Beautiful Views of Planet Earth

Loreena McKennitt - Night Ride Across the Caucasus

I found this at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJQoF-hamHg

Artist Franklin Carmichael - print

NELLIE LAKE

By Franklin Carmichael

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 9.5 x 12.1cm (3 3/4 x 4 3/4 in).image

Medium: wood engraving

Signed

Edition number: 2 from an edition of 50

Artist: Mariele Neudecker's - proposal

German artist Mariele Neudecker’s design, It’s Never Too Late and You Can’t Go Back, is a fictional mountainscape sculpture

It’s Never Too Late And You Can’t Go Back is elevated above the Plinth and represents a fictional mountainscape. It is ‘specific in its dramatically modelled detail’ and if viewed from above reveals the flipped and reversed shape of Britain. From below, the map is the right way around and more familiar. The juxtaposition of different views shifts the observer’s perception of the mountain from majestic and generic landscape to territorial space.

Historically mountains represent monumentality, conquest, glory, ownership. In turn, the sentiments frequently attached to landscapes have often served as reminders of our more fragile, human, moral and mortal positions in the grandest considerations of the sublime.

Artist biography

Born in 1965 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Mariele Neudecker lives and works in Bristol. Neudecker uses a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, film and photography. Her practice investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural world, focusing particularly on landscape representations within the Northern European Romantic tradition and notions of the Sublime. Central to the work is the human interest and relationship to landscape and its images used metaphorically for human psychology.

Mariele Neudecker has shown widely internationally, notably in Biennales in Japan, Australia and Singapore, also solo shows in Ikon Gallery, Tate StIves and Tate Britain. This year Mariele Neudecker has presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, won the Ludwig Gies Preis for her participation at Triennale Fellbach 2010 (Germany), made a new commission for Extraordinary Measures, Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has been invited to spend three month at the Headlands Centre for the Arts, San Francisco (USA). She is represented by gallery Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/index.html

Welsh Photographer - David Wilson

"My love of landscape photography began when I bought my first camera at the age of seventeen. I spent many carefree days riding around Pembrokeshire on my motorbike with my 35mm Canon and an ordnance survey map, learning to take landscape photographs while exploring the coast and countryside. Due to my habit of colliding with objects the motorbike is now history, but my passion for photography, particularly black and white landscape, is stronger than ever."

"Situated on the very western tip of Wales and surrounded on three sides by the sea, Pembrokeshire is an idyllic location to indulge in landscape photography."

http://www.davidwilsonphotography.co.uk/index.html

Monet - Landscape

Two images of the same painting - color is iffy.

Francis Towne watercolor landscapes

Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo (July 1781, "morning light from the left hand"

The Source of the Aveiron, Mont Blanc in the background. 1781

Lake Albano, the sunrise in the Rocca del Papa. 1781

Francis Towne (1739-1816) began his artistic career as a coach painter. He later moved on to landscape painting. His watercolours are very simple but striking. He painted this watercolour in Switzerland, where he stayed on his return to England after a trip to Italy.

According to Harold Barkley" Francis Towne was probably the most original artist working in the water-colour medium in the 18th century. He regarded himself, nevertheless, as primarily a landscape painter in oil and deeply resented a dismissive contemporary description of himself as 'a provincial drawing-master'. His water-colours were virtually unknown for a century after his death, most having remained with him until bequeathed to friends and thus remaining in private collections, apart from his Italian drawings which - as he desired - were given to the British Museum.

Although trained in London with his life-long friend William Pars, his roots lay in Devonshire and he spent the major part of his working life in Exeter, although he exhibited regularly in London and frequently spent long periods there. He was apparently a diffident and unworldly man who was satisfied to cultivate his Devonshire friends and patrons.

It seems likely that he originally used water-colour as an aid in the development of his oil compositions, but by 1777 he was using the medium characteristically, albeit still somewhat tentatively, to record impressions of a tour in Wales. The turning-point of his career as a water-colourist came in 1780, when he paid a visit to his friend Pars in Rome and in the course of his stay there considerably developed his technique. The present drawing belongs to the remarkable series of majestic studies of Alpine scenery made by Towne on his journey home through Switzerland in September 1781. Towne's view owes nothing to the 'Gothick' romanticism of Horace Walpole and his friends thirty years earlier.
He banishes all extraneous 'picturesque' elements such as wayside shrines and ruined bridges. His vision is of the greatest severity and his presentation austere in the extreme. He achieves the expression of his fascination with the geometry of Nature by the most economical means, reducing everything to the simplest terms and achieving a noble monumentality by his skillful arrangement and lighting of inter-reacting planes. This subject reveals Towne's preoccupation with outline and pattern in the highest degree as well as his subtle use of delicate washes to achieve his desired ends.

In due course, with the advent of the vision of Cézanne and of the Cubists a century after his death, Towne’s vision became more widely comprehensible and there is now due appreciation of the originality of his contribution.

Sanqing Mountain in Jiangxi Province

Shen Zhou, 1427–1509, China, Ming dynasty,

Xie An’s Excursion on the Eastern Mountain, dated 1480.

Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 66 9/10 x 35 inches.

Wan-go H.C. Weng Collection.

http://www.huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary_exhibitions.aspx?id=3674

Sanqing Mountain in Jiangxi Province, although not very well-known to many people today, was regarded as a sacred place for Taoists in the Tang Dynasty period (618-907), when Taoism was at its most popular. The mountain remained very popular among people seeking immortality until the 18th century, when Emperor Qianlong preferred Buddhism to Taoism.

The mountain is shrouded in mist for about 200 days each year. On misty days, dense fog envelops the mountain completely and makes you think you are wandering in the clouds. Once in a while, wind blows away the mist, and a stiff, imposing peak suddenly appears right in front of you. Sometimes you can even see the fog creep up on you, gently penetrating the pine trees on the cliff.

About 80 percent of Sanqing Mountain is covered by primeval forests. More than 2,500 kinds of plants exist here, most of which can be used to make traditional Chinese medicine.

These mountains and paintings of these mountains have been very influential for me and the way I approach my landscape painting and drawings. I will post more examples later.

Map of Marseille

Click image to enlarge

Middle Earth

Artist: Pam Ayres - Sketches and Influences

This is a Shan map created in 1889 relating to a border dispute between Burma and China. This map was painted by an anonymous Shan artist in tempera on paper and it covers an area of 47 square miles along the Nam Mao (Burmese Shweli) River. There are about eighty villages and hamlets shown in green. The map text is in Chinese Shan, though Burmese notes have been added in pencil. I have been looking at this map since September 2009 in a book titled "The Map Book" by Peter Barber. I am obsessed with it.

This is the first sketch I did after looking at the Shan map. It put me in mind of Dr. Seuss and The Zax.