Paul Nash - landscape of the vernal equinox

Paul Nash, Landscape of the vernal equinox, oil on canvas, 1934

Sir Roy Strong's "Genius of British Art" on channel 4 the other night looking at landscape, reminded me how fine Paul Nash's paintings were. There's a tradition of English pastoralism and abstraction that I find particularly interesting now (and which I overlooked as a young art student) with painters such as John Piper, Eric Ravillious, and especially Nash that I think warrant more of my attention.

darker than dark

Interesting article here on the darkest man-made material. The material, a thin coating comprised of low-density arrays of loosely vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light.
full article here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080122154610.htm

zodiacal light - the false dawn

Thanks to Jane for sharing this. In thinking about the faint amount of light that allows you to discern form in the darkness in my previous post depicting the night-time profiles of mountains, this phenomena  seems an interesting addition.

"Zodiacal light is a faint, roughly triangular, whitish glow seen in the night sky which appears to extend up from the vicinity of the sun along the ecliptic or zodiac. Caused by sunlight scattered by space dust in the zodiacal cloud, it is so faint that either moonlight or light pollution renders it invisible. The zodiacal light decreases in intensity with distance from the Sun, but on very dark nights it has been observed in a band completely around the ecliptic. In fact, the zodiacal light covers the entire sky, being responsible for 60% of the total skylight on a moonless night. There is also a very faint, but still slightly increased, oval glow directly opposite the Sun which is known as the gegenschein." (Wikipedia)

Zodiakallicht - Etienne Leopold Trouvelot

midnight mountains

Stob Coire Easin, graphite on paper, L Punton, 2010

Beinn Eighe, graphite on paper, L Punton 2010

Ben Cruachan, Graphite on Paper, L Punton, 2010

Martha Street

a new life

Angus Owen Punton Hamlyn was born on the 10th September after a long, but natural, labour. With the best birthing partner (and father) imaginable in Jim, and wonderful midwifes at the Princess Royal (Rebecca, we owe you so much), our lives will never be quite the same again.

Origin

L Punton,  "Origin", graphite on paper, 2010

grindelwald

L Punton, graphite on paper, 2010

language of displacement

Hamish Brown points out in his book documenting the first non stop walk of all the Munro's, that in Scotland, despite the variety of words meaning mountain (there's Stob, Sgurr, Stac, Stuc, Carn, Cairn, Cruach, Meall, Mheall, Maol, Mam, Monadh, Druim, Beinn, Ben, Bidean, Binnean, etc), and all the "peaks of the hind" and 'hills of the goat" and other hills descriptive of the land and wildlife found upon them, there is no hill with the Gaelic name for sheep, since they came later - when Gaelic itself was being evicted!

An Teallach, July 2008

geocentric

In an article in the New York Times, I recently heard about how there can be linguistic variance in how people experience space within different cultures. Western culture is egocentric with our perception of the environment around us viewed relative to our own bodily position in the world. Some cultures however utilise geography to explain their experiences. Put simply, we tend to describe space through left and right, forward and backwards, which is always dependent upon where we stand in relation to an object (turn around, and what was left will become right) whereas, in the Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, the people refer to directions via North, South, etc and not in relation to themselves.

Quite apart from the rather pleasant thought that non egocentric cultures even exist, the development of language that explicitly recognises space in wider terms results in some extremely interesting consequences. The people speaking Guugu Yimithirr, since their everyday experiences are founded upon a broader awareness of the relationships between places, and have learned from an early age to be continually aware of the cardinal directions of things, have a seemingly superhuman navigational ability. They continually and unconsciously know the relative position of a given thing/place etc and are able to navigate without compass or map in mist, on featureless terrain and appear to have an in-built compass. 


An analogy used in the article was that for you or I, if we were to enter a hotel where every room was decorated out in the same way, all the rooms would to all intents appear the same, regardless of the direction the room faced. For a Guugu Yimithirr speaker, a room on one side of a corridor would appear in marked contrast to the opposite door, where everything would be perceived in completely different orientation.


When recounting a story, the Guugu Yimithirr teller gesticulates towards actual directions; if he/she were to retell the story facing in a different direction, the gestures would still point to the same geographical direction regardless of their change in position.


Even more remarkable is that if you or I were to point towards our chest, we would be understood to be referring to ourselves. For the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, they are simply pointing in the direction that runs through their own body.

with the advent of radio astronomy..

Cerith Wyn Evans

Digitally-cut grey matt finish vinyl adhesive

dimensions variable,

2010

revisiting An Caisteal

After my revisiting Strontian post recently, I thought about those other places I've repeatedly found myself in over time, places of regular pilgrimage or simply habitual return, and I thought about how I've found myself making the "same" photograph on the summit of An Caisteal, a Munro near Crianlairich. I've climbed this hill 7 times now, and by the 5th time, realised I'd begun to make roughly the same summit photograph, looking in the same direction towards Beinn Chabhair and the Arrochar Alps, the weather conditions the main variant between them. Once this realisation had been made, I resolved to continue to make more images on subsequent walks up the mountain.

Co-incidentally, I visited a few exhibitions in Edinburgh yesterday and was also struck by the interesting Alexander & Susan Maris show at Stills, where Alexander Maris also returned to and remade photographs from places he'd visited in his past, also often in mountainous, wild terrain. I think there's something akin to my own process here, something altogether more intimate, more biographical, than that found in Mark Klett's formalised re-photographic survey.

Here are the images I made on An Caisteal. There may well have been more images had I been carrying a camera on the first climbs, though I seem to remember only having a low grade mobile phone camera with me on those occasions, and which I rarely used.

27.11.05

4.3.06

3.4.07

 24.3.08

Clearly from the images, I've a fondness for climbing it in the snow. Perhaps it's familiarity and close proximity to home make it a good winter hill for me when the daylight hours are short, though I recollect the earlier ascents were in fine warm weather and took in neighboring Beinn a' Chroin too.

Re-creation as recreation.

strength through joy...?

Looking for some images of the cliffs at Rügen (in order to see images of the famous chalk cliffs Caspar David Friedrich painted but which partially collapsed in a landslide a few years ago), instead, I somehow found myself looking at an altogether different spectacle of the sublime. Built by Hitler as part of the Strength Through Joy programme (basically, a kind of National Socialist leisure industry wing - which also brought us the VW Beetle), Prora was a 4.5km long hotel (one continuous structure) in which all the rooms had a sea view, providing accommodation for 20,000 people on the Baltic Sea. It's also known as the "Colossus of Rügen, and it's extraordinary to think of a "holiday camp" built on such an imposing, daunting scale. Butlin's x 100!

arial view of Prora

Built between 1936 and 1939, it was designed to provide affordable holidays for the average worker, but with the onset of war, construction stopped. The eight housing blocks, the theatre and cinema stayed as empty shells, and the swimming pools and festival hall never materialised. 
During the Allied bombing campaign, many people from Hamburg took refuge in one of the housing blocks, and later refugees from the east of Germany were housed there. By the end of the war, these buildings served to house female auxiliary personnel for the Luftwaffe.


These images by Vegar Moen show the building and it's environs in 2001.

After the war, Rügen ended up in the Russian sector and Prora became a top-secret army base, a virtual university of warfare, where Warsaw Pact troops rehearsed for a Third World War. The holiday camp that Hitler built became a hi-tech military training camp, where Soviet soldiers played wargames to prepare for the apocalypse to come. Out of bounds to locals, Prora disappeared from East German maps. A wild wood grew up around it, hiding it from the sea.

waiting

Samuel Beckett claimed that this painting, two men contemplating the moon, was his inspiration for Waiting for Godot.

He subsequently said that this image, man and woman contemplating the moon was his inspiration, but they are so similar, that clearly the influence was strong.

Both paintings are in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and both are identical in size at 34x44cm.

stargazing

The Perseids meteor shower reached it's peak on Thursday night/Friday morning, though there's still a couple of days more in which to see them. The radiant point for this shower will be in the constellation Perseus. The thin, crescent moon will be out of the way early, setting the stage for a potentially spectacular show. For best viewing, look to the northeast after midnight.