Nature and landscape photography is in a rut. The same style of imagery that we have seen for decades hasn’t changed. While fun for amateur photographers to engage in and learn how to execute ‘the perfect landscape’, such photography has nothing left to say. It’s time to move on. But where to?

Sergio Muscat has shown us one way – and an engaging and intriguing way it is too. In a project that he titles ‘Soul Searching” he explores a space between abstraction and nature photography.

What makes this approach so intriguing and so interesting? In a previous post about the work of Joan Miró, I said that the Miró work “makes us realize that what is maybe most important when we encounter nature and the landscape is not what we see but rather what we feel”. And so it is with Muscat’s work. When we look at this work, we can make out that it refers to some natural space – field, sea, meadow – but we can’t quite make out where or exactly what. Yet we take in the color, the motion and, sometimes, the dynamism of the natural environment being represented. The skill is in maintaining the clarity that here we are in some kind of ‘natural environment’ while depriving us of the ability to focus on what these natural spaces look like.  Rather that being told what these places look like, we are reminded of what they feel like.

In his own description of the work, Muscat draws on Kandinsky’s belief that colours, shapes and lines reflect the inner self, the emotional “vibrations of the soul”. Human interaction with natural spaces (whatever those might be – and ‘parks’ count too!), initiate these vibrations of the soul. Yet they are so difficult to reproduce in artistic expression and impossible to do so in anything that is purely representational.

Imagine standing in the middle of a meadow on a fine Summer’s day. What do we see and feel? We ‘see’ a riot of color; we see our surroundings swaying in the gentle wind; we see some movement – a butterfly maybe. We hear and smell too. But mainly we feel. We feel a sense of pleasure, maybe relaxation, maybe an uplifting of the soul at being there. Seeing is a small part of our experience. So much so that many of us close our eyes and somehow ‘take it all in’ with our eyes closed. We are enveloped by an experience.

These images start to guide us back to that experience. They do not distract us with the reproduction of irrelevant, pin-sharp detail but rather, impressionistic as they are, they allow us to drift into our own thoughts and experiences. Maybe, if we’re lucky, they will, like the meadow itself, cause us to stop looking, shut our eyes, and just feel.

“You see, as a kid growing up in Orange County, nature was this place we drove to.” This quote is from an essay by James M Brown which was the winning essay in this year’s WOLFoundation annual writing competition (download full essay here). It expresses what is in danger of happening as a result of the conservationist’s ongoing narrative: nature is something that is ‘over there’ – very little to do with us except as entertainment or a packaged ‘product’ we consume as a National Park or other nature reserve – a kind of Disneyland without the big, smiling mouse.

Landscape photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenschel have created for National Geographic Magazine a set of images that shows us that nature is right in our cities – and has always been. The meadowland recreated on the London roof (above), not only serves as insulation for the solar powered house it covers, but also provides a view of nature in our midst for the urban dwellers looking out of the surrounding windows. And there may be even more practical applications.  In Japan, where space is at a significant premium, some of the rice that goes to make Hakutsuru sake is grown on the roof of the company’s offices in Tokyo (below).

But maybe one of the most successful recent projects of urban nature has been the creation of the Highline in New York City. The conversion of a disused, raised railway line into a promenade, mini-park and social gathering space has created a strip of nature snaking between the towering blocks of New York City (below). Cook and Jenshel have been one of the many photographers and artists who have been inspired by the Highline and the vibrant life that has been created around it. It’s surprising how uplifting even a small patch of nature can become.

We live in an age when it is inconceivable that anyone will be able to invest in creating mega projects like those that created the great parks that grace cities worldwide. Yet, the Highline and the many initiatives now sprouting on roofs and walls everywhere are worthwhile and highly valuable. They bring benefits to people and create small areas of refuge that attract birds, butterflies and other creatures right into the middle of our great cities. Valuable as they are, we needn’t just focus on creating new Yellowstones to make a difference. Smaller initiatives sprouting in our midst are valuable too – and all the more so because we don’t even have to drive to them.

National Geographic article about green roofs here

National Geographic article about the Highline here

Last night I went to a benefit party in New York for a wonderful organization that uses art and performance to make cleaning up the local environment fun.

Earth Celebrations was founded by Felicia Young as an organization that uses art and performance to raise local awareness in New York City about the environment of the Hudson River. It’s landmark annual event is the Hudson River Pageant – a costumed street party that brings people together, celebrates the river and raises awareness about environmental issues as well as the progress being made in cleaning up the local environment.

But it doesn’t stop at just one street party. Preparations for the party and the use of Art & Ecology workshops bring together artists and other interested parties to design the costumes and, in the process, talk about the ecological issues and opportunities that they would like to address.

Through a series of collaborations with schools and community centers, Earth Celebrations also engages “children, teens, and community participants to explore, research and learn about  ecological issues“. All ideas and information collated through the workshops are transformed into artworks.

Earth Celebrations is one example of how engagement in environmental issues can be made to be enjoyable fun rather than a merely a tale of woe. It also shows the power of local engagement.

Apart from making art that focuses our minds on ‘saving the environment’, artists can, themselves, start making direct contributions by addressing the use of polluting materials and the enormous amounts of waste that contemporary art tends to generate.

In an article in today’s Observer – ‘Can art be environmentally friendly?’ – Lucy Siegle addresses this issue.

She suggests that “more artists [need] to move from making work that carries pivotal ecological messages to actually ameliorating their footprint”

Can the concept of “sustainability” be visualized.

The Guardian newspaper in collaboration with Getty Images have tried to pick a series of images that visualize the concept of sustainability. Have they been successful?

Sustainability is an idea that is gaining widespread usage, widespread support and also widespread criticism as being somewhat meaningless – a plastic concept that everyone can turn to their own use say the critics. There is little doubt that concepts and ideas gain more support if they can be visualized and this is the attempt being made here.

The success of this series of images lies in the breadth of the issues that have been included. From the slightly surreal image shown here – which we can interpret in many different ways – to more standard (and therefore less powerful) images of power saving bulbs and drawings of greener cities, the images selected show that sustainability can affect many aspects of our lives.

But maybe the most interesting aspect of this series is the focus on people. Although many still associate sustainability with ‘nature’ and ‘the planet’, it is, in fact, all about people. From images of “humans coming together to connect with the Earth to survive” (image below) to images of human vulnerability to a rather amusing take on ‘environmental conversation’, people are at the center of this collection of images.

It is time that we shifted our focus from ‘nature’ to people. If you are interested in finding out more about this idea, here is a short article.

I remember when, a few years ago, I visited the Joan Miro museum in Barcelona. There were two large, wall-sized paintings that each consisted just of one single curved line painted in black on white paper. I remember looking at these simple paintings and being overcome by a very strong emotional sense. For me they were the most powerful paintings in the whole museum. To this day, I have no idea why two curved lines could have such a strong impact.

Joan Miro never called himself a surrealist. He experimented with surrealist techniques and had an interest in Dada but never aligned himself with any particular movement. Here I am interested in his landscapes. This blog has reviewed many different landscape styles – David Hockney, Eyvind Earle, Mary Mattingly and others. Miro provides yet another style. Inspired by his Catalan roots, Miro’s landscapes make us feel the harsh contrasts of the Spanish landscapes. The painting reproduced above makes us feel the dry, almost desert-like land against the blue sky. A solitary rooster and a few scattered objects – cartwheel, stones, ladder taking our eyes up into infinity, floating clouds – all evoke the hot dry summer in an agricultural landscape. They remind me that working the land and earning a living from it is not necessarily a romanticized, pastoral idyll but more likely hard work in a difficult environment.

The above painting presents three elements of any landscape – land, sky and a living form – and reduces them to their essence giving them a drama that may be more powerful than any landscape image that is truly representational. The floating object on the right seems to connect earth and sky. One could look at this painting for a long time, its strong colors and shapes create all sorts of emotions and lead us to reflect on questions such as ‘what is a landscape and how do we relate to it?’

In Landscape (The Hunter) – below – we see a softer and more active landscape. A hunter stands on the left (his beret and pipe easily visible). Along the bottom an animal of some sort – some have interpreted this as the spine of a sardine because of the word ‘sard’ on the right. The rest is an active landscape. We do not know exactly what is what and what is going on – only that there seems to be much going on. Here we have activity, life and work and a different feel of landscape from the stark, harsh landscapes featured above. The human is here part of a working landscape.

And finally a landscape of serenity. The sun is the only recognizable element in the landscape below yet the image with its white background and its few, scattered elements conveys a feeling of calm and serenity. This is a landscape where we can relax and a far cry from the harshness of the Catalan landscape with which we started.

Miro barely places any recognizable elements in his landscape paintings. Yet he takes us on a journey from one type of landscape to the next. He makes us realize that what is maybe most important when we encounter nature and the landscape is not what we see but rather what we feel.

“Our world should be called ‘Water’ not ‘Earth’” according to Spanish photographer Hector Garrido. Water is a fundamental source of life and our planet is made up largely of water – as is our own body. Yet water has, over the years, received relatively less attention than the land in the environmental world. We talk of a ‘land ethic’ whereas water is largely seen as a resource – comparable to other extractable resources such as oil or minerals. A lifelong ornithologist, naturalist and nature photographer, Garrido has experienced at first hand the importance of water to our whole existence. In his series of aerial photographs he discovers water as the tree of life (above) or as the circulatory system on which our continued health depends (below).

More recently, water has received more attention but, as land based creatures, I suppose that it is only ‘natural’ that we should tend to be more focused on the land than on our waters. I remember that as a young kid being brought up in a hot and dry Mediterranean country, intermittent water shortages were a fact of life. Being careful with how one uses water was part of our normal habits. In many places, this ‘respect’ for water has largely disappeared. Water is readily available or can be produced through desalination. Agriculture keeps diverting and consuming large amounts of water with significant amounts of waste.

Yet water shortages seem to be returning even in ‘developed’ countries. US States such as California have to fight with neighbouring States on which they depend for their water supply. Around the world, millions of people still have limited access to water and need to walk miles a day to their water sources. Droughts still account for many lives lost – human and non-human.

“Can nature create art” is another of Hector Garrido’s questions. Is the image above a nature photograph or a piece of abstract art? It is, of course, both. Nature has not created it as a piece of abstract art but we choose to re-interpret it in that fashion when we see dynamic expressiveness in the flow of shapes and color.

Water has the power to create drama. When toxic chemicals on the Ohio river caught fire, it was that unimaginable drama of ‘water on fire’ that finally brought home Rachel Carson’s pollution narrative. But today for most of us water is that prosaic liquid that flows out of our kitchen taps or a product packaged in plastic that we consume. It is neither an object of respect not of much interest except for those who don’t have enough of it.

Can we harness some of the visual drama that water has the potential to create to encourage a greater emotional connection with water? Hector Garrido’s work starts us on that path as did some of the work of David Maisel previously reviewed in this blog.

Today I came across this gallery in the small town of Cambria, on the central Californian coast. The gallery stocks a wonderful range of contemporary artists’ work among them the magical landscapes of Eyvind Earle. Ever since the David Hockney exhibit, the subject of a previous post, I have been on the lookout for interesting approaches to depicting the landscape and Earle’s work is certainly interesting.

A number of things struck me about Earle’s work. First, his background working for many years for Disney comes through in his work. Many of his works (depicted here as serigraphs) have an enchanting quality to them – as though one is entering the magic kingdom. Yet, in spite of this, his landscapes are inviting. They are not imbued either with fear or with sublime awe – making us admire the landscape while still creating a sense of distance, a sense that we do not belong there. These landscapes make us want to explore their magic.

Earle’s humanization of the landscape carries through in his depiction of patches of pastureland carved out of the rugged landscape as the mountains drop precipitously into the ocean at Big Sur (above). This omnipresent pasture and agricultural land is the reality of the central Californian coast and Earle does not shy away from it. He blends the rugged with the cultivated in a cohesive mix, maybe suggesting that it is yet possible for us to find that elusive harmonious relationship with the land – what today we fashionably call ‘sustainability’.

Landscapes that are more obviously created by Man are also celebrated (below).

A ploughed field ending in a eucalyptus plantation (below) probably comes close to a conservationist’s nightmare. Yet these are the realities of today’s landscapes. It is time that we looked forward to how we can harness and improve these landscapes while enjoying their magical quality. We should stop looking backwards and have conservationists trying to “restore” landscapes to match their own particular vision of ‘nature’ or attempting to return to a landscape as it was at some arbitrary point in the past.

What are ‘appropriate’ landscapes for the second half of the 21st century and beyond? I wonder. I suspect it much depends on who you ask.

Planning Drawings for "Over The River"

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are possibly the best known among those artists who work outside of the gallery in urban and rural environments. Many of their projects involve wrapping stuff in fabric – be it the Reichstag in Berlin, the Kunsthalle in Bern, a medieval tower in Spoleto, etc. Their latest project titled “Over The River” is a plan to suspend 5.9 miles of silvery fabric over the Arkansas River in Colorado. Nearing launch, the project has been thrown into some disarray by a the filing of a lawsuit to stop the project. A group named “Rags Over Arkansas River” (ROAR) claim that the project will cause significant environmental damage and that the Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed project was flawed.

This lawsuit crystallizes a conflict I have always felt about the idea of ‘land art’ or so-called ‘environmental art’ – is it art that calls our attention to environmental issues or is it vandalism – damaging the environment that it purports to be trying to protect. The answer is, as always, not straightforward. Christo and Jean-Claude care about the environment. They say of this project: “The artists bring to Over The River a documented and unwavering commitment to conservation and are dedicated to avoiding or minimizing all potential impacts related to noise, vegetation, air quality and water quality during the construction and removal phases, as well as during the two-week viewing period. In fact, the artists altered their artistic design, installation schedule and the viewing period to be sensitive to wildlife and the environment.” Supporters will quote this as evidence of their commitment. Cynics will compare this statement to almost identical statements made by large corporations involved in mining, drilling and other natural resource intensive industries.

For me, the questions here are different – What is this for? and What does it say about our relationship to the Land?

The project has significant local support primarily because “the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) projected that Over The River will bring a total of 416,000 visitors to the Arkansas River Valley, including 344,000 visitors during the two week exhibition period and 72,000 visitors during installation and removal combined.  The BLM also estimates that Over The River will generate more than $121 million in total economic output throughout Colorado.” In this context, what do projects such as this end up telling us about our relationship to the Land? Do they lead us to respect the land and our environment and feel a closer connection to it in some way – the purpose, I would argue, of any art that purports to label itself ‘environmental’? Or do they further embed the idea of the land as ‘exploitable product’ – now wrapped up nicely so that it becomes an ephemeral tourist attraction generating economic activity? And if it’s the latter, then are the temporary and relatively gentle environmental disturbances and uplifting sensations of works of art such as these not a better way of ‘exploiting the land’ than other alternatives?

For most of their work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have limited themselves to urban environments where there is little or no potential for environmental damage. However, when they venture on to rural or relatively “unspoilt” landscapes such as their work to surround islands in Biscayne Bay (below) and others, then this takes us into the ambiguous territory of land art. Here we run into the debate as to whether any form of environmental damage is reasonable for artists who claim to have an interest in protecting the environment. But then, which artist – whatever the medium and whether in the gallery or elsewhere – can create art without using resources and therefore, in some way, exploiting the natural environment?

David Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most important of contemporary artists; all the more so because, like that other contemporary great, Gerhardt Richter, he hasn’t been seduced into the ever increasingly ridiculous nonsense that goes under the rubric of contemporary ‘conceptual art’.  His latest exhibit at the Royal Academy in London is focused on one of the most traditional of subjects – the landscape.

Since its origins in Rome in the 17th century, landscape painting has both reflected and influenced Man’s relationship with the land. Since the romantic period, not much has changed in landscape painting. The landscape is romanticized and presented as a fetish object to be held in awe – a perspective that later paralleled the rise of the conversion of natural landscape to consumer product through the creation of national parks. Turner was possibly the only landscape painter to provide a different perspective – the landscape as atmosphere rather than object.

The romantic view of the landscape as fetish object continues to be carried through in contemporary nature photography of the type that populates the National Geographic magazine and other similar outlets. John Stezaker’s work comments on this view of nature.

In these days of concern with our environment and the preservation of natural spaces, a fair amount of contemporary art portrays Man as the invader and destroyer of a nature that would remain as this romantically beautiful object if only we would leave it alone.

It is in this context – and the context of landscape painting nowadays being largely seen as a spent art form – that Hockney’s work needs to be judged. And it emerges victorious.

After four centuries of landscape painting, one would have thought that there remains little to say. Yet Hockney manages to give us a totally different feel for the landscape in these images. Here the landscape is presented as a joyful motif. The bright colours (a kind of return to Fauvism – though not quite), the almost naif approach to some of the work, the general atmosphere that is created – all of these generate a sensation of fun and joy. Hockney draws no difference between so-called unspoilt landscape – or wilderness – and agricultural countryside. Both are to be celebrated. Hockney moves away from the trend to excluding any form of human influence from landscape representation – a trend that continues to perpetuate the fiction of a wilderness to be preserved untouched.

In these works the landscape is no longer that remote object to be fetishized and held in awe. Unlike so much of contemporary environmental art, guilt at being human and living our lives is no longer the emotion we are expected to feel when looking at the Hockney landscape. With these images we feel uplifted with sheer delight, enjoyment and a sense of fun – all Hockney trademarks represented with particular exuberance in this body of work. All of this creates a different and more positive human relationship with the landscape – one built on joie de vivre and which may lend itself better to building interest and support for addressing environmental questions.

One final point about this body of work. Some of the ‘paintings’ (including the two shown here) were created on an iPad – rapidly becoming one of Hockney’s favourite tools. In doing so, Hockney combines modern technology with his celebration of nature and the landscape – again a refreshing change from the dichotomous battle between nature and modern progress that is all too often set up by the environmental community.

Slide show of images of the exhibit

One review of the exhibit.

But, of course, not everyone likes this work.