My favourite 30 works of art working with nature
It is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here. We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own. . .”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences
A list of favourites is capricious and highly variable. I took some liberties with a list of thirty not ten, some I couldn't leave out if I was going to do justice to the diversity of art dealing with nature both globally and through time. Though it remains highly personal and Eurocentric. How to make a choice – that delicious anxiety about discrimination, which for good and bad is wrapped tightly around the notion of art and artworks - is it favouritism or is one trying to be objective? I am so fortunate in having experienced all of these wonderful examples of artists working with nature, except the two earliest art pieces, the Haida poles in situ and Lightning Field. The context of the art, outside the white cube, and outside mechanical reproduction is so important.
1. Rhino, Chauvet, south-eastern France, c32,000 BCE.
‘There are no pictorial displays as in Lascaux or Altamira. There is more emptiness, more secrecy, perhaps greater complicity with the darkness. Yet, although these paintings were made 15,000 years earlier, they are, mostly, as skilful, observant and graceful as any of the later paintings.’ John Berger, ‘Past present’, Guardian October 12, 2002.
2. Three deftly carved ivory figurines from Hohle Fels Cave in Germany's Ach Valley, c32,000 BCE: a horse, a diving waterfowl, and a man/lion.
3. Mimi spirits, fish and animals, including the Tasmanian Tiger and mythic rainbow serpent, Ubirr Rock, Kakadu escarpment c3,000 to 6,000 years old. Thermoluminescence dating has dated the sand surrounding pieces of ground ochre to 50 000 years ago in Kakadu, which suggests ceremonial use and quite possible art.
4. The Uffington White Horse, England. The oldest and most famous hill figure at 2,000 to 3000 years old.
It is a beautiful abstracted running horse cut out of the turf on chalk downs near the Ridgeway ancient track. It is 374 feet long and may represent the Celtic horse goddess Epona (or a tribal symbol). It has to be maintained every few years, so in a real sense is alive.
5. The crocodile god Sobek and the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Luxor Museum. Calcite, New Kingdom - 18th Dynasty c1400BC.
The materiality of the piece, of form working is outstanding.
6. Persian (Achaemenian) Persepolis 6thC BC.
The art shows great technical skill and imagination, especially in animals (a lion attacking a horse),
7. Garden wall, Pompeii, c70AD. Some wall paintings were extensions of the garden (a trompe d’oeil version of Chinese borrowing from the landscape), extending house into nature, like the Japanese, or we do with French doors and a deck.
8. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good and Bad Government on Town and Countryside (1337-39) Town Hall, Sienna. This is one of the earliest examples of Western landscape and these great frescoes depicting disorder and entropy and process with human interference (so important in ecological art).
9. Great Zimbabwe birds, c14th C, from the ruins of the ruins the oldest and largest structures located in Sub-Saharan Africa.
10. March by Limbourg brothers, Paul, Hermann and Jean, from the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, 1412-1416, the classic example of a medieval Book of Hours. A text for each liturgical hour of the day plus calendars, prayers, psalms and masses for certain holy days were commonly included.
11. Van Eyck, Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, 1435, Louvre. One of my favourite painters, and though he preceded the western landscape tradition, he painting are filled with distant vistas and details of flowers.
12. Ryoanji, c1500, the dry stone garden in Kyoto. Fifteen rocks of various sizes in groups of three and two, fit the raked gravel perfectly, no single view can capture them all. Japanese philosopher Murota notes: “The Japanese view of nature is quite different from that of Westerners . . The Japanese nature is all-pervasive force . . . Nature is at once a blessing and a friend to the Japanese people . . . People in Western cultures, on the other hand, view nature as object and, often, as an entity set in opposition to humankind.’
Stephen Kellert surveyed attitudes to nature: “A Japanese affinity for nature was identifies, therefore, but typically as a restricted idealistic recreation or artistic rendering of especially valued attributes. This refined appreciation of nature involved considerable abstraction and a concept of perfection derived from prescribed rules and assumptions of harmony, order, and balance in the natural world.”
13. ‘The Hunt of the Unicorn’, tapestry, South Netherlandish, c1500, The Cloisters, The Met, New York ( or The Lady and The Unicorn Tapestries, Hotel Cluny, Paris). Sumptuous and beguiling.
14. Durer, Great Piece of Turf, 1503, Watercolour and gouache on paper, Vienna. The details so exact, Budding yellow dandelion flowers, the details so exact, we know it was painted in May. A wonderful composition, looking natural but the dandelions are arranged. The grass leaves so fresh, then the bottom tails off into browns, showing the roots. Durer collected objects throughout his life, anything that interested him, snail shells, skeletons, sketches of people, a walrus, a gale. The divisions between sacred, supernatural and ordinary temporal were not seen as so clearly divided then. [also Durer, Hare, Watercolour and gouache on paper, Vienna – astonishingly beautiful]
15. Pieter Bruegel, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ c. 1558. Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. He pust human activities in perspective in a beautifully odd composition. I am a poet so biased, but there is so much in this painting and, unlike his sons, the working of paint on the canvas rewards close attention.
16. Claude Lorrain ‘Study of Trees’ c1635, collection of the Queen. Not his serene landscapes in oils, his attention to nature so very different in his sketch books of the Compagna. Sandraat described his earlier frescoes at the Cavalier Mutio Rome and commented on his naturalism, "each tree can very well be recognised according to its special characteristics in trunk, foliage, and colouring, all as they rustled and moved in the wind."
(A different image opp. to the one showing the artist's friends that captivated me but similar period)
17. Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, The Silver Tureen c. 1728, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Charles-Nicolas Cochin writing soon after the artist's death in 1779, attributed the origins of his still life painting to his close study of the fur of a rabbit: “The first lessons Monsieur Chardin had derived from nature committed him to continue studying it assiduously. One of the first things he did was a rabbit. The object itself seems very insignificant, but the way he wanted to do it made of it a serious study. He wanted to paint it with the utmost verity in every respect—with discernment, without any trace of slavishness which might have rendered the execution cold and dry. He had not yet attempted to render fur, fully realizing that one should not count the individual hairs nor render it in detail. "Here," he said to himself, "is an object to be rendered. In order to paint it as it is, I have to forget all I have seen and even the way these things have been treated by others. I have to place it at such a distance that I no longer see its details. I must above all faithfully imitate its general masses, colour tones, volume, and the effects of light and shadows." In this he succeeded; his rabbit reveals the first fruits of that discernment and magical execution which ever since have characterized the gifts that have distinguished him.
18. Stourhead, English landscape garden, Stourton, Wiltshire, 1741 to 1765.
Built by a banker Henry Hoare II with the architect Henry Flitcroft, it is classical, tame and wild. I have seen it in winter iced over, spring, summer and autumn, beautiful and thought provoking in each.
19. John Constable, Cloud Studies: “I have done a good deal of skying…That Landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition – neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids …It will be difficult to name a class of Landscape, in which the sky is not the “key note”, the standard of “Scale”, and the chief “Organ of sentiment”… The sky is the “source of light” in nature – and governs everything. Constable, 23 October 1821
Constable thought skies were one of the most difficult parts of landscape painting and one of the most important. During 1821 and 1822 at Hampstead, he painted the sky quickly but obsessively, noting on the back the date, time, temperature, wind direction etc. A scientific interest and one I link to Ruskin’s notion of the importance of drawing daily as practice for seeing the world. In addition, Constable showed what Ruskin meant by: "The truths of nature are one eternal change — one infinite variety" (Modern Painters, 3.145). And, "There is not one of her [Nature's] shadows, tints, or lines that is not in a state of perpetual variation: I do not mean in time, but in space. There is not a leaf in the world which has the same colour visible over its whole surface" (3.294). We forget how revolutionary he was since he has become so popular on teatowels.
20. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1844, Tate Gallery. A postcard favourite, Turner visited Norham Castle in 1797 and sketched the castle once on the cliff above the River Tweed. From this drawing Tuner exhibited a watercolour in the Royal Academy in 1798, titled Norham Castle-Summer's Morn'. Turner returned to this drawing in 1815 to reference a plate for the Liber Studiorum, and later for the series illustrating the Rivers of England around 1822-4. It is a mesmerising liberating painting showing the beauty of landscape.
Cloud study, horizon of trees 27 September 1821 oil on paper laid on board
21. John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852. The painting depicts the character from Hamlet singing while floating just before drowning. Very famous, rather sentimental but still beautiful, it was known and admired once for its accurate depiction of flowers (with symbolic significances).
22. Paul Cézanne, "Pot of Flowers and Fruit", c1888-90, Courtauld Gallery. A simple, small but utterly mesmerising oil painting. One of my favourites. I always anticipate revisiting it.
23. Zenga - Death is of no account though artists only say so after lifetimes of meddling with what is real. Daruma, the hero is here, Bodidharma in many forms, painted on the end of a life, bartered for food in local villages and hung by the fire; some images are dark and sooty. Or the abstract circle. A later beautiful circle by the Japanese artist Nakahara Nantembo, calligraphy inscribed inside the circle, 'Within the Spinning Circle of Life We are born', c1900, Seattle Art gallery exhibition. The first step is a pilgrimage, both outward and inward. How fortunate to have a year to travel (1990, following the Newcastle Poetry prize), I sold everything but my books.
24. Pablo Picasso, She-Goat. Vallauris 1950 (cast 1952) MOMA. I prefer Picasso’s sculptures to his paintings, they are creative, funny and expressive. Though I’m not sure how it got into this list, but then that’s Picasso for you.
25. Totem Pole, 1950s, Haida artist Bill Reid and Namgis artist Doug Cranmer carved 15 metre (50 foot) frontal pole for large Haida house (now inside, too fragile to remain outside). Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver. I tried to visit the Haida coast once from Vancouver, until I realised just how far it was and ran out of time.
26. The monumental landscapes of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, e.g. ‘Warlugulong’, 1976. Papunya Tula artists. The details here are not photographic but mytho-topographic. See Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Eds. H Perkins & h. Fink, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000. At Sotheby’s in Melbourne, a world auction record for Aboriginal artist Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri whose work, Wild Potato Dreaming, sold for $205,000. None of which, as far as I am aware, went back to the artist’s family.
27. Walter de Maria, ‘Lightning Field’, 1977. The piece sits high in New Mexico, 400 highly polished steel poles or spikes nail a grid one mile by one kilometre. The sublime resides here, promoting danger and melodrama. You have to pay $100, and sign a waiver saying in case of death you won’t sue, and agree to spend 24 hours in a cabin all of which gives weight to the experience. Official photographs (photography is forbidden) show lightning striking, but that has never been seen. The work is responsive to light, invisible in middle of day, acutely visible at dawn, very sensitive to the light’s colours almost allergic to moonlight.
[Or James Turrell’s Roden Crater, begun the same year].
It has become a very important work. It takes a couple of hours to walk around, the sense of space, of a body in space through a landscape, immersed in an environment without vantage point – space without our scale, missing the forest of the city, colour shifts blue much slower – hills still look brown in desert, no landmarks, no trees for our measure of site, memory, place.
28. Peter Dombrovskis, Rock Island Bend, photograph, 1979:‘the iconic image of the campaign to stop Tasmania's Hydro-Electric Commission damming the Franklin River. When it appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Herald just before the 1983 federal election, the caption was "Would you vote for a party that would destroy this?. . . He was the finest landscape photographer in Tasmania, a master of his large format camera which recorded the environment in remarkable detail.” Tim Bonyhardy, ‘When a picture packs punch’ , Sydney Morning Herald June 10, 2004
29. Andy Goldsworthy various, "Hand to Earth Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 19761990," The Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 1990. That show was a real eye-opener. He goes out into the woods (or the moor or the desert or the pond or the beach) and arranges things he finds there - leaves, berries, stones, blades of grass, chunks of ice, driftwood - into patterns which are strikingly or subtly artificial, which he then photographs.
One of his works is titled
Iris blades pinned together with thorns
filled in five sections with rowan berries
fish attacking from below
difficult to keep all the berries in
nibbled at by ducks
“My response is not to standardise and control these elements, but to treat them as an extension of the many unpredicatabilities in the process... [the works] are alive with the variety of the places that they come from, and it is in their nature to accept further variation.”
30. Kangaroos: Faces In The Mob, Jan Aldenhoven and Glen Carruthers, 1992. The only documentary on the list, though Attenborough’s remarkable montages pulled from the best wildlife photographers could have been used. Documentaries are problematic, often feeling the need for narrative which is so often anthropocentric (March of the Penguins”), or dramatic without getting a sense of the social and ecological goings on. Faces in the Mob is brilliant in showing animals to be individuals.
