Do I have any preconceptions about what “landscape” means in terms of art? Probably, possibly even inevitably, up to a point. However after a lifetime of looking at art, in the broadest sense, in galleries, books, magazines, and doing a bit of practising on the side for my own part, generally I try to see categories as being fairly malleable, flexible, and not prescriptive.
Any given image is potentially capable of being “filed” under a number of different categories: landscape, documentary, socially engaged, post-photography, narrative/historical, allegorical, even portraiture. In this latter regard I think in particular of some of Elina Brotherus’s work were she is the subject of a self-portrait, often with her back to the camera, but posed within a landscape. The painting that I have chosen as the starting point for my sketch, of which more below, is similarly both a landscape and a portrait.
The genre is not just about pretty pictures and impressive views. I admire and can see the greatness in the work of classical painters such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, JMW Turner (who regarded Lorrain as a genius), but luminous sunsets, bucolic scenes, dramatic light and storms, are not enough for me if the picture is not saying something more profound.
Nor do I think it is limited by scale. A patch of pavement can just as easily be a landscape, albeit perhaps at a micro level, just as much as a mountain range or an ocean at the macro.
Funnily enough I was going to include in that very short, highly exclusive, and it must be admitted wholly partisan, list, a few American painters of monumental landscapes (both the land itself but also the sheer scale of some of the paintings themselves), particular Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Thomas Cole, whose works I first got to know on visits to New York and Boston in particular. However, I have gone back to look again at some of their pictures and am stuck by how much there are other narratives at play in their work – the role and place of mankind in the environment, and most vexedly questions of ownership and belonging. Even when the ostensible subject is just the monumental view, there are often figures introduced who help not simply to define the scale of the scene but also raise questions about the relationships between man and land. (Are we going to look at more of this sort of thing when we get to Martha Sandweiss’s book, dealing as it does specifically with the American West?)
Generally speaking what I might term pure landscape work (whether painting or photography) that does not have some deeper significance beyond simply recording the view, leaves me cold. What is allegedly the most photographed tree in Britain is not far from where I live, at Sycamore Gap (guess what species of tree it is) on Hadrian’s Wall. Yes it is pretty, and the physical setting is quite striking, but it does not say much and there are so many banal images of it out there that it has become little more than a cliche, Instagram fodder. That is not the sort of representation of any landscape that interests or inspires me.
Looking at my own modest, but growing, collection of photographic prints I have few “pure” landscape pictures, mostly by the Canadian artist Mark Brennan who has been documenting the coastline of Nova Scotia in his Almost an Island series. What appeals to me about this work, notwithstanding that it does not ostensibly do anything more than record the “view” is that it does at a deeper level carry other messages: about the physical nature of the environment, its vulnerability, the effects of climate change, for example.
I have otherwise been sent back to think about the work of other artists, particularly those whose books I have bought of late and who have had, in varying degrees, influence on some of the work that I have done for I&P. The landscape, the place, the environment has been a major feature in much of it, but not simply as a view. Rather questions of identity, belonging, the effect of man on the environment, and vice versa, ideas of home and ownership have all been there. Indeed it has to an extent only been now that I have started to think about them as landscape work, rather than for example simply documentary or socially engaged, or indeed portaiture. Some examples: Maja Daniels in Elf Dalia, the Wagners in Kleinstadt, Rinko Kawauchi and her landscape pictures inspired by peoples’ stories and recollections in ‘The river embraced me’, Eiji Ohashi and his vending machines, Matthew Genitempo, Alec Soth on the Mississippi, Toshiya Murakoshi in Tohoku, Fay Godwin, Guido Guidi on his home turf and in Sardegna, Ekaterina Vasilyeva’s St. Petersburg, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes perhaps stand apart from this crowd as they are just that, seascapes. I cannot help loving this work as it is so striking and impressive, impressive, particularly when seen in the flesh as some of the original prints are quite big.
What surprised me a bit, as I have written in my I&P blog, is how certain political ideas have found their way into the landscape work that I did their, exemplified particularly by the series I shot for the fifth assignment on the idea of home as somewhere exclusive and exclusionary.
Which, I suppose, brings me to the question why I decided to choose this course next. Partly it is because of that growing awareness and a desire to explore and develop some of those ideas further. It also seems to me to offer an opportunity to do much more than take pictures of views, to introduce and explore other “genres”, not least documentary and portraiture. Already I have started to off-piste from the recommended reading list and, predictably, have gone back to John Berger. There is an apt quotation from his book A Fortunate Man in Landscapes (2016) (at page xiii):
“Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal.”
It might not appear very important at the moment but one thing that I can see this course is going to do is make me reassess my view of Ansel Adams, whom I see we will be looking at more systematically anon. At one level his work, which I certainly admire, might be seen to do little more than record the view (and mess with the mind a bit with the almost hallucinatory effects he sometimes achieved with his long exposures and extreme depth of field which does funny things to a sense of physical scale). It will be interesting though to think a bit more deeply about what else is going on in his work, and indeed whether a purely pictorial approach is actually ok after all.
So to my “sketch”. I have taken for this as my starting point Gainsborough’s Mr & Mrs Andrews.
I actually first looked more closely at this painting when working on a previous (pre-OCA) course and played around with an homage to it, creating an updated version of it, a first exploration of the theme of ownership of property. (This was taken shortly before we got our current dog, otherwise he would have been in the picture as well, sitting at my feet!)
I was already thinking about this painting as an inspiration before I started to read Berger again and was then reminded that he explored it in Ways of Seeing (1972). Again it is worth quoting him as he speaks so well to my own developing thoughts (at page 108):
“Of course it is very possible that Mr and Mrs Andrews were engaged in the philosophic enjoyment of unperverted Nature. But this in no way precluded them from being at the same time proud landowners. In most cases the possession of private land was the precondition for such philosophic enjoyment – which was not uncommon among the landed gentry. Their enjoyment of ‘uncorrupted and unperverted nature’ did not, however, usually include the nature of other men. The sentence of poaching at that time was deportation. If a man stole a potato he risked a public whipping ordered by the magistrate who would be a landowner. There were very strict property limits to what was considered natural.”
By the way, I do not accept the idea that they were enjoying “uncorrupted and unperverted nature” as Professor Gowing maintained in his argument with Berger. This is a carefully managed and controlled landscape, one that was no doubt fashioned and sculpted to some extent to “improve the view” and create an artificial, and artful, impression of “nature”. At the very least it has been altered, and managed, by agriculture.
Another bit of coincidence is that I was already thinking of incorporating an element of “Private – Keep Out” before I read that when the original television version of Ways of Seeing was broadcast the producer put just such a sign on the tree in the painting.
For this I have also drawn on one of Fay Godwin’s pictures (“Nightguard, Stonehenge, 1988”) and added some other elements of my own.
Shape? Naturally, landscape format. I say “naturally”, almost tongue in cheek but really I do not think the image would work in quite the way I intend (nor indeed as Gainsborough no doubt intended) had a portrait format been used. That though does not mean to say that a different aspect ratio, a portrait format, might also suit a landscape picture. Here I think of one of Bierstadt’s paintings that has a distinct portrait alignment because it suits his subject, the physical height of a waterfall (Cho-looke in Yosemite). Here verticality is the important point rather than, for Gainsborough the emphasis on the extensive nature of the Andrews’s property, and in my sketch, the sense of barrier and exclusion. (Note the inclusion of people to at the very least give a sense of scale.)
Terrain? Rural. No buildings (significantly as I suggest below), hints of countryside and farm animals in the distance on the left edge.
What is in it? Landowners, their dog, a gun, a fence with indications of security, an unmistakable sign, a surveillance camera.
How are the subjects arranged? Most importantly for me the composition is spread across the picture plane so that it by itself acts as a barrier. We cannot see what lies behind, apart from hints of trees and animals in the distance. Significantly, at least in light of the work I did for Assignment 5 of I&P, it is not possible to see the house. (https://wordpress.com/post/markrobinsonocablog3ip.wordpress.com/1033)
Mood? Menacing, defensive, unwelcoming. There is though a sense of comfort, ease, even nonchalance about the figures, which I had not realised was there in the original Gainsborough painting until I looked at it again, indeed even smugness. Without necessarily having deliberately composed the sketch in this way with this in mind, the landowners are outside their barrier, acting as if guards. They seem at ease, almost daring the viewer to try to cross the threshold of the picture into their private domain, knowing that they have back-up (Nightguard Security) and main-force in the form of a gun and a dog. I find that all strangely and unexpectedly disturbing.
Berger, J, (2016). Landscapes: John Berger on Art. London: Verso
Berger, J, (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin
Daniels, M, (2019). Elf Dalia. London: MACK
Genitempo, M. (2018). Jasper. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers
Godwin, F, (2001). Landmarks. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Guidi, G, (2019). In Sardegna: 1974, 2011. London: MACK
Guidi, G, (2018). Per Strada. London: MACK
Kawauchi, R, (2016). The river embraced me. Tokyo: torch press
Mahler, U, & Mahler, W, 2018. Kleinstadt. Stuttgart: Hartmann Books
Murakoshi, T, (2018). An Eventual Saturation. Tokyo: Case Publishing
Ohashi, E, (2017). Being There. Tokyo: Case Publishing
Ohashi, E, (2017). Roadside Lights. Tokyo: Zen Foto Gallery
Shore, S, (2014). Uncommon Places. London: Thames & Hudson
Soth, A, (2017). Sleeping by the Mississippi. London: MACK
Vasilyeva, E, (2019). Road to Petergof. St. Petersburg: Self-published
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 
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