Status Updates From Landskipping: Painters, Plo...

I've lost this :-D If I find it again I'll make more progress!

"Visitors are, if they plan their visit carefully, still allowed to take on this staggering coastline in their own way, rather than have it interpreted for them. There seems rather little that we are allowed to discover now, without some notice board looming up to tell us how to look, how to decode. Interpretation of this kind death to a natural landscape."

"When I look over the [Dorset] coast, or the mountains round the place where I was born in Wales, I'm not thinking geology, geomorphology, Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous. my response is immediate, visceral. The land rearing up,plunging down, the mist lying heavy in the valleys, the alternating blocks of plough & pasture, smudges of copse, sandstone cliffs swooping into waves..."

"Speed diminishes the gifts that a journey can give you, he gift, for instance of moving through a landscape slowly enough to be able to watch it, take in its characteristics, observe the the land's relationship to the sky, the patterning made by boundaries, whether of hedge or stone, the way that trees, banks in the lane signal changes in the underpinning of the landscape..."

since painters or gentlemen on the Grand Tour could no longer get to Italy due to war with France - they were obliged to turn to Britain for substitutes: "the craggy landscape of Cumberland & Westmoreland stood in for the Alps & Constable's calm landscapes of the Stour valley replaced Claude's views of the Roman campagna"

"when it first appeared, 'landscape' was considered a foreign word, often written the Dutch way - landschap - & used to describe the pictures that artists in england began to make in the 18th century"