I didn’t intend or expect to return to the subject of landscape so soon. A good deal of today, however, has been spent driving around West Yorkshire in the sleet and snow, in the endeavour to find a new carpet for the living room.* I have had plenty of time to think, especially since the combination of traffic volume and weather reduced us to a crawl for a good bit of the journey, and little else of any note has taken place.
I was thinking how little interesting work there is on landscape as a genre, that actually considers the question of what landscape is actually for. Edmund Swingelhurst’s interesting little volume The Art of Landscapes does no more than review the work of a succession of artists from the end of the XVI century onwards, where they are considered in relation to concurrent general developments in art, but not specifically as exemplifying any development in the understanding of what it meant to paint “landscape”. I’ve dug out my copies of Kenneth Clark’s celebrated volume, Landscape into Art, and also Malcolm Andrews’ Landscape and Western Art, neither of which I have read for some time. I need to refresh my memory, and get some fresh stimulation for my own thinking.
Meanwhile, however, I have been pondering the question of whether and to what extent the term “landscape” does actually describe a lot of what I do. Are my intimate studies of rocks or trees better seen as landscapes or as “outdoor still-life”? What would be the point of the distinction? I certainly think of them as landscapes. Is any picture which takes as its subject-matter a natural object thereby a “landscape”? Hmmmm! Makes you think.
* We succeeded, after some adventures and misadventures, finding something that very much suited our needs in the small town of Brighouse, not far from us. Brighouse is a fascinating place, rather unprepossessing at first acquaintance, but with hidden advantages. It is one of the few remaining places in which the small independent shops have not been displaced by chains. We had coffee in a local cafe, Fratelli, instead of in a Costa or Starbucks. (I’ve had a worse doppio macchiato in Italy!) It has all kinds of specialists that you don’t find even in a city as large as Bradford. Incidentally, the low-point of the day was our attempt to find something suitable in IKEA, which I regard as Hell on Earth.