art in nature essay

nature in art

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The theme of nature in art has almost always been present whether in American art, Korean art, or art from any other culture. Sometimes its depiction can be literal or even abstract, narrowing it down to just colors of the natural world. Nature can be a simple add on to a painting to convey a sense of depth, or perspective. However, it can also be the main focus of a work of art. Just like nature can be recreated through art, it can also be used as a stand in for greater thought. A realistic depiction of a mountain for example can symbolize not only the sublime, but also curiosity for the unknown. Depictions of nature can also be about intellectual thought and spirituality. Art involving nature can be done simply to display the beauty of the natural world around us, to make scientific observations in an environment, or to open our minds to philosophical ideas about our own connection to nature and beyond. The philosopher Aristotle once wrote that "Art not only imitates nature, but it also completes its deficiencies." This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak.

Examining the Relationship Between Nature and Art

One of the most remarkable artists to ever live, Henry Matisse once said: “An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.”

For as long as there has been art, artists have been enthused by nature. Apart from providing endless inspiration, many of the mediums that artists use to create their masterpieces such as wood, charcoal, clay, graphite, and water are all products from nature. 

The artists of years gone by

Although  Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting  during his lifetime, he was in a league of his own. He had the ability to bring aspects of nature, such as simple flowers, to life in his paintings. One such a work of art, Irises, is particularly impressive with the life-force of the flowers being almost tangible. Monet is another of the world’s greatest artist who drew inspiration from nature. His series of paintings entitled Lilies is a beautiful showcase of shadows, light, and water and portray his garden in France. Monet’s flowers were one of the main focuses of his work for the latter 30 years of his life, perfectly illustrating what an immense  influence the natural beauty around us  can have on the imagination of an artist.  

Modern artists inspired by nature

Mary Iverson both lives and works in Seattle, Washington and draws inspiration from the immense natural beauty that surrounds her. Her remarkable paintings offer a rather  contemporary spin on traditional landscape art  portraying the great monuments and national parks of the USA. Mary’s greatest inspiration comes from the picturesque Port of Seattle, and the Rainer, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Mary’s work has been featured on the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine in 2015 and also appeared in Huffington Post,  The Boston Review and Foreign Policy Magazine . She also works closely with a number of galleries in Germany, Paris, Amsterdam and Los Angeles and teaches visual art at the Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon where she passionately shares her love for the natural world with her students.  

British artist draws lifelong inspiration from the natural world

British wildlife artist Jonathan Sainsbury is known for his astonishing ability to capture the fleeting moments of the natural world. Having spent most of his life observing and drawing his various subjects, Sainsbury has become a master at using watercolor and watercolor combined with charcoal to effortlessly evoke a feeling of movement in his artwork. Apart from capturing the very essence of countless natural scenes he also draws on nature in a metaphorical way to refer to our everyday lives. Jonathan’s work can be viewed at the Wykeham Gallery in Stockbridge, the Strathearn Gallery, and the Dunkeld Art Exhibition.

Despite the world becoming more technology-driven by the minute, there are very few things that can inspire artistic brilliance quite like nature does. From a single rose petal spiralling to the ground to a mighty fish eagle swooping in on its prey, the countless faces of Mother Nature will continue to mesmerize and provide inspiration for some of the most renowned works of art the world has ever seen.

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Artistic Representation of Nature Essay

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One of the main qualities of visual art is that it allows people to get in touch with the surrounding physical reality through the perceptual lenses of another person’s mind – hence, making it possible for the spectators to experience the sensation of aesthetic pleasure. The derived pleasure often proves particularly intense when the art piece in question is inspired by the works of nature, or when it is concerned with depicting the natural environment.

This simply could not be otherwise – nature has always served as an important source of creative inspiration for many generations of artists. The actual explanation for this has to do with the innermost essence of art, as the instrument for amplifying the pleasurable aspects of one’s ‘experience of being’. When exposed to the elements, most people naturally grow to feel aesthetically overwhelmed – especially when surrounded by some breathtaking scenery. In its turn, this triggers several artistic anxieties in them – hence, prompting the affected individuals to consider creating art, or to act ‘artfully’.

Nevertheless, even though nature does inspire artists more or less equally, how they channel their fascination with the natural environment vary rather substantially. The most logical explanation as to why this is being the case is that just about any nature-inspired work of art is reflective of the specifics of ‘mental wiring, on the part of its creator. What this means is that it is possible to experience the aesthetic thrill of observing ‘nature art’, and to gain certain insights into the innermost workings of the affiliated artist’s mentality. To substantiate the validity of this suggestion, I will discuss some nature-depicting paintings by Janaina Tschape and Katherine Del Barton.

Janaina Tschape is a German-born artist, who had spent her formative years in Brazil, and who now resides in New York. She is known for her willingness to experiment with the innovative artistic techniques, as well as for the prominent impressionist quality of many of her artworks. Tschape’s painting Winter stands out as a perfect example in this respect.

Even a glance at this artwork will reveal that by working on it, the artist was the least concerned with trying to ensure the lifelikeness of what is being depicted. Rather, she strived to provide the visualization of the whole range of her feelings, invoked by the snowy weather outside of the window. Partially, this explains a certain nebulosity of the author’s artistic representations of a cloudy sky, trees, water in the river, bridge, and some watery streaks on the window.

After all, it does take some time observing Tschape’s painting to realize that the cloud-like objects in the artwork’s upper part are indeed clouds and not the crowns of some trees, for example. This, however, is exactly what contributes towards strengthening the impression that the depicted objects are in a state of some elusive motion. The unmistakably ‘cold’ palette of the featured colors does its work helping to establish a proper perceptual mood in onlookers.

Tschape did not merely strive to ‘catch the moment’ while creating this painting, but also to present its discursive motifs being inseparable from her sense of individuality – hence, the earlier mentioned impressionist appearance of the analyzed art piece. In a certain sense, the artist’s personality is being objectified within the compositional elements of the painting, which implies that Winter is as much about the author herself, as it is about the portrayal of the snowy landscape in the distance. Essentially the same applies to Tschape’s other painting Clouds .

As we can see in it, the depicted clouds resemble the real ones only formally. However, while exposed to this painting, one is likely to experience the realistic sensation of standing under the cloudy sky. Just as it is the case with the earlier mentioned painting , Clouds presents viewers with the strongly personalized artistic account of nature – hence, the presence of bright yellow color amidst the otherwise ‘cold’ ones. In the painting, they codify the hidden ‘clusters of meaning’, which the audience members are expected to be able to ‘decipher’. It is namely while ‘deciphering’ the artwork’s implicit semiotics that viewers can experience the feeling of aesthetic excitement. This excitement will prove particularly intense in those individuals who know a thing or two about the theory of art.

In light of what has been said earlier, it will be appropriate to suggest that Tschape tends to use the images of nature in her works as the vehicles for promoting her own highly subjective understanding of what accounts for the effects of one’s exposure to the surrounding natural environment on the formation of his or her attitudes towards life. Thus, it will only be logical to assume that Tschape’s interrelationship with nature is marked by the artist’s unconscious tendency to think of nature’s expressions as such that serve the purpose of helping her become increasingly enlightened, as to what accounts for human life.

For Tschape, nature is much more of an abstract idea of some omnipresent potency than merely the object of one’s aesthetic admiration. This provides us with a rationale to suggest that both paintings reflect the aesthetic workings of Tschape’s ‘Faustian’ psyche – the artist regards nature to be the actual key to discovering the innate principles of how the universe operates, even without being aware of it consciously. Therefore, there is nothing too odd about the apparent whimsicalness of the artist’s style – it is yet another indication of Tschape’s innate predisposition towards trying to achieve some sort of intellectual enlightenment by the mean of subjecting the surrounding nature to her emotionally driven aesthetic inquiry.

The artworks of Del Kathryn Barton (an Australian artist, who lives in Sydney) are concerned with the deployment of the entirely different methodological approach to depicting nature, as compared to that of Tschape. The most notable difference in this regard is that whereas the works of the latter connote ‘motion’, Barton’s paintings are best described as ‘motionless’, in the representational sense of this word.

Partially, this can be explained by the reference being made to the technical details of how Barton’s artistic masterpieces come into being, “Her (Barton’s) paintings show an obsession with meticulous mark-making; from minuscule dotting to veins on leaves and strands of hair. Being that the production process for her larger paintings is extremely labor-intensive”. To exemplify that this is indeed the case, we can refer to the artist’s painting Animals , as seen below.

What immediately comes into one’s eye, regarding the subtleties of Barton’s artistic style, is that they are strongly ornamental. That is, the author made a deliberate point of using bright colors to increase the anthropomorphic appeal of the depicted animals – the aesthetic technique commonly used by the Aboriginal people in Australia. The impression that Barton’s artwork was indeed inspired by the legacy of Aboriginal art is strengthened even further by the visual and thematic idealization of nature, achieved through the application of the tiny bits of paint to the canvas throughout its entirety.

Given the sheer amount of time, required to create artworks like Animals , the discussed painting cannot be deemed quite as spontaneous and ‘moody’, as it is the case with Tschape’s Winter and Clouds . At the same time, however, there are a few similarities between the aesthetic strategies of both artists. The most distinctive of them is that, just as it appears to be the case with Tschape, Barton tends to treat the emanations of nature as being highly symbolical and allegorical. The artist’s painting Birds can be considered as yet another proof in this regard.

That is, nature for Barton is more of an abstract idea than something that can be experienced and enjoyed as a ‘thing in itself’. While observing Barton’s art, people are also required to solve a mental puzzle as to what accounts for the proper approach to interpreting this art’s symbolical denotations. Thanks to the artist, there is nothing too challenging about the task. The pale coloring of human hands (one of the compositional elements in both Barton’s paintings), as well as how they are portrayed, implies that Barton uses her art as a medium for channeling the message of environmental friendliness to people. According to this message, people must aspire to live in perfect harmony with nature.

There is, however, even more to it. As it can be confirmed regarding the mentioned paintings by Barton, just about every depicted object in them is shown visually interlocking with the rest, which results in increasing the measure of both paintings’ holistic integrity. This specific effect is brought about by the fact that, despite the elaborative detailing of each component in Barton’s paintings, all of the featured elements (including the tiniest ones) are perceived as the integral parts of a whole.

Therefore, there is nothing accidental about the presence of Aboriginal motifs in Barton’s artworks – the specifics of the artist’s conceptualization of nature correlates well with the provisions of Non-Western ‘perceptual holism’, which stands in opposition to the Western (object-oriented) outlook on the natural environment and one’s place in it.

Thus, there is indeed a good reason to believe that the significance of a particular artistic representation of nature should be discussed in conjunction with what accounts for the affiliated artist’s psycho-cognitive predispositions, which define the qualitative aspects of this person’s aesthetic stance. This concluding remark is fully consistent with the paper’s initial thesis. There can be no ‘pure art’ – just about every form of artistic expression is symptomatic of its originator’s psychological predilection – just as it was implied in the paper’s introductory part.

One of this conclusion’s possible implications is that, as time goes on, the positivist theories of art, based on the assumption that there are universally recognized ‘canons’ in the artistic domain, will continue to fall out of favor with more and more people. The dialectical laws of history predetermine such an eventual development.

Bibliography

Chakravarty, Ambar. “The Neural Circuitry of Visual Artistic Production and Appreciation: A Proposition.” Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology 15, no. 2 (2012): 71-75.

Currie, Gregory. “Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art’s Definition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 235-241.

Davey, E. R. “‘Soft Framing’: A Comparative Aesthetics of Painting and Photography.” Journal of European Studies 30, no. 118 (2000): 133-155.

De Lorenzo, Catherine. “The Hang and Art History.” Journal of Art Historiography no. 13 (2015): 1-17.

Galenson, David. “The Life Cycles of Modern Artists: Theory and Implications.” Historical Methods 37, no. 3 (2004): 123-136.

Hawkins, Celeste. “ Del Kathryn Barton. ” The Art and the Curious , 2015. Web.

Leslie, Donna. “Seeing the Natural World Art & Reconciliation.” Art Monthly Australia no. 258 (2013): 30-33.

McClelland, Kenneth. “John Dewey: Aesthetic Experience and Artful Conduct Education and Culture.” Education and Culture 21, no. 2 (2005): 44-62.

Murphy, Margueritte. “Pure Art, Pure Desire: Changing Definitions of l’Art Pour l’Art from Kant to Gautier.” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (2008): 147-160.

Pearse, Emma. “Janaina Tschape.” ARTnews 104, no. 9 (2005): 184-185.

Tekiner, Deniz. “Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning.” Social Justice 33, no. 2 (2006): 31-44.

Thomas, Daniel. “Aboriginal Art: Who Was Interested?” Journal of Art Historiography no. 4 (2011): 1-10.

Vasilenko, Ivan. “Dialogue of Cultures, Dialogue of Civilizations.” Russian Social Science Review 41, no. 2 (2000): 5-22.

Wilson, Henry. “Pleasure Palettes.” World of Interiors 30, no. 1 (2010): 58-67.

Young, Michael. “Del Kathryn Barton: Disco Darling.” Art and AsiaPacific no. 96 (2015): 68-69.

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IvyPanda. (2020, November 5). Artistic Representation of Nature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artistic-representation-of-nature/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Artistic Representation of Nature." November 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artistic-representation-of-nature/.

1. IvyPanda . "Artistic Representation of Nature." November 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artistic-representation-of-nature/.

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JustynZolli-Visual Artist.com

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Essay: Understanding Art Through Nature

Justyn zolli, much of my work in the visual arts is centered on understanding and creating compositions derived from the exploration of patterns and organizing dynamics in landscape, to better explore the themes of change and transformation in the world and in us., “nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. she hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.” -ralph waldo emerson, ‘history’ essays, what attracts me to this study is the way in which differing forces are reconciled, and how fixed and seemingly static states succeed in incorporating differences in endless variety, using only a simple set of rules and dynamics.  i am fascinated by how natural systems can adapt and rearrange their own structures to account for new forces and thereby establish new orders.  patterning is the mechanism for how new orders can grow out of older orders, but can also incorporate them into the new paradigm.  it seems evident to me that this is the exact process by which culture itself is created. patterns in nature become formed or revealed by instabilities introduced by external forces to a system of relative equilibrium or symmetry. this area of study is called ‘phase transitions’ in the modern science of thermodynamics.  it includes the study of various patterns that arise in matter or energy in an attempt to reconcile opposing forces: they include vortices, branching, fracturing, crackling, cellular, concentra, ripple, contornare, polygonal, nubilous, phyllotaxy, labyrinthine, vermiculate, fractal, etc… while this field is being explored in thermodynamic science, only a few older civilizations ever sought to extol these patterns within the visual arts. the ancient chinese landscape painters of the taoist lineages are a notable example.  the old chinese sages used the term ‘ li ’ which meant ‘natural principle’.  li eventually became a standard study for ink painters and scholar-artists, arguably reaching its highest expression with the mountain landscape painters of the sung dynasty in the 11 th and 12 th centuries., “speaking of painting in its finest essentials, one must read widely in the documents and histories, ascend mountains, and trace rivers to their source, and only then can one create one’s idea’s.” – k’un-ts’an,, (zen painter 14th century), for many years now i have been studying these processes as the requisite research to developing a personal approach to abstract painting and organic design. to that end, i have been studying these principles by direct observation and primary experience. this has led me to travel and study the land in vast, remote wilderness preserves and national parks throughout north america.  such wilderness ecosystems have included old-growth forests, tide-pools, alpine mountaintops, wetlands, high and low deserts, salt flats, cliff erosions, dry plains, canyons, underground cavern complexes, coastal ranges, and volcanic formations, among others.  i have also collected and published my analysis into several volumes of photography, which describe sets of visual correspondences in natural forms across differing ecosystems.  in a sense therefore, all my work is ‘earth-centered’ and ecology-inspired, be it in the synthetic art of painting, the analytic art of photography, or in the application of organic design.  my concern artistically is of approaching the subject of landscape as dynamic and abstract, yet the underlying idea has always been broadly one of transformation, transmutation, and change from one state of being into another., “the equilibrium phase transition, like the abrupt transitions that characterize much of pattern formation are spontaneous, global, and often symmetry breaking changes of state that happen when a threshold is broken.”- philip ball  (the self made tapestry), the transformation from one state to another is the basis of all such ‘alchemy’, and change itself is really the only universal constant. all matter on our beautiful earth once existed inside the fiery belly of some distant star.  so creation is not really a matter of purity versus impurity, as those old alchemists thought. more simply, it is a change in the organizing systems.  in this way, the universe creates itself.  the more this is grasped, the more interconnection we will feel with great nature.  this interconnection is one that every age must rediscover for itself in its own language.  every generation of poets and artists must sing these songs anew., “i believe now there is no school worth its existence except as it’s a form of nature study — true nature study — dedicated to that first, foremost, and all the time. man is a phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he really matter…”, -frank lloyd wright. (education and art on behalf of life), so what are the implications of such a message what is the point of researching nature and then pictorially describing the phase transitions of one elegant pattern engaging another in space the purpose is to convey and speak eloquently of the change we are all a part of, and then attempt to convey it in humanistic and poetic terms through the visual arts.  the message for this civilization is that we are still evolving , still in a change-state, as is all of nature. furthermore, this transition is intrinsic and interconnected to our very being., we are an expression of great nature. i believe art can be a noble means of reminding us of this understanding.  a reconnection with this knowledge is urgent in our current age. our ecological ignorance is threatening our collective future on this planet.  by using the poetic language of art to speak to others of the dynamic forces in nature, i am attempting to remind them of their own deep but perhaps unaware connection. in an age of global warming, floating garbage islands, and undersea oil geysers, we need to become aware of our relationship to our living planet in more conscious way, and i believe art to be a very powerful vehicle for this message., [justyn zolli, 2010].

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Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment Art & Environment

Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Joy Sleeman

Introducing the group of articles devoted to the theme of ‘Art & Environment’ in  Tate Papers  no.17, this essay reflects on changing perceptions of the term ‘environment’ in relation to artistic practices and describes the context for a series of case studies of sites, spaces and processes that extend from the immediate locality to the most remote boundaries of knowledge and experience.

Changing environments

Sites revisited, research in practice.

The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers  no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world.

Held at a time when the emergent effects of economic crisis were intersecting with a more established sense of ecological crisis, the conference offered an opportunity to rethink the relations between art and environment, which had become central to a number of art exhibitions and publications. These included in 2009 Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery and Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, both in London. 1 Conference contributors took the opportunity to reframe relations between art and environment critically and creatively, with a broad historical and geographical perspective that considered artworks from the eighteenth century to the present.

The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was organised by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment programme. This is one of a set of AHRC thematic programmes supporting research fields of wide cultural and public value as well as academic scholarship and creative practice. The AHRC is distinctive internationally in supporting various forms of practice as well as scholarship – including curating and conserving artworks and archives as well as creating work of all kinds – and funds projects at museums, galleries and libraries, as well as higher education institutions, often in collaborative partnership with each other. One of the programme’s major projects was hosted at Tate Britain, ‘The Sublime Object’, a project that produced a series of its own conference findings published in  issues 13 and 14 of  Tate Papers.

The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was intended to be exploratory and to further research on art and environment in terms of methods and perspectives as well as subject matter, and in terms of research process and practice as well as product and outcomes. Contributors explored the changing meaning of ‘environment’ in art practice and the different ways it was encountered. They addressed, and some themselves undertook, different kinds of journeying, both epic and eccentric, which confronted and crossed various kinds of boundary, physical and symbolic, material and immaterial. The journeys represented in the conference talks were historical as well as geographical, travels through time as well as space, many reflecting on issues of environmental decline and degradation, some journeys through ruins. They intersected with longstanding journeying traditions of landscape art and aesthetics, encountering romantic and picturesque ruins and speculating on the wider processes of social and environmental transformation, from the ruins of empire to the regeneration of nature. Here were travels through the real and imagined worlds of the recent past and the longest imaginable time, both close to home and to the very ends of the earth. 

The journeys, undertaken by both artists and historians, were sometimes to make new work, or conducted in the spirit of re-enactment or pilgrimage, and sometimes as research trips to distant or familiar locations. Some were made to places associated with the early phase of land art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and such re-visitations inevitably prompt reflection on the contrast between the environment as it was perceived then and as it appears now, and indeed on altered perceptions of the term ‘environment’ itself in the discourses of art and nature. The artist Nancy Holt, describing in 1977 the landscape of the Utah border in which a year earlier she had made her Sun Tunnels , could speak of ‘walking on earth that has surely never been walked on before evokes a sense of being on this planet, rotating in space, in universal time’. 2 But was it ever such a tabula rasa ? Away to the east, on the other side of the Great Salt Lake, Holt’s late husband Robert Smithson had located his Spiral Jetty near an abandoned jetty built for oil drilling. He had always been interested in spaces depleted by industry: now there is talk of renewed oil extraction in the area.

In 1970, when Smithson extended his jetty into the shallow margins of the lake, the human environment seemed to be expanding rapidly, pushing beyond the limits of the earth, appropriating the moon. And in art discourse, too, ‘environment’ seemed a vastly expansive term, informed by a comparable frontier spirit, capable of embracing a multiplicity of interventions, both gallery-based and in wide open spaces. In London, the term figured in the title of an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, Environments Reversal , in 1969. Conceived to mark the opening of a new garden at the centre, its curator aimed to present ‘a situation in which art of an indoor nature will be in the garden and art of an outdoor character in the gallery’. 3 The film David Lamelas made for the occasion, A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space , begins with an analysis of the gallery space itself before spiralling outwards through ever widening physical, social and geographical environments until it ends by implication in outer space, with a series of interviews with passers-by on the most compelling topic in the news of the day, the Apollo mission and the landing of the first men on the moon. 4

The term ‘environments’ was used again in the plural in relation to another of the ubiquitous words of the era, ‘happenings’, in the title of an often-overlooked survey by the Liverpool poet and painter Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings , published in 1974. In a chapter on ‘landscape and environment’ Henri offered a decidedly European framing for a phenomenon that was more usually seen as American; it opens with a quotation from the French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) proposing impromptu performances in the countryside and ends with an image of grazing cows in an urban plaza in the Netherlands. He writes that if ‘the major works of the new earth art are American … Holland seems to be a natural home for environmental art’. The new forms of art are an appropriate response to a landscape entirely transformed by man, and the chapter concludes with reflections on the implication for landscapes more familiar to him:

Correcting this section of the book on a train going through industrial South Wales, I was struck by the extent to which artists tend to condition our vision of the world. In precisely the way that Cézanne, Monet or Turner have altered our view of particular kinds of landscape, it is now impossible to see the randomly formed slag heaps, piled-up sacks in bright polythene, heaped slabs of rusting metal, the sudden ivy-shrouded chimney of a disused factory, bulldozed paths of a new motorway through a landscape, without being reminded of the work of Oppenheim, Heizer or Morris. 5

In this environment artistic interventions generate an awareness of the concurrent processes of ruination and productive activity.

Smithson himself had visited England in 1969 and made a number of works during his stay, including a piece in a chalk quarry near Oxted in Surrey, near the route of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. 6  Smithson’s own works would soon become the object of pilgrimage, both those he actually made and unrealised projects. The sculptor Roelof Louw, an important figure in early manifestations of conceptual art in Britain, wrote an essay in which he invited his readers to join him on an imagined journey to the site of such an unrealised work, described in terms of both re-enactment and pilgrimage:

Smithson’s site works, it might be said, bind a style of physical action to geological circumstances. What then happens? Consider how the journey directed by Smithson’s proposed project for Sprawling Mounds might operate. (While this massive labyrinth for strip mine tailings is unrealized, it might readily be re-enacted as an experience by visiting strip mines tailings and by wandering through mine dumps) … The decision to travel to the site of this project is like setting out on an extraordinary pilgrimage to a wasteland … Shortly the enormous white mounds come into sight. Their eroded, misshapen surfaces of whitish rubble and gravel affront one; they loom ahead like an abominable mess. 7

Louw brings out a disturbing sense of dereliction and physical and moral collapse in the journey towards this entropic site, ‘a place where social values have fallen into disorder, where wealth has turned into waste’. In 1969, Barbara Reise, writing in the British-based journal Studio International , commented that ‘Smithson’s “non-sites” of photographs and material extractions from real-life rock quarries are consistently less interesting than rock quarries themselves’, a remark that seems to anticipate the artist’s imminent shift to making outdoor works on a large scale. 8 These included Broken Circle and Spiral Hill , constructed in 1971 in a sand quarry near Emmen in the Netherlands, Henri’s ‘natural home for environmental art’. Wasteland is transformed into monument, just as John Latham would re-designate mid-Lothian’s unsightly shale bings as monumental process sculptures later in the decade.

Given the apparently redemptive character of such projects, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the challenge to critical conventions presented by new forms of landscape art in the late 1960s and 1970s began to give way to narrower, more affirmative interpretations. In the 1980s they were more often seen as deeply felt expressions of human relationships with nature, with the term environment coming to refer almost exclusively to nature or the natural environment. In this context, certainly in Anglo-American publications, land art and earthworks were considered within more closely focused landscape terms, and the history and origin of these works as ‘quintessentially’, if not exclusively, American. This is the case even in the most explicit ‘environmental’ anthology, Alan Sonfist’s Art in the Land (1983). 9 In his introduction, Sonfist identifies his concern as with ‘a group of artists whose work makes a statement about man’s relation to nature’. 10 Elsewhere in the volume, however, Kenneth S. Friedman cautions against taking too narrow a definition of environment: ‘given that human beings and their culture are in the largest scale of description simply a form of life moving about and acting on the surface of the planet, the drilling of an oil company is as much part of the “environment” as a tree’. 11 There is ambivalence here about how environmental art should be understood: as a category of recent landscape art, predominantly American, with a concern for nature, or an all-embracing approach to art’s relationship with the environment that makes the latter term sound a lot closer to ‘ecological’. Indeed, there has been an increasing tendency to subsume environmental art under the banner of ecology, particularly apparent in a number of exhibitions. 12 In this way, the land art of the late 1960s and 1970s has come to be seen as a proto-ecological art form.

A recurring aspect of the research highlighted in this issue has been the revisiting of sites associated with earlier manifestations of art in the environment. Some of the changing possibilities and readings of environmental art as outlined above are brought out by Craig Richardson’s paper on John Latham ’s proposals in the mid-1970s intended to transform perceptions of the huge heaps of industrial waste that dominated (and disfigured, according to some viewpoints) the environment of mid-Lothian. But this project to re-conceptualise places of industrial dereliction as ‘process art’ on a monumental scale has itself become the object of a necessary exercise in historical recovery, and it is the more recent recognition that the shale ‘bings’ are sites of exceptional biodiversity that has proved more effective in securing their cultural value.

A longer historical perspective is provided by the papers of Richard Wrigley and Geoff Quilley . Wrigley considers the Roman campagna as a landscape with a special place in the history of art, since it was regarded as the cradle of idealised landscape painting, and associated with the origins of a pastoral tradition in poetry. Later artists, writers and tourists arrived in Rome’s hinterland with certain expectations, with mental pictures already formed of a noble landscape dotted with ruins, richly suggestive in moral lessons. But what they found was a terrain ruinous in more ways than one, a noxious landscape, inimical to health, and this led to speculation as to the historical causes of decline, and reflections on the failures of custodianship which had resulted in such a waste.

Geoff Quilley considers British naval artists’ representations of Tahiti in the mid-nineteenth century as re-enactments of the first views of the island by William Hodges and other artists on Thomas Cook’s voyages of exploration some sixty years earlier. Those early views had projected the formal terms of the idealising classical tradition on to completely unfamiliar terrain, and the later artists consciously reiterate those conventions. The ideological significance of such re-enactments lies in the recovery of a time when Tahiti was first imagined as a British possession, although the political reality was that it had recently been annexed as a French colony.

Re-enactment of a different kind, though no less ideologically loaded, is the key to Cai Guo-Qiang’s practice, as explored by Ben Tufnell . Cai’s photographic series The Century with Mushroom Clouds 1996 involved the artist visiting various significant sites in America, including those of canonical works of land art from its first heroic phase (including Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative 1969–70), but also the former nuclear test site in the Nevada desert, a landscape more sinister and toxic even than the malign, exhausted Roman campagna , though in its way now also a tourist destination. Cai detonated small hand-held explosive devices at these locations, documenting them in photographs. These actions are absurdly small-scale, playful and transient in the context of such monumental and symbolically resonant sites, yet also provocative and not without their own symbolic charge. With his interventions in places where works of radical art were once created on an epic scale, or which are associated with some of the most traumatic memories of the twentieth century, Cai is revisiting, and re-thinking, past human actions which were designed to reshape the environment itself.

An English landscaped park might seem to be a context at the very opposite end of the environmental spectrum to the mythic spaces of the Nevada desert, but the idea of revisiting the past is still the key to another project, Andy Goldsworthy’s interventions in the grounds of Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, since 1977 the location of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. As Helen Pheby demonstrates, Goldsworthy’s revisiting can be understood in a double sense: the making of new permanent outdoor works in order to engage critically with a particular landscape history of enclosure and exclusion, and the return to his own beginnings as an artist working with natural materials in the open air. Goldsworthy’s ambitious 2007 project at Bretton was in part staged ‘in celebration of the journey taken by both artist and organisation’, but it was also designed to counter and complicate the perception of his reputation as a second-wave land artist with a decorative sensibility and an easy popular appeal. 13

Nicholas Alfrey also goes back in his paper to an early piece of land art, Richard Long ’s A Ten Mile Walk England , made on Exmoor in the winter of 1968, in order to look again at the implications of this kind of environmental practice: an outdoor sculpture on an unprecedented scale but with no physical trace. This is to offer a corrective to the established view that such a work should be understood as an abstract gesture laid down in an empty space. But the terrain itself was already shaped by historical forces, and was far from being empty: it is a landscape of enterprise, improvement and enclosure, one in which boundaries matter as much as open ground. Long was adding one more layer to a space dense in association.

Projects by contemporary practitioners were also presented at the conference. Lara Almarcegui and Heather and Ivan Morrison participated in the Barbican’s Radical Nature exhibition and, like the other artists in that show, their work is instrumental in character, designed to promote awareness of the relationship between nature and the urban environment and often involves community participation and affirmative action. Almarcegui has campaigned to preserve empty lots from development and improvement, resisting the strategies of planners in order to let ‘natural processes of decay, transition and entropy’ take their course. In designating empty spaces and wastelands as artworks her tactics are reminiscent of those of John Latham, but she works within an ecological agenda, seeking to bring about the greening of urban space:

Wastelands are important as places of possibility, because one can only feel free in this type of land, forgotten by town planners. I imagine that, in a few years’ time, those wastelands that were protected by my projects will be the only empty spots within built areas. 14

The Morrisons are interested in utopian communities, sustainable materials, gardening, the construction of alternative modes of dwelling. For several years they managed an allotment in Birmingham as a performative work of art, and have since created an arboretum in ancient woodland by the Mawddach Estuary where they now live.

In contrast, Katie Paterson and Simon Faithfull make work that tests the very limits of the sphere of human activity and knowledge, and their conception of the environment as a vastly expanded field is made possible by new developments in technology and radical advances in scientific thinking and method. At the same time, the way in which their work is actually realised retains a keen sense of physical constraints and material conditions; they set themselves wilfully difficult tasks, and resolve them in ingenious, laborious, sometimes eccentric ways. Paterson describes her practice as:

cross-medium and multi-disciplinary, often exploring landscape, space and time, using technology to bring together the commonplace and the cosmic. Everyday technologies – phones, record players, radio – connecting with something vaster, more intangible: telephone calls to melting glaciers, maps of all the dead stars, streetlights which flicker in time with lightning storms, music reflected from the moon. 15

Two such projects operate at the extreme opposite ends of scale, one making use of new techniques in astronomy to look back to the ‘dark ages’ when the universe had only just begun to form, the other using nanotechnology to reduce a grain of sand from the Sahara Desert to its minutest form.

History of Darkness is an open-ended project made possible by her encounter with the astronomer Richard Ellis, who invited her to accompany him on a research visit to the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii where he was studying the ‘cosmic dawn’, looking directly at galaxies twelve billion years back in time, before the earth came into existence. ‘I discovered that his project was looking for the very first stars and galaxies to have evolved in the universe’ Paterson remarked. ‘Astronomers have now developed remarkable techniques to enable them to look back to almost 5% after the Big Bang. He told me of a period, the “Dark Ages”, shortly after the Big Bang, when the stars were beginning to alight’. 16 The first work Paterson made in response to this vertiginous new awareness was Ancient Darkness TV 2009, ‘a one minute broadcast on television in New York, transmitted at midnight, of the furthest away darkness. People could tune in and see nothing but a black screen, but they would know this darkness was from a very ancient time’. 17 The History of Darkness followed from this (fig.1). She describes it as:

a slide archive of darkness from throughout the Universe. It shows different pieces of darkness from multiple times and places – some are one thousand light years away, some are one million. A life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times and places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image is accompanied by a handwritten record with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity. 18

Fig.1 Katie Paterson History of Darkness 2010 Black and white photograph, de-bossed mounts Installation view Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2011 Photograph © Ingleby Gallery

The work is ambitious and understated at the same time, a thought-provoking conjunction of the sublime subject, innovative technology, handwritten record, the inscrutable elegance of the image, and sheer visual repetitiveness. It seems to allude to the history of minimal art as well as the history of the universe, and compels reflection on the impossibility of ever achieving full knowledge, or of finding a way of recording what is known. ‘I think that there is never a way to represent, see or know all the darkness in the universe’, she remarks, ‘so it is a kind of infinite journey, and a futile one, to try to capture it on a human scale’. 19

Paterson has described the speculative talk among the scientists at the observatory, as deep time appeared right there in front of them on the screen, and discussion of origins inevitably turns to that of a possible end. She heard them speak of ‘the Big Rip’, when all matter, from stars and galaxies to atoms, will be torn apart by the expansion of the universe. But what kind of art practice could hope to deal with such an incomprehensible domain? For her piece Inside this Desert Lies the Tiniest Grain of Sand 2010 she turned away from cosmic space to work at micro-scale:

I created a grain of sand on the nano-scale: that is, 0.00005 mm across, completely invisible.  I took a grain from the Sahara Desert, then had it chiselled down using special techniques in nano-technology, to become almost nothing, but yet still a grain of sand. It was an invisible sculpture, but yet still present in time and space. 20

She then returned it to the Sahara, and buried it among the desert sands, and later posted 500 postcards announcing ‘this small event’ to friends, family and random recipients. The work, therefore, combines a challenging concept, elaborate technologies, the play of metaphors, and a real (that is, complicated, arduous and expensive) journey to the Sahara, as well as the use of old-fashioned infrastructures such as the postal service.

Simon Faithfull’s work evinces a fascination with the surface of the globe, across which he traces symbolic lines and figures, and with the wilful colliding of grand, abstract ideas with awkward physicality or quotidian expressive vehicles. His projects have involved programmes of action that follow a relentless logic to some ultimately absurd end, documented in films in which the camera scrupulously records real-time events, and which on occasion are projected as illustrations to performances in which the artist takes on the guise of an explorer or geographical society lecturer.

Escape Vehicle No.6 2004 charts the upwards journey of a weather balloon from which has been suspended what appears to be an ordinary domestic chair, the progress of which is recorded by a camera attached to the balloon itself. The chair ascends quickly to the point where the curve of the earth and black space beyond are visible. In the artist’s own words: ‘You can just about make out this thin blue line at the edge of the planet that quickly fades to black. This is the space that we normally occupy. We’ve reached about 30 kilometres high now and already we are beginning to leave the atmosphere’. 21 Thirty kilometres, he goes on to point out, is not that far, hardly a day’s walk. But at this height there is only a faint atmosphere and the temperature is minus sixty degrees, and the shortness of this journey reminds us of the relative thinness of our protective layer of air, and the fragility of our position in space. An empty chair in nineteenth-century pictorial symbolism stood in for the human figure, dead or absent, which habitually occupied it, and is here a further symbol of our vulnerability.

0.00°  Navigation  is another video piece in which the protagonist, the artist himself, follows an invisible but symbolically significant line, the Greenwich Meridian, from the point where it cuts the southern English coast at Peacehaven, across country, through villages, towns, then London and eventually via a caravan park near Cleethorpes, into the North Sea and presumably on to the North Pole (fig.2). The artist has described the appeal of this imaginary line, an entirely hypothetical construction:

A line built by Britain out of naval power and world domination but one that until recently was completely invisible. With the advent of GPS, however, you can now trace or feel it as its slices through the landscape … I was imagining myself as a kind of ghost following another phantom – a ghost-line. A very insignificant, unnoticed ghost following a much more powerful spook. 22

Fig.2 Simon Faithfull 0. 00° Navigation 2009 Video 55 min © Simon Faithfull

The figure’s progress is, of course, richly comical, as he scales the emblematic white cliffs, goes through the garden of a bungalow, exits via a kitchen window, scrambles through brambles, scales fences, clambers over rooftops, goes through schools and garages, crosses a golf course, lakes and ditches. The banal, suburban landscapes of England  are contrasted with ‘this epic line created by empire, this grid slung around the planet by imperial power’. 23 There is an obvious allusion to the practice of Richard Long, and it might be taken as a parody of a work such as A Ten Mile Walk England across Exmoor – open moorland replaced by cluttered and commonplace spaces – were it not for the realisation that Long, too, had to commit himself to reckless trespass, and that there was a playful and provocative aspect to early British land art which has tended to be forgotten in later readings of that movement as environmentally affirmative and respectable.

The deadpan quality of  0.00°  Navigation  also alludes to the films of comic actor Buster Keaton. Faithfull has described it as ‘a kind of homage to Rail Rodder , a film that Keaton made right at the end of his life. In it Keaton swims out of the Atlantic on the east coast of America, accidentally traverses the complete landmass of Canada on a small railway buggy, and finally goes back into the water at the Pacific coast’. 24 Journeys from one coast to another are also a staple of the repertoire of British walking artists such as Long and Hamish Fulton , but the reference here to film, comedy and popular culture introduces an element of unpredictability and hybridity into Faithfull’s environmental practice.

Jem Southam has established a strong reputation as a photographer of landscape since the publication of his first collection in the 1980s. His work is mostly organised in series, often open-ended, in which he records changes, both natural and man-made, in particular locations over considerable periods of time. He is interested in the narratives that run through any given environment, narratives that can be historical, as in his first publication The Floating Harbour : A Landscape History of Bristol City Docks , or geological, as in his studies of coastal erosion, cliff falls and sand bars. 25 Sometimes the focus is on the activities of a small group of individuals, such as the well-meaning but misguided attempts of local ‘improvers’ to ameliorate a former industrial site in the Devon village of Upton Pyne, and sometimes on the larger ravages of industry, as in Red River and his work on the Cumbrian coast, where the rocky shoreline has been turned into solid metal as a result of molten slag being tipped there from the nearby steelworks. 26

Southam favours a very large format analogue camera, in essence equipment comparable to that used by earlier photographers, which at first sight seems to make his work an extension of a long tradition of topographical or documentary image-making. On the face of it, aspects of his method and vision appear to have something in common with the work of filmmaker Patrick Keiller: the same dedication to cumbersome equipment and a willingness to accept the constraints that this imposes, the same preference for working alone in the field, the same intense scrutiny turned on the landscape, with each carefully framed shot loaded with inexhaustible detail. Both have a respect for a certain kind of rigorous pictorialism, and a wariness towards the Picturesque. Both believe that much of the meaning of the world can be apprehended through the way it looks, and that looking is a mode of critical analysis that can reveal far more than what lies on the surface. Both are aware of the politics of landscape, and the stories that are threaded through it.

Yet there are connections in Southam’s work with some of the other artists who have been the subject of enquiry in this programme. There is his strong feeling for the sculptural, for example, so that the forms of dewponds or rockfalls can come to seem like the work of anonymous sculptors, even as a kind of land art. There is an unexpected affinity, too, with Paterson’s History of Darkness , for all that he is working with a traditional medium and that her interests are in conceptual art, performance and installation: a certain quality of melancholy, and an awareness of how limited our knowledge is, how difficult it is to be sure of anything.

This uncertainty comes across in his discussion of his most recent project, to photograph the River Exe and its tributary system. It begins with a simple question: what is a river? Southam had made rivers his subject before, but the origins of this new project are unexpected: a conversation about an experiment to throw light on the neurological development of children between the ages of five and eleven by asking them to make a drawing of a river (fig.3). He describes how he tried this experiment himself, and persuaded around ten local children aged between about seven and twelve to ‘draw a river’:

It was a very small sample but the results were fascinating. Most of the drawings showed a small river flowing from the top right across the horizontal sheet to the bottom left. All the drawings included trees and foliage and a series of small round shapes either within or next to the stream. I was puzzled as to what these represented for a while, until I realised that all the children of our street would, if they went out for a walk with their family, in all likelihood go to Dartmoor. The streams of Dartmoor are strewn with small granite boulders and rounded pebbles. So when asked to draw a river the children had responded by pulling from their imaginations pictures that corresponded to their direct experiences … Only one drawing featured tributaries, but the angle at which they met the main stream was against the flow of the river. When I asked about this, the child explained that they understood something of a river system, and when pressed on the matter of the angle of address, they explained that water flowed down the main stream and then UP the tributaries. 27

Fig.3 Anonymous child aged 12 A River 2006 Coloured drawing Photograph © Jem Southam

The drawings might be found charming for what they said about children’s naive understanding of the world and their capacity to express their knowledge in visual form. But Southam felt that they raised a deeper point: ‘could any of us say with confidence that we know what a river is, or could or we come up with a comprehensive definition? … A river, any river, even one as small as the Red River, is beyond our powers of understanding’. 28

Southam turned to his own medium of photography in search of a definition of what a river is, choosing the Exe because it was his local river, and walking its banks to determine possible locations, but without any clear idea as to what the content, form or structure of the finished work might be, or indeed if the work could ever be resolved, ‘since I was not aware of any model that might suggest a structural resolution’. 29 Right from the start, some formal and technical aspects – camera, lens, film etc. – had to be decided, considerations that would in themselves have far-reaching implications for the conceptual development of the ensuing work as well as its visual character:

Early on I started using a lens that rendered, even with this system, an exceptional degree of peripheral detail. This led me to pay more forensic attention to the myriad narratives that a view contained.  In one photograph [fig.4], for example, a thin line of ice follows the bank of the river, a large dog has recently made its way onto the soft sand of the bank, the river level has recently receded five or so inches leaving a small ‘tide’ line of fine twigs, and two light stalks are all that remains visible from the profusion of towering and invasive Himalayan Balsam plants that grew here over the summer, while twisted through the lower hanging branches at various levels are clumps of organic material left from the earlier autumn floods, and on the higher branches of the alder trees that lean over the river hundreds of dark dots that are the remains of last year’s fruit. 30

Fig.4 Jem Southam River Exe  2010 Photograph © Jem Southam

Here is that intense scrutiny that is also found in Keiller’s films, comparable to his long-held shots of roadside flora, though the ‘narratives’ referred to by Southam are less evidently metaphorical or political.

Other aspects of the project’s methodology and content began to emerge: revisiting locations and re-photographing them at regular intervals over extended periods of time, the issue of access (which on non-navigable rivers in Britain can be very restricted), the question of structure, form and ultimate outcome. But each decision, each new photograph taken, only raises further questions and anxieties as the full complexity of the task ahead is gradually disclosed. There are so many reaches of the river, so many tributaries, springs and sources; it seems an ‘impossible task … a quagmire of a problem, from which I see no viable release’. 31  

From this perspective, a river presents as much of a challenge to the artist as does the darkness of ‘anterior time’ that Paterson has taken as her subject. Southam’s pursuit of the elusive phenomenon of a river and Paterson’s discovery that ‘ancient darkness’ can be made visible have both given rise to projects that could be life-long, and to the creation of archives that are potentially infinite. The objects of their enquiry may be literally more than poles apart, but nothing could more vividly indicate the expanded terms in which artists might now engage with the world.

Patrick Keiller’s feature-length film Robinson in Ruins (2010) was the centrepiece among the artistic projects presented at ‘Art & Environment’; appropriate given that it was produced under the auspices of the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment programme itself. Elsewhere in this issue of Tate Papers , Stephen Daniels, Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright introduce the background of the film and the wider project of which it was part.  Robinson in Ruins traces a journey following a roughly elliptical circuit around Oxford, across luminous pastoral landscapes which are nonetheless shadowed by economic crisis and an impending ecological collapse. Two other contributors to this issue also engage with the film, concentrating on its motif of ruin. Matthew Flintham was a part of Keiller’s research team, though working on a theme of his own, militarised landscape, which intersects the filmmaker’s concerns rather than coincides with them entirely. Flintham’s contribution ranges widely over recent British and American art practice and argues that art is a legitimate and productive means of responding to militarised spaces, despite the obvious difficulties they present. He brings out the analogies he sees in Keiller’s film between earlier historical enclosure movements and the large-scale appropriation of land by the military in the twentieth century. He also dwells on the physical ruins that are the legacy of such an occupation: urgently built, highly specialised structures that soon become redundant, and are then left to slow decline.

Finally, Brian Dillon ’s paper focuses as much on the metaphor of ruins as on their physical persistence. He takes Robinson’s rapt gaze on pastoral subjects – landscapes with ruins – as an indication that the English countryside has become ‘a monument to itself’, a symptom of a problematic nostalgia, associated with a tradition of English ruin aesthetics. But he also seeks to define Keiller’s own position as part of a broader and more critical European tradition in which ‘ruin lust’ can just as well imply fantasies of the future as of the past, an anticipation of coming ruination. In this light, the extended, almost exaggerated shots of foxgloves, thistles and poppies that have given rise to so much comment elsewhere, are suggestive of an ecology that is ominous rather than reassuring.

Patrick Keiller The Robinson Institute

Patrick Keiller creates an ambitious new project in the Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain from March 2012

Artist’s talk: Patrick Keiller

Artist Patrick Keiller talks about his work for the Tate Britain Commission, 23 May 2012

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in England, 1969

Nancy Holt and Simon Grant1

Robert Smithson, best known for his Land Art piece Spiral Jetty , and Nancy Holt, best known for her work Sun Tunnels , were both fascinated by man’s imprint on the natural landscape. They often travelled together and documented their work – and themselves – in photographs. In 1969 they took an important journey through England and Wales visiting sites that resonated with their practice, ranging from ancient ruins and landscaped gardens to wild natural places. For the first time, Holt reflects on the trip and its influence on their art

Jem Southam: From A Distance: An Industrial Landscape in Cornwall

Jem Southam: From A Distance: An Industrial Landscape in Cornwall: past Tate St. Ives exhibition

Layered Land: Andy Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Helen Pheby

Focusing on the long relationship Andy Goldsworthy has had with the landscape of the Bretton Estate, the location of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Helen Pheby explores the artist’s interest in the cultural heritage of the English landscape, which informed the design of estates such as Bretton. 

Richard Long

Richard Long past Tate St Ives exhibition

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth ate Tate Britain 3 June – 6 September 2009

Hamish Fulton: Walking journey

Hamish Fulton: Walking journey: photographic works about the experience of walking. Past Tate Britain exhibition

Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Rothko and Smithson

Timothy D. Martin

This paper addresses the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973), and, referring to the philosopher Kant and psychoanalyst Lacan, discusses how the sublime can have a psychotic aspect. It argues that Kant’s categorical imperative, for all its attempts to exclude self-interest and the pathological aspects of the hypothetical imperative, establishes a frame not only for sublime aesthetic experience but also for psychotic delusion.

Lost Art: Robert Smithson

Jennifer Mundy

The Gallery of Lost Art is an immersive, online exhibition that tells the fascinating stories of artworks that have disappeared. Each week a new story of loss is added, and the evidence presented for examination

A-level: Nature in art and architecture

Videos + essays, a-level: j.m.w. turner, snow storm.

Like a disaster movie, Turner’s painting transforms a natural catastrophe — with death a near-certainty — into entertainment.

A-level: Sheltered by the sea, Barbara Hepworth’s Pelagos

Sheltered by the sea, a study in place and feeling

A-Level: Monet, The Basin at Argenteuil

In the suburbs, Parisians escaped the pressures of modern life. Monet painted their sun-drenched pleasures.

A-Level: Tipu’s Tiger

Made for a sultan, this unusual automaton emblematizes the fierce hostility between British and Indian rulers.

A-Level: Sample set of works for Nature

Artists throughout history have engaged with the natural world, whether capturing coastlines or planting landfills.

A-level: Angkor Wat

This temple remains the largest religious monument in the world. Once a Hindu shrine, it is now used by Buddhists.

A-level: Art and Context—Monet’s Cliff Walk at Pourville and Malevich’s White on White

Which of these paintings do you like better? Watch this video before you decide.

A-level: Giambologna, Abduction of a Sabine Woman

With a complex, multi-figure composition, this monumental sculpture captures a moment from ancient Roman history.

A-level: Georgia O’Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree

Confused by this painting? Imagine lying on the grass under a tree and looking up.

A-level: Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds

Over 100 million porcelain seeds filled the Tate’s Turbine Hall in a critique of conformity and censorship.

A-level: Ai Weiwei, Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)

A-level: double-headed serpent.

Snakes shedding their skin was a powerful metaphor for the Aztecs and is reflected in their pantheon of gods.

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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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Drawing Connections

Drawing in contemporary art, spring 2017, nature as art, by joseph mangano.

Alan Sonfist, American (b. 1946), Earth Mapping of New York City , 1965. Charcoal on paper, 19 in x 22 in. University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Purchased with funds from Alumni Association, UM 1986.67.

Historically, drawing has been used mostly as a teaching tool and a preliminary step to develop ideas before completing a painting. With the rise of Modernism in the 20th century, drawing evolved to become its own medium for artists to express themselves. In the University of Massachusetts’s Contemporary Art Museum exhibition Body Language , viewers had the privilege to encounter different expressions of what a drawing could be in the categories of “Looking,” “Touching,” and “Feeling.” These diverse drawings opened the mind to the broad range of materials and functions of drawing. In particular, a drawing by Alan Sonfist titled Earth Mapping of New York City  stood out to me among the rest. It appears to be a tracing of pine needles and natural objects found on the ground. I became fascinated with the transformation that took place when this everyday, natural pattern found on the ground was transferred into the context of art. As this interest peaked my curiosity, I started to research how artists have interacted with nature and used it as a primary source for their artworks. By considering Alan Sonfist and the works of other Land artists, I came to the conclusion that nature can be represented as a form of art on its own through the inclusion of pattern and interactive experience.

In the history of art, landscapes have proved the most enduring of artistic inspirations aside from the human figure. Only in this century has the enthusiasm for its depiction lessened due to the the multitude of technological developments that have led to a revival of abstract art. As Jacques Ellul states in his Remarks on Technology and Art :

Technology influences everything and has indeed become the chief determinant not only of man’s habitat but also of his history [….] Today art has two main orientations, the first a direct reflection of the increasing role of technology, the second a sort of explosive reaction against the rigor of technological thinking.¹

I believe a major reaction against technology has defined the movement known as Land Art, also referred to as “Earth art, “Earthworks” or “Environmental Art.” Land Art first gained popularity in the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s in response to the cultural turbulence and social unrest of the late 1960s. In order to really inspire people to feel compelled to conserve nature, a more public approach was needed. Rather than representing nature with paint on canvas or the welding of steel, a handful of artists chose to enter the landscape itself and work with its materials directly. Land Art developed out of conceptual practices in which artists started to make interventions into everyday life. These new earthworks did not depict the landscape so much as engage with it. The first works of this kind were created by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, and Alan Sonfist. These works distinguished themselves from other forms of sculpture due to their physical presence within the landscape.² Most of these works are also inextricably bound to their sites, creating a special relationship, which in turn becomes the primary content. However, since Land Art can simply be seen as a presentation of nature, what is it about nature that can be translated into the context of art?

Similar to paintings and drawings, nature provides the viewer with a pattern of similar forms that create a composition. Alan Sonfist’s Earth Mapping of New York City is a charcoal drawing that was completed in 1965. This artwork completely transcends the traditional definitions of drawing in its representation of the trace and the mark. A trace is something inscribed by the artist’s direct physical presence, while a mark is a sign placed with deliberate intention. Earth Mapping of New York City exists as both a trace and a mark. The drawing is a rubbing of pine needles and dirt that suggests the composition of the New York City landscape long before it was inhabited. However upon further examination, the drawing transforms into a landscape with its suggestion of depth, mountains, and even animals or figures in action. The possibility of seeing objects and pictures within this abstracted natural composition is what originally fascinated me in the drawing. If this drawing were still laying flat on the ground where Alan Sonfist traced over the surface, I would most likely just see the overall appearance of marks making up the ground. When this drawing is hung on a gallery wall, however, the bold and active strokes begin to mix with the stain-like shadows and smaller dots to create the illusion of a landscape with possible figures.

The possibility of seeing imagery that is not really there is explained by the concept of “pareidolia”. Pareidolia is “a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus (an image or a sound) by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists.” Pareidolia was used as a tool by artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci in the Renaissance and Alexander Cozens in the 18th century, both of whom used stains and natural occurring patterns to make pictures. In Da Vinci’s notebook “Precepts of the Painter,” there is a section included titled “A Way to Stimulate and Arouse the Mind to Various Inventions.” Here, Leonardo Da Vinci states:

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate well-conceived forms.

Leonardo understands that this new device for painting may appear “trivial and ludicrous” but is truly a vital tool in arousing the mind to various inventions.

Aside from Leonardo Da Vinci, later artists such as Alexander Cozens and Thomas Gainsborough, another 18th-century English landscape painter, used the effect of pareidolia in nature to invent works of art. Like these artists, I believe that pareidolia can help us understand a pattern and how it makes feel. This understanding can be important in deciding on the types of strokes and marks that you choose to render a scene or capture an emotion. The ability to see different forms and imagery adds an interactive component to nature where viewers can pull out individual perceptions of what lies in front of them, Aside from arousing new inventions for natural compositions, patterns in nature can also be directly translated as they appear. The idea of referencing patterns in nature dates all the way back to biblical times. In Exodus 25, a book in the Old Testament, God gives directions to the prophet Moses on how to build the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, with the specific instructions to “be sure that you make everything according to the pattern I have shown you here on the mountain.”³ Beyond patterns, this individual, psychological experience viewers gain is what makes nature a truly astonishing work of art.

Continuing with experience, strong pieces of art often evoke an emotion, bring to light a memory, or change the way you perceive something. For example, when I view works by Claude Monet I am always hit with a sense of nostalgia and familiarity with the landscape depicted as if I have been there in a previous life. This action of receiving a feeling and being put into a different emotional state is what I think makes great art. This one of the strenghts of nature over other forms of art. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this personal experience with nature in his essay titled “Nature.” The Transcendentalist writer brings up the idea that a true understanding of the self can be achieved by going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying activities as well as society. Emerson believes that when a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware of his own separateness from the material world resulting in an uninhibited  way of thinking.? Like Emerson, I believe that nature can serve as an escape from the material world and can provide artists with a space to reflect on the world around them without the influence over others. This effect that nature can bring to the viewer is why Land Art is especially important today. For example, New York City’s famous “Times Square” is essentially a square intersection filled with over 230 billboards and advertisements. The advertising and influence of big corporations are posted all around Manhattan and constantly invade the minds of pedestrians.

Thankfully, a source of nature can be found in a Land Art work in lower Manhattan. In 1965, Alan Sonfist created the environmental public sculpture titled Time Landscape . This sculpture is an area of plants and trees that recreates the natural heritage of Manhattan long before it was filled with skyscrapers and taxis. In Sonfist’s essay “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments,” the artist explains that with Time Landscape he hopes to create a space for reflection and heightened sensitivity in a “cluttered and overly rationalized modern world” that would ideally stimulate an altered sense of one’s place within the world.? While critics might view Time Landscape as a simple garden or urban forest, the idea of using this natural space as a source for “reflection” transforms the traditional garden into an immersive experience. I believe the experience that Sonfist’s Time Landscape provides is an integral attempt to reconnect humans to nature.

Today we live in society where advertisements, political opinions, and worldly views are constantly being pushed into our mind by force. According to digital marketing experts, it is estimated that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.? A study at Oberlin College also revealed that the average American child is able to identify over 1,000 corporate logos but only can recognize about a dozen of the plants or animals found in their neighborhood.? Our society’s loss of connection within nature is creating a population controlled by media and opinions of corporations instead of living out our own personal discoveries and intuitions.

In conclusion, the patterns and personal experiences that viewers achieve when looking at nature justify nature as a direct material of art. While nature can sometimes seem only an aesthetically pleasing source for art, the interactive experience of reflection and individual thought is what pushes nature beyond its concrete existence into the realm of art. More importantly, using nature as a form of art can help compel society to conserve and revitalize our connection with the natural world.

1) Ellul, Jacques . “Remarks on Art and Technology.” Social Research , 1979, 805-33.

2) Beardsley, John. Earthworks and beyond contemporary art in the landscape . New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.

3) Exodus 25:40, Old Testament of the Bible.

4) Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays – “Nature” (1844). 1844. Accessed May 02, 2017. http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/nature1844.html.

5) Sonfist, Alan. Alan Sonfist: Natural Phenomena As Public Monuments . Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, 1978.

6) Marshall, Ron. “Advertising Campaigns.” Http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads.

7) “Loving Children: A Design Problem, David Orr.” Accessed May 02, 2017. http://designshare.com/research/orr/loving_children.htm.

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• Land Art: Seeking The Right Approach →

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The Relationship between Nature and Art.pdf

The mid-eighteenth century was a defining moment in the tradition of aesthetic reflection in the visual arts. The relationship between nature and art was influenced by aesthetic thought expounded by various philosophers. Landscape painting became the model for the appreciation of nature, which was encouraged by aesthetic theory, at a time when the urban inhabitants of England’s major cities were longing to be reconnected with nature. The canonical idea of art’s function as imitation of nature was questioned in the artistic developments of English landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emphasis on ‘imitation of nature’ was the subject of much debate.

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The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque were three key concepts of aesthetics originated in philosophical context of the 18th century. Together, they outlined the variety of aesthetically significant experiences. The article aims to review historical roots of the three aesthetics and how they were associated with landscape architecture and environmental art, both of which concerned with shaping the land and environment. Subsequently, the article discusses associations between the English Landscape School - landscape architecture embraced by the 18th century three aesthetics and the ecological design - modern landscape architectural design theme primarily dominated by Ian McHarg in the 1960s. Conclusively, the article critically discussed lessons learned from the associations and how landscape architecture should be shaped forward.

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The Close Connection Between Art And Nature

By Team Mojarto

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his language.

-Henry Matisse

There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists’ artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where they can bring life to nature in their paintings. Many famous artists like Van Gogh and Monet celebrated nature in their artworks. Nature in art is glorified for its sublime and picturesque manifestation on canvas. It is cherished for its intricacy and beauty. 

Some philosophers including Aristotle lauded that art can mimic nature. It embodies as a true reflection of the artist’s inner soul. Aristotle even once wrote that “Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies”. This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. Here’s a look at some beautiful artwork that can mesmerize one’s soul and convey a sense of deeper thoughts and perspectives.

The idea offered by nature is endless. It is seen as a way to appreciate nature and bring out the complex human connection to nature. From time immemorial artists and poets have connected nature to human characteristics and mood. Earlier artists used art as a medium to bring out the spirituality in nature. They portrayed every landscape, flower, and insect with a touch of divinity, which was largely attained by the use o light and shade. Art was also a way to explore the world of nature. It brought out the beauty and importance of nature. Many artists portray nature as realistically as possible, which led to the emergence of many movements surrounding art. 

Photorealism to abstraction, nature is depicted in every art style. Art movements like Tonalism, naturalism, Plein air, Danube school, and Ecological art were based solely on nature and the natural world. 

Landscape Paintings depict natural scenery in art, which is why it is also referred to as nature paintings. Artists have been enamoured by the beauty of nature and have tried to capture nature in all her glory through beautiful landscape paintings. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the Earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes that are also depicted extensively in art, such as moonscapes, skyscapes, seascapes among others.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Winter’s Tale — The Circle of Life: Art vs. Nature in Achieving Natural Order in the Winter’s Tale

The Circle of Life: Art Vs. Nature in Achieving Natural Order in The Winter’s Tale

• Categories: The Winter’s Tale William Shakespeare

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Friday essay: in defence of beauty in art

Senior Lecturer, Art History and Visual Culture, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Robert Wellington receives funding from Australian Research Council. Material in this article was first presented as the Australian National University 2017 Last Lecture.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Art critics and historians have a difficult time dealing with beauty. We are trained from early on that the analysis of a work of art relies on proof, those things that we can point to as evidence. The problem with beauty is that it’s almost impossible to describe. To describe the beauty of an object is like trying to explain why something’s funny — when it’s put into words, the moment is lost.

Works of art need not be beautiful for us to consider them important. We need only think of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal that he flipped on its side, signed with a false name, and submitted to the exhibition of the newly founded Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. We’d have a hard time considering this object beautiful, but it is widely accepted to be one of most important works of Western art from the last century.

To call something beautiful is not a critical assertion, so it’s deemed of little value to an argument that attempts to understand the morals, politics, and ideals of human cultures past and present. To call something beautiful is not the same as calling it an important work of art. As a philosopher might say, beauty is not a necessary condition of the art object.

And yet, it is often the beauty we perceive in works of art from the past or from another culture that makes them so compelling. When we recognise the beauty of an object made or selected by another person we understand that maker/selector as a feeling subject who shared with us an ineffable aesthetic experience. When we find something beautiful we become aware of our mutual humanity.

Take, for example, the extraordinary painting Yam awely by Emily Kam Kngwarry in our national collection. Like so many Indigenous Australians, Kngwarry has evoked her deep spiritual and cultural connection to the lands that we share through some of the most intensely beautiful objects made by human hands.

In her work we can trace the lines of the brush, the wet-on-wet blend of colours intuitively selected, the place of the artist’s body as she moved about the canvas to complete her design. We can uncover her choices—the mix of predetermination and instinct of a maker in the flow of creation.

It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason. It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that works of art ought to be beautiful. What I want to defend is our felt experience of beauty as way of knowing and navigating the world around us.

The aesthete as radical

The aesthete — a much maligned figure of late-19th and early-20th century provides a fascinating insight on this topic. Aesthetes have had a bad rap. To call someone an aesthete is almost an insult. It suggests that they are frivolous, vain, privileged, and affected. But I would like to reposition aesthetes as radical, transgressive figures, who challenged the very foundations of the conservative culture in which they lived, though an all-consuming love of beautiful things.

Oscar Wilde was, perhaps, the consummate Aesthete - famed as much for his wit as for his foppish dress and his love of peacock feathers, sun flowers and objets d’art. His often-quoted comment “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china” has been noted as a perfect summary of the aesthete’s vacuous nature.

For Wilde and his followers, the work of art — whether it be a poem, a book, a play, a piece of music, a painting, a dinner plate, or a carpet — should only be judged on the grounds of beauty. They considered it an utterly vulgar idea that art should serve any other purpose.

Over time, the term “aesthete” began to take on new meanings as a euphemism for the effete Oxford intellectual. Men like Wilde were an open threat to acceptable gender norms—the pursuit of beauty, both in the adoration of beautiful things, and in the pursuit of personal appearances, was deemed unmanly. It had long been held that men and women approached the world differently. Men were rational and intellectual; women emotional and irrational.

These unfortunate stereotypes are very familiar to us, and they play both ways. When a woman is confident and intellectual she is sometimes deemed unfeminine. When she is emotional and empathic, she is at risk of being called hysterical. Likewise, a man who works in the beauty industry — a make-up artist, fashion designer, hairdresser, or interior designer — might be mocked for being effete and superficial. We only need to look to the tasteless comments made about Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson to see evidence of that today.

By the 1880s, many caricatures were published of a flamboyant Wilde as a cultivated aesthete. One cartoon from the Washington Post lampooned the aesthete with a reference to Charles Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution. How far is the aesthete from the ape, it asked. Here the pun relies on a comparison made between the irrational ape — Darwin’s original human — and Wilde the frivolous aesthete.

The aesthete was a dangerous combination of male privilege, class privilege, and female sensibility. The queerness of aesthetes like Wilde was dangerously transgressive, and the pursuit of beauty provided a zone in which to challenge the heteronormative foundations of conservative society, just as Darwin’s radical theories had challenged Christian beliefs of the origins of humankind.

Wilde’s legacy was continued by a new generation of young aristocrats at a time of cultural crises between the two World Wars. The Bright Young Things, as they were called, were the last bloom of a dying plant — the last generation of British aristocrats to lead a life of unfettered leisure before so many were cut down in their prime by the war that permanently altered the economic structure of Britain.

Stephen Tennant was the brightest of the Bright Young Things. He was the youngest son of a Scottish peer, a delicate and sickly child whose recurrent bouts of lung disease lent him a thin, delicate, consumptive and romantic appearance.

Stephen was immortalised as the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s character of the frivolous Oxford Aesthete who carries around his teddy bear, Aloysius, and dotes on his Nanny, borrows these characteristics from Stephen — who kept a plush monkey as a constant companion right up until his death.

Waugh’s book is a powerful meditation on art, beauty and faith. The narrator, Charles Ryder, is thought to have been loosely based on Tennant’s close friend, the painter/illustrator Rex Whistler, the aesthete-artist who tragically died on his first day of engagement in the Second World War.

Through the character of Charles, Waugh grapples with the dilemma of beauty vs erudition. Visiting Brideshead, the magnificent country estate of Sebastian’s family, Charles is keen to learn its history and to train his eye. He asks his host, “Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.” Sebastian replies: “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” Sebastian gives the aesthete’s response, that a work of art or architecture should be judged on aesthetic merit alone.

I’m not suggesting that we should all drop what we’re doing and quit our jobs to pursue an uncompromising pursuit of beauty. But I do think we can learn something from the aesthete’s approach to life.

Aesthetes like Wilde and Tennant, cushioned by their privilege, transgressed the accepted norms of their gender to pursue a life not governed by reason but by feeling. This is a radical challenge to our logocentric society; a challenge to a world that often privileges a rational (masculine) perspective that fails to account for our deeply felt experience of the world around us.

How, then, to judge works of art?

How, then, should the art critic proceed today when beauty counts for so little in the judgement of works of art?

The unsettling times in which we live lead us to question the ethics of aesthetics. What happens when we find an object beautiful that was produced by a person or in a culture that we judge to be immoral or unjust?

I often encounter this problem with works of art produced for the French court in the 17th and 18th century – the period I study.

Last year, when I took a group through the exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace at the National Gallery of Australia, one student was particularly repulsed by Sèvres porcelain made for members of the Court of French king Louis XV . For her, it was impossible to like those dishes and bowls, because she felt they represented the extraordinary inequity of Old Regime France – these exquisitely refined objects were produced at the expense of the suffering poor, she thought.

I suppose that might be true, but I can’t help it – I find this porcelain irresistibly beautiful.

The vibrant bleu-celeste glaze, the playful rhythm of ribbons and garlands of flowers, those delicate renderings painted by hand with the tiniest of brushes. It is the beauty of such objects that compels me to learn more about them.

When it was first made, Sèvres porcelain demonstrated the union of science and art. We are meant to marvel at the chemistry and artistry required to transform minerals, metal and clay into a sparkling profusion of decoration. This porcelain was the material embodiment of France as an advanced and flourishing nation.

You might well argue that the politics of 18th-century porcelain is bad. But our instinctual perception of beauty precedes the reasoned judgement of art.

The artists and makers at the Sèvres factory were responding to the human capacity to perceive beauty. These objects were designed to engage our aesthetic sensibilities.

Works of art don’t have to be beautiful, but we must acknowledge that aesthetic judgement plays a large part in the reception of art. Beauty might not be an objective quality in the work of art, nor is it a rational way for us to argue for the cultural importance of an object. It’s not something we can teach, and perhaps it’s not something you can learn.

But when it comes down to it, our ability to perceive beauty is often what makes a work of art compelling. It is a feeling that reveals a pure moment of humanity that we share with the maker, transcending time and place.

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Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

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