Mini lianer Ldascpnaes

aaaaghh, not enough much and too time to do, so these landscapes done were mini fast and small! A clpoue in late August elary Sepeetbmr while snuinng on the lakse and the Bertschikon ones tnohgit, I’ve trhwon tehm teotgher as I lkie the linear asecpt I seem to grtativae twoards wehn worinkg on tihs scale. One of tshee, and my foaurtvie was mdae by my seevn yaer old daugehtr, can you gsues which? And if your tiihnnkg its ltae and that ltae ngiht G&T is ginivg you bulrerd vioisn, thnik again….as according to boffins at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter what order the letters of a word are in; as long as the first and last letters are in the proper place, you can scramble the rest and still understand it. Check out douglastwitchell where you can have your words mixed up for free without having to drink anything first.

good sketcher….baaaad painter

SO, I had a couple of hours off…great I thought and I packed my stuff and drove to a nice spot outside Winterthur to paint. It was raining of course, so that meant I was sat in the back of the car trying to avoid getting wet, but I’m just making excuses. Watercolours always look so easy when they’re done right (by someone with more practice than me!!).  I haven’t been painting outdoors in a while and I think by the end of each session I am starting to learn something. The problem is by the time I get to painting again, I’ve forgotten what I’d learned the first time, which says a lot about my retentive memory. In fact it seems the longer I spend on a painting, the worse it gets and here is a prime example.

The first painting was the one I spent the most time on and I totally overworked it. The second took me about 15 minutes and though not perfect, I’m much happier with it. Maybe you disagree? Anyway if your easily impressed with my work and need more proof of how to do it good then you should take a look at the work of the unpronounceable artist Joseph Zbukvic , who really knows his way around a pan!

Landscape shapes culture?

Following from my last post here are some photos taken in both the areas I was talking about. The first five were taken a few miles outside Bamberg, Upper Franconia, Germany.  The second near Whitby, North Yorkshire, England. I have been thinking more about how landscape, topography and climate must have an influence on the development of cultural temperament and personal character. There is definitely a difference in the character of people who live in mountain, island, desert or jungle environments and I’m positive that it is not only economics, religion, language and natural resources that shape them. I also think that climate specifically, could be a significant ingredient in shaping national temperament. I would be interested in learning more about how our natural environment effects us, from our cultural temperament to our personal character, though I could only find a couple of quotes to support this. One from the British travel writer and novelist, Lawrence Durrell who states that ” We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it” and the author Terry Tempest Williams, who simple says, in her book Refuge, that, ” Landscape shapes culture”

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Big Horizons

I’m in Frankonia, (Bavaria, Germany), for a few days, but unfortunately with no access to a scanner or any way of uploading any artwork so, today its only words.

The landscape here is linear, structured and ordered, made up of clean lines, horizontal and vertical. The sky seems always at a distance and the light though not today, is even and bright. By contrast the landscape I grew up in, in North Yorkshire is rugged and uneven. It is busy with dry stone walls and hedges, small river valleys, sunk beneath high moorland. The colours seem altogether more rich and varied. It is a windy spontaneous landscape, where the sky and everything under it appear to be in continuous flux. It is often heavy with dark clouds under which the light gets trapped, saturating everything. The contrast to Bavaria couldn’t be more different and when I first began visiting here years ago I found it un-stimulatimg and sterile by comparison.  It isn´t the same but it does have its own ordered, linear beauty.

(Actually it was the photographer Thomas Struth in his book Dandelion Rooms that helped me appreciate it more. The landscape photos taken in that book are actually taken around the area of Winterthur, where we live. But the topography and landscape in both areas are very similar).

Its not a patchwork of history like England’s landscapes, but a green and gold landscape where fields and woods are neatly divided. The ploughed furrows are perfectly straight and you find few abandoned farmhouses or dilapidated orchards to disturb the uniformity.  I joke that even the trees here stand to attention. It also got me thinking how landscape so much reflects the history and character of its people. But it could be just as well, that we are formed by our natural environment? By the consistency of the weather and open or obstructed horizons?