A veil of soft-focus vegetation screens the peeper from the sentinel.  Poussin?  Claude?  No, more like Watteau in its magical ambiguity.'  In Soft pink landscape (1971-2) he reproduces this scene in misty paint, as if seen through half-closed eyes, with a roll of Andrex placed on the ground.

In 1975 Hamilton exhibited Andrex-inspired work at the Serpentine Gallery along with other landscape views derived from postcards.  Some of these show Miers, the French spa noted for the laxative properties of its waters.  There were also nine pastel images of sunsets, each with a giant turd in the foreground.  One further view was of sunrise over Cadaqués with a turd blotting out its church, and Hamilton linked this with Jung's account of a dream he had: 'the cathedral, the blue sky, God sits on his throne, high above the world - and an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.'  Hamilton's interest in the Andrex adverts continued and in 1980 he completed Soft blue landscape (the cover of the Tate's 1992 exhibition catalogue, below, shows a detail from this painting, omitting the toilet roll).  It was at this point that Hamilton discovered the rather surprising identity of an artist who had actually worked on the original 1960s Andrex campaign... Bridget Riley.

One streak of dying light

Landscapes, finished in 1949 and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1953, is the earliest work for orchestra by Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung.  It uses three traditional Chinese melodies to create three different 'landscapes': 'Under the Cliff in the Bay,' 'The Sorrow of Parting,' and 'One Streak of Dying Light.'  The titles come from poems by Cheng Hsieh (1693-1765), Ting P’eng (c. 1661) and Liu Chi (1311-75).  You can read the full poems and see the score on the composer's excellent website.  The third one, for example, reads: 'Green, green the grass west of the pavilion,/ The clouds low, the cries of the wild geese faint,/ Two lines of sparse willows, /One streak of dying light, /Hundreds of homing ravens dotting the sky.'

In the years following Landscapes Chou worked as student and assistant to Edgard Varèse (the manuscript for Déserts was written out by him).  He also continued to compose his own landscape-inspired music; in 1956 for example came And the Fallen Petals, based on a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740).  He says 'in this work I have tried to convey through sound the emotional qualities of Chinese landscape painting and to achieve this end with the same economy of means ...  In this as well as in my other works to date, I am influenced by the philosophy that governs every Chinese artist, whether he be poet or painter; namely, affinity to nature in conception, allusiveness in expression, and terseness in realization.'  The music is in three sections: 'Part 1: Against a quiet and mysterious landscape, budding blossoms dance the praise of life in the Spring wind', 'Part 2: A storm breaks and the furious wind drives the dazed petals far and wide,' 'Part 3: Against a quiet and mysterious landscape, the fallen petals are being swept away and fresh blossoms on the branches dance in the Spring wind.'

Chou's long career continues and his most recent piece is from 2009, Ode to Eternal Pine, dedicated to Elliott Carter (who is still going strong in his second century).  He says of this that 'in East Asian cultures, the pine, often seen on mountain peaks, is a symbol of longevity and the eternity of nature. “Meditating on Eternity” is a reflection on the fundamental esthetic principle of East Asia, as expressed in the Chinese terms tian di ren, heaven, earth and humanity. It suggests human emotion within the timelessness of the universe and the physical constraints on earth, the two axes symbolized by the subsequent movements, “Lofty Peaks” and “Profound Gorges.”'  I was reminded of these two axes while reading an interesting interview with Chou, where he says that back in 1977 he had been responsible for selecting a traditional Chinese zither piece called 'Flowing water' for inclusion on the Voyager golden records - music that has now left behind the physical constraints of earth on its journey out into the universe.

A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind

On Thursday Radio 4 are broadcasting a new play by Helen Macdonald about that classic of English nature writing, J. A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967).  It will be, I'm told, "a strange thing", comparing Baker's pursuit of wild falcons with Helen's own experiences keeping a goshawk called Mabel.  The play has been produced by Tim Dee, who wrote in his own bird memoir, The Running Sky, about his fascination with the book and its strange author, who seemed to lose himself in a quest to follow the peregrine wherever it took him: 'earthed, haggard and self-loathing, traipsing through marshes, crouching in ditches and lurking on field edges.'  Whether Helen ended up in this state too we shall be able to hear next week.

Robert Macfarlane's preface to the 2005 NYRB edition of The Peregrine noted that little is known of Baker's life beyond what is recorded in his book.  This mystery has added to the aura surrounding him over the years (in a way reminiscent to me of Robert Johnson, who in 1961 could be described on King of the Delta Blues Singers as 'little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists').  But (as with Johnson) investigators have now unearthed more information and it turns out that when he wasn't on the trail of falcons or composing his visionary masterpiece, Baker managed the Chelmsford branch of the AA.  This new biographical material has been included in the introduction to The Complete Works of J. A. Baker, published earlier this year.  In addition to The Peregrine this volume has a selection of diary entries devoted to bird watching, The Hill of Summer (Baker's second, almost-forgotten book) and an essay, On the Essex Coast.

'Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious,' writes Baker at the start of The Peregrine, and indeed he never needs to amass detail to convey a vivid and original sense of place.  By omitting all reference to identifiable locations (500 of which actually appear in the newly published diary selections), Baker strips his landscape down to the shapes and colours and sensory impressions that a falcon might experience.  Mark Cocker (in his introduction to The Peregrine) says that 'for Baker devotees this compositional device has given rise to a kind of sport, as they try to tease out a real geography behind the otherwise anonymous descriptions.'  But equally, it has the effect of transforming Baker's corner of Essex into a universal landscape.

The Peregrine draws on observations made over a ten year period but is written as if they all took place in one year.  I have quoted below some of the opening lines to convey a sense of the way Baker often sets the scene with a distilled, imagistic landscape description. The first entry in the book is for October 1st, when he finds a peregrine and watches as it picks off a jay (too vivid and conspicuous against the green water-meadows) and vows to follow him all winter, sharing 'the fear, and the exultation, and the boredom, of the hunting life.' The last entry is on April 4th, when he pursues the peregrine until he is able to crawl to a position five yards away, right in front of the bird, whose eyes look into his but seem to see something beyond 'from which they cannot look away.' 

October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...

October 30th: The wind-shred banner of the autumn light spanned the green headland between the two estuaries...

November 2nd: The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light...

November 11th: Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud, gulls bone-white in ashes of sky...

November 16th: The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory...

November 21st: A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees stands sharply up along the valley skyline...

December 8th: Golden leaves of sunlight drifted down through the morning fog...

December 15th: The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge...

January 5th: Broken columns of snow towered over lanes dug from ten foot drifts.  Roads were ridged and fanged with white ice, opaque and shiny as frozen rivers...

February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...

March 10th: Towering white clouds grew in the marble sunlight of the morning.  The wind eroded them to falling weirs of rain.  The estuary at high tide brimmed with blue and silver light, then tarnished and thinned to grey.  A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind...

Bless all ports.

Well, summer is over - the coldest for eighteen years apparently and, as The Tate's Vorticism exhibition also comes to an end, it is perhaps excusable to curse the English climate 'for its sins and infections'.  The Vorticist Manifesto blasts our 'flabby sky that can manufacture no snow, but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle like a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges.'  But at the same time, claims that 'the English Character is based on the Sea' and blesses England's

PORTS, RESTLESS MACHINES OF    | scooped out basins
                                                               | heavy insect dredgers
                                                               | monotonous cranes
                                                               | stations
                                                               | lighthouses, blazing
                                                               |     through the frosty
                                                               |     starlight, cutting the
                                                               |     storm like a cake
                                                               | beaks of infant boats,
                                                               |     side by side,
                                                               | heavy chaos of
                                                               |     wharves,
                                                               | steep walls of
                                                               |     factories
                                                               | womanly town
                                                                                                                  
There follows a list of the great ports, including Newcastle, which is portrayed a few pages later in a Vorticist woodcut by Edward Wadsworth.  The Tate exhibition includes a similar print, called simply Port, and it was a subject Wadsworth would return to throughout his career (although his later harbour views are much less interesting).  During the First World War Wadsworth was involved in the application of dazzle camouflage to allied ships and used this experience in what may be his most famous port scene, Dazzle-ship in Drydock at Liverpool (1919).  Roy Behrens has recently unearthed a photograph of Wadsworth painting this - you can see it on his Camoupedia blog.

 Newcastle, 1914
Edward Wadsworth,