Earthen Streams & Cracks that Run

The Land as Art~ Nina Kappel ~ Sweet Briar College

[oldbookillustrations]

Pfäfers monastery, Switzerland.

From Le tour du monde (Around the world), by Edouard Charton, Paris, 1860.

(Source: archive.org)

[oldbookillustrations]

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Besides a pumice isle in Baiæ’s Bay.

William Hyde, from Nature poems, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Toronto, 1912.

(Source: archive.org)

[onlythelanguageisevergreen]

Framing the view ~ Shenandoah National park

[studyclose]

oops! accidentally posted this on my other blog. . . 

[studyclose]

In Camera

you see 

the network of structure

of rivulet branches like veins on the shore

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 take water to tide, riverines in the sand

run like blood in the body, flow to where nature plans

rush from river to river, roots have anchored the lay

the land has been weathered to wend—that’s the way

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~     

 Now study close the network web

that’s woven through the weathered wend

of earthen streams and cracks that run

and riverines that gush with blood   

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

written in the Spring of 2013 by yours truly

photo also by me

[studyclose]

This image was shot from Loft Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. 

Cropped/edited in Lightroom 5; decisions were very similar to the flower pictures below. 

Flickr

[studyclose]

These are some pictures that went through a lot of cropping in lightroom 5. I decided that the most interesting thing to do with the pictures was to crop them down in order to accentuate the meandering pattern I was able to see. Another decision I had to make was whether or not to keep the color or make the photo black and white. I decided on B & W because I wanted the focus to be on the flowing nature of the flowers. 

Flickr

[studyclose]

Framing the View

The idea of ‘framing the view’ is something I’ve thought about before in terms of digital photography. Whenever I shoot a photo, I am making a decision as to what I want and don’t want to be included in the shot. This can go even further in the editing proces, where I have cropped many photos to my liking. One of the things I like to go for in some of my photos is a degree of movement or direction, so I might crop a photo to acentuate that. It’s hard for me to figure out how I know how to do this, besides having a naturally good eye for it, though I guess I can credit it to  practice as well as picking up tips from others.

  It’s interesting to think about nature and how it is viewed. Is it wrong to manipulate a photo so that only part of something is shown. But it’s something our eyes do anyway without pictures. For instance, one’s eyes naturally follow the lines of a river in a valley.

  Also, I believe that it is okay to study something closely—study part of a whole—just look at one part--because it is only in looking at many different components that we can hope to understand what they make up. 

[unhistorical]

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840)

Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape.

[studyclose]

Josh Fox

At the beginning of the semester, Josh Fox visited Sweet Briar to do his 'Ban on Fracking' presentation. I wish I still had my notes, because the whole thing really affected me. I'm glad we've got someone like Fox out there to bring attention to the issue--someone who isn't going to give up. He's very passionate, very intelligent, and very fair. He makes absolute sure that his facts are correct, because he knows he needs them in order for people to listen. 

My favorite part of the Q&A session at lunchtime before the big presentation was an analogy he used: which went something like this: we're not being invited to the conversation. They won't let any of us even sit at the table. And it's not enough just to squeeze in and try talking. You'll be ignored. Sometimes you have to get up and stand on the table.

But he's also aware that standing up like that isn't everyone's style. Not everyone can do that, or at least not do it affectively. Something Fox stressed was the idea that everyone has something they're good at, something that they love. And that it's important that we do that thing that we love, and that we share it with the world. 

[greengrinch-blog-blog]

We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

Andy Goldsworthy (via greengrinch)

I first watched the Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides in January or February of 2013, and I count it as a huge influence in the way I think about the world and about art. Something that really interested me from Goldsworthy was the idea of the rivers and veins of the earth. As I also had a new camera that semester, I began noticing this pattern all around me—in the branches of trees, the rivulets of water in the sand, the veins inside my body.

[vlphillips]

“My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.”

Andy Goldsworthy (via vlphillips)

I love Goldsworthy’s understanding of growth—that everything from the woods to the city is a part of nature, and that all of is continually growing and decaying in time. 

[studyclose]

Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.

Andy Goldsworthy

[studyclose]

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments.

Paul Cézanne

Landscape and Western Art; Chapter 6: ‘Astonished beyond Expresion’; by Malcolm Andrews

This passage brings up the issue of influence, which is something I think about a lot. I don’t think this guy has thought about it enough. Or maybe I just disagree with him. Personaly, I don’t think it’s impossible to free our minds from the work that has taught us what we know. I also don’t think that it’s a bad thing, especially because it helps alieve anxiety one might have about ‘being original’ which I think is a silly and pointless endeavor. Energy is better spend elsewhere.

[studyclose]

None the less artists devised various strategies for accentuating the Sublime. In one of the earliest and most disseminated pictures of Niagara, the engraving View of Niagara Falls, the rather stilted and tame ribbons of falling water and the splashes at their base are given emotional force by the gestures of the foreground figures.

Landscape and Western Art; Chapter 6: ‘Astonished beyond Expresion’; by Malcolm Andrews

[studyclose]

It is impossible by pen or pencil to convey even a faint idea of their magnificence. Painting is lifeless; and the most burning words of poetry have all been lavished upon inferior and ordinary subjects. We must have new combinations of language to describe the Falls of Niagara.

Thomas Moore

Landscape and Western Art; Chapter 6: ‘Astonished beyond Expresion’; by Malcolm Andrews

[studyclose]

I own I have not, as yet, anywhere met those grand and simple works of art that are to amaze one…but those of Nature have astonished me beyond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief. . . [it is] one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld!

Thomas Gray

 Landscape and Western Art; Chapter 6: 'Astonished beyond Expresion'; by Malcolm Andrews

[studyclose]

Perhaps the ‘original’ has in some respects never been other than a construction, a fabric of our perceptions determined by cultural conventions and changing human needs. To what extent does the formal framing of a view of the natural world—the window view of Romanticism as much as the framed, painted landscape—not just enhance but produce the sense that there is such a thing as unframed landscape? Is that sense of a real, wild landscape beyond the frame just as much an illusion as the framed, painted view of it?

 Landscape and Western Art; Chapter 5: Framing the view; by Malcolm Andrews