Scans

 

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance

or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique."                                                                                                                                                      Jackson Pollock        

Link to SCANS book on blurb.     

Art has seen as much experimentation in the last 150 years as the previous 1500 years. This accelerated rate of change occurred in a period of increased scientific knowledge of nature and parallel social developments. The style of figurative realism that emerged in the Renaissance was challenged by the rebellious era of modern art that started at the Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris in 1863. During the 20th century three methods of image making: photograms, holography and flat-bed scanners, provide insights into the values of modern art. Although recording images without a camera lens, they all share a similarity to photography. As well as recording objects, they subtly transform their appearance, in different ways that are unique to each method.

Photogram by Man Ray

published in Painting 

Photography Film 

(page 77)

Photograms are cameraless photographs created by placing objects directly onto a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic paper, and exposing the composition to light. Unless reversed by copying, photograms are negatives where exposure to light creates darkness. Because a camera lens is not used, images of objects placed on the film or photographic paper are recorded same size. Photograms are as uncanny as images on a pre-digital radar scope, with potentially recognisable white silhouettes emerging from a dark ground. Photograms are the opposite of picturesque. The brooding darkness of their backgrounds suggests a form of 'technological sublime' (1) that is even more explicit in x-ray pictures.

​Photograms have an ambiguous relationship to the cannon of 'serious' photography as they were often used as an introductory exercise for those learning chemistry-based photography. They were the photographic equivalent of learning scales on a piano, with visible tones instead of musical notes, but they also became associated with modern art. Whereas cameras have been designed to imitate the type of perspective associated with Renaissance painting, the distinctive effects made by photograms aligned with the modernist principle of being "truthful to materials" and the older adage "form follows function".

Anyone who has seen an Anglepoise lamp has experienced these ideas made solid. The car designer George Carwardine invented the iconic desk lamp after researching car suspension systems, creating a functional task lamp that was also attractive in the terms of the Bauhaus-inspired ‘machine aesthetic'. Just as the Anglepoise lamp has a stark beauty arising from the expression of mechanical levers and springs, so a photogram is a rather severe image created by the ability of a photographic emulsion to record the beguiling effects of light passing through translucent objects and around the edges of solids but without the more traditionally pleasing effects of chiaroscuro associated with photographs made with a lens. Objects registered as white shadows are uncanny.

​László Moholy-Nagy included photograms made by himself, and the American photographer Man Ray, in his influential book Painting Photography Film published in 1925 (2) in which he postulated an aesthetic and philosophical revolution called "The New Vision" that would unleash the creative potential of society. He described photograms as "light composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in paintings and sound in music." Light could create "a new kinetic space-time rendering". (3) Moholy-Nagy derided the "Ruskin-Morris circle" who he accused of ignoring the need to harness machine production to meet the 'biological' needs of society. The New Vision was to be based on technology.

Solar eclipse on 29th May 1919 

photographed by Arthur Eddington. 

The observed deflection of 

starlight by gravity confirmed 

Einstein's theory of relativity 

and was reported enthusiastically 

worldwide.

Moholy-Nagy speculated that novel optical systems such as prismatic lenses and cameras able to view objects from multiple positions could surpass cubist painting, but new forms of sculpture would acknowledge Einstein's theory of relativity. Whereas the pictures of Futurism showed a superimposition of the object in a sequence of linear movement and Cubism rendered the object as if it were rotated in space, Moholy-Nagy wanted to 'paint' with "flowing, oscillating, prismatic light, in lieu of pigments" to "allow us a better approach to the new conception of space-time." (4) He made light/kinetic sculptures for the 1936 film Things to Come, although they were eventually not included in the finished production.

​A complete 'phase transition' of society suggested by the concept of The New Vision (5) never happened, but in 1949 a photographic process capable of exploring Moholy-Nagy's fascination with space/time was proposed. The physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor calculated that combining light reflected from an object with light sent directly to a photographic emulsion would create interference patterns from which a fully three-dimensional image, a hologram, could be reconstructed.

Older methods of stereoscopic photography

Moholy-Nagy would have been fascinated

by holography. In The New Vision - 

Abstract of an Artist he wrote about 

neoplasticism and how constructivist artists 

had sprayed very thin, iridescent layers of

paint on polished surfaces, metals and

synthetic materials "..to which the reflecting

layer underneath gives an ethereal fluctuating

appearance..,.The surface becomes a part of

the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background;

it sucks up light phenomena produced outside

itself...." (Page 39) His description sounds rather

like the experience of viewing a hologram.

create the impression of depth but lack a sense of the roundness of objects. Confusingly, both stereoscopy and holography are often referred to as "3D" pictures. For holography to work it is necessary to use light of a single wavelength which was not fully available until the invention of the laser.​ After the first laser-based hologram was made in 1964 the medium's status as an art form was questioned. The invention of photography between 1825 and 1850 was followed by a similar period of speculation as to whether it could be considered art. For critics in the 20th century the issue of photography was resolved by modernism which valued characteristics that are unique to specific media. For painting, the qualities of flatness and colour were regarded as essential modernist qualities. Paradoxically, the mechanical aspects of photography (as opposed to eye/hand skills) that caused art critics to doubt that it was an art form in the 19th Century allowed the medium to claim a special position within modernism.

​Surrealism and abstraction were important developments in modernism but the ability of photography to record images outside human imagination was equally significant. Both the blurring of objects caused by motion in long exposures and the ultra-sharpness of high-speed photography exceed human perception. Similarly, holography initially only seemed to be a kind of photographic sculpture, but at the University of Nottingham the 1970s Margaret Benyon undertook a fellowship in fine art in the mechanical engineering department where she was able to establish a holography studio and explore a unique feature of the medium.

​

Margaret Benyon's 'hot air' hologram.
Column of rising air appears dark and
flat among rounded objects.

To make a successful hologram, the photographic emulsion must receive light directly from a laser as well as light reflected from the objects being recorded. As the interference pattern created in the emulsion is a very precise record of the interaction of the wavefront from the laser and the wavefront modified by the shapes of objects, nothing in the arrangement should move by more than a fraction of the wavelength of the light in use. Benyon discovered that movement as slight as the drying of bread would cause a loaf to appear as a flat, dark silhouette. Experiments confirmed that holograms can register time as well as three dimensions in a single image, as Moholy-Nagy desired half a century earlier. Benyon's most intriguing images recorded the movement of hot air from a cup as flat, dark plumes. Time compresses three dimensions into two. (6)

​Holography made little impact on the art world, either in the exclusive collectors' art market or the more socially orientated public art sector. Perhaps the exploitation of the ability to register tiny movements of objects as 'non-holograms' was one of the last throws of the dice for modernism. Many of the creative techniques of modernist photography can be thought of as qualified failures in that they are departures from the norms of Renaissance art. Blurring caused by motion, depth of field rendering backgrounds out of focus, the compression of perspective by telephoto lenses and the near spherical perspective of fish-eye lenses are all photographic tropes that make a virtue out of the unconventional. Depiction of movement as a black silhouette in an otherwise three- dimensional field is a uniquely holographic, and modernist, characteristic.

The set up for Margaret Benyon's hot air hologram.

The expectation that artists should use characteristics that are unique to the nature of a particular medium, creating artwork that is as much an expression of its physical properties as any subject, has not spread to popular culture. From the earliest days of cinema, painted backdrops were a common feature of filmed illusions. A current trend is towards the increasing use of computer-generated images in films. Additionally, postmodernism has produced an 'anything goes' culture which influences all media. For artists there is the challenge of deciding what not to include or generate, so great are the possibilities afforded by digital technology.

​Flatbed scanners are associated with digital editing of images and postmodern expectations. For anyone wanting to scan a photograph the software that enables the scanner to operate with a computer presents a preview image and offers the user an opportunity to adjust brightness, contrast and colour before the subsequent image is created. Further digital manipulation can contribute to the elision between photography and illustration, where any departure from visual accuracy is accepted if it is made with sincere and obvious intention. Maps and pictures made for manuals or textbooks are expected to dispense with surplus detail for the sake of clarity. Similarly, the routine surveillance of the Earth by satellites is increasingly undertaken by thematic mapping projects that concentrate of specific geophysical information such as ice-cover or vegetation types. The Earth rotates under them as they orbit from pole to pole, rather like the action of a flatbed scanner.

​Scanners use LEDs for illumination combined with multiple detectors arranged together on a single moving bar that sweeps the underside of a glass platen on which documents or objects can be placed. Scanners were not designed to record objects, so their traveling perspective produces distortions caused by parallel projections in the resultant image. Depth of field is about one centimetre and unreflected light creates dark backgrounds. The darkness is similar to 'flash falloff' seen in photographs taken by the light of an electronic flashgun. Photograms, holography and scanners record distance as darkness because they project light in a dynamic way without relying on ambient illumination.

​Unlike human vision, the photogram process, holograms and scanners bombard their subjects with photons. The phrase "suffocating darkness" is revealing because light feels like it belongs to the air that we breathe. Looking up at a blue sky, there is no apparent difference between atmosphere and light. When a cloud uncovers the sun, light enters a room like fine dust falling from the air. The disparity between the searchlight of technology and how we see, influences how our attention to nature becomes divided between science and art. 1970s Land Art (originally called Earth Art) came close to reconciling this difference.

Land Art projects, mostly in remote areas of the United States, were 

Double Negative was excavated by Michael
Heizer in 1969. 240,000 tons of rock was
bulldozed from two sides of a valley wall.
The sculpture is a void that demonstrates
the imposition of geometry on the
landscape,and by implication, the whole
of nature.

created in the 1960s and 1970s. The Earth artists individually embarked on a series of diverse sculptural projects, on the scale of civil engineering, using the material of the landscape itself. One of Robert Smithson's early works exhibited mirrors, rock, gravel and sand in an art gallery. The materials were removed from a distant site where mirrors had also been placed and photographed. The methodology resembled a museum exhibit that had resulted from geology fieldwork. Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) almost functions as a science experiment. At a high-altitude site in New Mexico in the United States, De Maria created a one kilometre by one mile array of polished metal poles placed vertically in the ground 67 metres apart. Lightning is said to "sense" the poles when it is within 61 metres of them. (7)

​Land Art seems to have signified an end to the development of landscape art, but it is possible to consider a return of nature to a central position in contemporary art. Imagine a Venn diagram with nature in art at the centre, surrounded by four circles. Firstly, nature that is revealed by science. Secondly, the tradition of landscape art that represents nature as beautiful, sublime or picturesque. Thirdly, climate change, a new mass extinction period and the expansion of the technosphere (the built environment, mining spoil, farming, solar power collectors etc). Fourthly, ambitious plans such as altering plant genomes to enable them to use more atmospheric carbon dioxide, producing 'meat' protein in bioreactors and the duplication of the energy of the sun in thermonuclear power stations. 

(1) Strip mining (2) Contour ploughing (3) The Palm Jumeirah, Dubai - 5.6 square kilometre land reclamation development. 

The expansion of human activity to encompass the majority of the Earth has supported a massive increase in population. This means that there is no simple way back to a pre-industrial world that existed before the Anthropocene. Behind the concept of 'sustainability' lie complicated choices around the degree of artificial management of biological and Earth systems. 

​​The Anthropocene epoch is so called because humans are now a geological force. We cause global climate change, move more material than river erosion, control three quarters of land not under ice and are also influencing the course of evolution. The image of a self-consistent nature depicted in traditional landscape art is not true in the Anthropocene. Some of the Land Art projects of the last century presaged this new situation. A new direction for art as metaphor for the complicated and problematic interface between nature and technology in the 21st century is available. Rather than attempting to create visual equivalents to the complexity of all environmental issues art could be a sensitised surface that provides opportunities for contemplation of artificiality itself.

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank. 

This painting by Jan Wijnants (active 1643 - 1684)  shows 

the remains of an original coastline resulting from the 

reclamation of land from the sea in Holland. This 

picturesque depiction of one aspect of the technosphere 

may appear to be anachronistic, but the type of cultivated 

landscape familiar from landscape painting is equally 

artificial.

 

(1) Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

​(2) (3) (4) Moholy-Nagy, László, Hans Maria. Wingler, and Janet. Seligman. Painting, Photography, Film. London: Lund Humphries, 1967.

(5) Moholy-Nagy, László The New Vision ; and, Abstract of an Artist. New York: Wittenborn, 1947.

(6) Benthall, Jonathan. Science and Technology in Art Today. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.

(7) Kastner, Jeffrey., and Brian. Wallis. Land and Environmental Art : Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 1998.Page 109.

 

Link to SCANS book on blurb

Lost in Landscape.

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11200757-lost-in-landscape-john-stockton

Attenborough nature reserve in

Nottinghamshire is the result of 

gravel extraction that has left

behind flooded areas that are now 

managed by a wildlife conservation

charity. In this Anthropocene epoch

human activity moves more material

than rivers and glaciers. Humans have

become a geological force. Climate

change means that no corner of the

Earth is unaffected. No landscape

can be though of as truly 'authentic'.     

We are familiar with the possibility of getting lost in a landscape but the Anthropocene epoch, the present time in which humans have effectively overridden nature, presents a way of being metaphorically lost in the increasingly artificial world that we are creating by our own technological power. Ideas of nature are as much a product of imagination as landscape pictures. While we believe that we have a relationship with an objectively real world, there is a race between the discovery of its hidden intricacies and the rate at which agriculture and industry is transforming it. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the relentless replacement of the natural world by the built-environment, agriculture, synthetic biology and waste materials. Humans are responsible for a new mass extinction event. The expansion of agriculture and globalised consumerism is moving the world towards a homogenised biosphere in which the concept of 'invasive species' will no longer be meaningful. Biomass may remain broadly the same as the number of species within it diminishes. Biodiversity is reduced and Earth systems are being pushed to tipping points beyond which they will operate in new and unpredictable ways. 

The tradition of western landscape art has been complicit in this process. 

Bucolic landscape scenes depicted actual landscapes as constructed 

Flatford Mill c 1816 John Constable

The son of a wealthy corn merchant,

Constable's early paintings exhibit an

affection for the area in which he lived.

His landscapes belong to an era when

commerce was on such a small scale

it could operate in sympathy with nature.

Today, his paintings are part of a nostalgia

'industry' of which tourism is a very real

economic part. Hill farming subsidies

in the UK are partly paid to maintain

farms in the appearance made familiar by

landscape art. The grazing on hill farms

keeps the land free from vegetation that 

would help to reduce flooding and absorb 

carbon dioxide.

achievements that were a combination of providence and virtuous labour. The picturesque sub-genre of landscape art provides a dream of nature, in which the desire to exploit the landscape operates in harmony with a reduced form of wilderness in the form of woods and distant hills. Within landscape art there is no real difference between agriculture and nature.  This still popular aesthetic of the picturesque landscape picture (painted or photographed) suggests that as long as there are a few corners of the world that are still wild, all will be well. Actually, the impact of human activity on Earth systems occurs on a scale that is outside the scope of any single picture. Carbon dioxide emissions are not only increasing global temperatures, they are also acidifying oceans. Methane emissions from cattle also act as a greenhouse gas. It is possible that humans are now driving evolution and creating some new species as well as pushing many more to extinction. Inevitably technology in the 21st century will be used to try to navigate the Anthropocene. Attempts to use genetic engineering to modify not just crops but entire ecosystems to cope with climate change are being considered. The genes that control photosynthesis may be changed so that more carbon dioxide is removed from the air. Machines to capture the gas and store it underground already exist. Nostalgic landscape art is no longer a reflection of life.

Since the iconic Picture 51 x-ray

diffraction photograph was made

by Rosalind Franklin in 1952 the

discovery of the structure of DNA,

which the picture enabled, has resulted

in the invention of genome editing 

technology which will alter plants to

use more carbon dioxide from the air.

Eventually entire ecosystems could be

altered, either to help plants cope with

climate change or to try to return 

atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-

industrial values.

The 21st century needs a new genre of art that contemplates the changing distinction between the natural world and technology as well as acknowledging that the 'technological sublime' is now as eloquent as 'sublime nature' was in Edmund Burke's time. The extent to which contemporary art is characterised by detachment, coolness and irony is unhelpful in this direction. The expectation that minimalism can distill the essence of what is significant into a few lines or shapes goes unfulfilled. Visual art could provide a critical context to the exercise of control over nature by creating opportunities for contemplation and reverie and to momentarily step back from the language of institutions, writers and journalists. Landscapes will change as livestock becomes less prominent in agriculture. Opposing practices of permaculture versus intensive agriculture, including industrialised 'vertical farming' and the production of cultured meat in bioreactors, will probably operate at the same time in different places. While permaculture aims to reduce the impact of food production on nature, paradoxically, industrialised farming concentrated in smaller areas opens the possibility of rewilding and the return of farmland to carbon-sink wetland. Wind and solar energy will become

There is no guarantee that thermonuclear

fusion can be used as a source of electricity.

If a way of harnessing the heat released by

fusing protons together is found it could be

the most significant technical innovation 

since the discovery of how to make fire. 

Fusion power would not eliminate the need

for solar, tidal, geothermal and wind energy,

but the surplus capacity could be used to 

mechanically extract carbon dioxide from

the atmosphere, liquefy it and store it 

underground. Whoever controlled access to 

these underground stores would effectively

have their hand on the 'global thermostat'.

In some distant future the gas could be

released to negate the onset of an ice-age.

 more common. Controlled thermonuclear fusion, if it works, will effectively create artificial suns on Earth.  The diffusing boundary between naturalness and artifice will be the most important subject for art in the 21st century, creating the impetus for a new aesthetic in art as almost the entire world becomes a kind of walled garden with wilderness confined to ever-decreasing pockets - an exact reversal of the medieval hortus conclusus or ancient paradeisos.     

  

A winter garden under cover painted by Franz Antoine in 1852.

The glass-enclosed space is perhaps the ultimate form of a garden

in which the air itself is protected from cold.

Before landscape art evolved from narrative driven history 

painting, walled gardens such as the European Hortus Conclusus

and the  Paradeisos of Egypt and Persia were culturally important

means of maintaining a shared understanding and interpretation

of nature. The ordering of space can serve as metaphor for the 

construction of meaning in general, and the creation of a garden

is specifically symbolic of a belief in an underlying order behind

nature.

A paradox of our age is that although our arrangements of fields,

orchards and herb gardens were created to save what we value

from harm, it is wilderness that is now in need of protection. 

Humans now manage 75% of land that is not ice-bound. What

was once thought of as threatening is now itself in danger. It can

now be understood that although uncultivated nature was once 

seen as randomness it is in fact composed of dynamic 

relationships of organisms in complex ecological communities.

The future will bring increasing ability to alter nature. Genome

editing, synthetic biology and possibly nano-technology that

will join atoms together to form new compounds without chemical

reactions, will define the 21st century. It is over ambitions to 

expect art to reflect all of this, but the active border between 

nature and technology, the actual location of choices, will be 

a subject as significant as landscape was from the 17th century

to the 19th century. Metaphorically, the point of contact between 

nature and technology will be like a weather front dividing 

air-masses. This active zone of interaction will give rise to the 

most interesting art.

• 
  
• 
  
• LOST IN LANDSCAPE
• ISBN
  • Hardcover, Dust Jacket: 9798210452474
  • Hardcover, ImageWrap: 9798210452467
  • Softcover: 9798210452450
  • 
    

                                    https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11200757-lost-in-landscape-john-stockton

Utopias - 6 Landscape In the Anthropocene.

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/8713591-utopias-6

Alexander von Humboldt has been described as the last scientist

Climatic regions made explicit by isotherms,
now also used to map weather.

who knew everything. After his death in 1859 the volume of knowledge of nature became too great for one person to comprehend. Amongst his many achievements, he invented isothermal lines for climatic maps. Isolines enable us to map aspects of nature that are invisible and extend beyond the horizon or the scope of a landscape picture. Since the time of Humboldt, science has continued to advance and now researchers know more and more about ever narrower fields of study while the scientific account of nature has reached a point that exceeds popular understanding and shared belief.

The industrial revolution made this happen by providing the 
technology and instruments that could interrogate nature. The 

Punched cards used to
record patterns for a
Jacquard loom.

conceptualisation of nature in the west evolved within a circular exchange of ideas between science, technology and culture. Jacquard looms coincided with speculation about the existence of genes. In the 20th century photography made time appear to stand still and pass more quickly or slowly. radio connected distant lands and aeroplanes soared above landscapes that could be read as revealed geology, but then nuclear

Aerial photograph - USAF.

physics and the space race caused this narrative arc to break contact with perceptible nature and ordinary lives.

In this information age computers and gene-editing technology allow simulations of Earth systems and the transformation of

data realisation of Earth systems and gene editing

biology, but art struggles to adapt to our changed relationship to nature. From the 16th century onwards oil paint was the medium that allowed landscape painters to depict the solidity of nature that could be owned as garden, farm, estate or empire. The idea of a tangible nature was so sincerely believed in that the earliest attempt at producing a periodic table of elements included heat and light.

Periodic table of elements

Dimitri Mendeleev's revised periodic table was created in 1869 just

as impressionist painters were starting to explore the ephemeral effects of light. The pictorial dissolution of material certainty that was a feature of modern art presaged Einstein's theories of relativity but, despite a brief dalliance between cubism and relativity, 20th century art ignored new knowledge of nature from science. However, architecture embraced ideas from engineering. Whereas classicism had inspired

The entrance to the front of the

administrative office building in 

the Werkbund Exhibition at 

Cologne 1914 (a)

Strowger electro-mechanical exchange 

monumental constructions, modernist architects saw buildings as structural frames potentially open to light; bridges over inhabited space. (1) The utility of vertical and horizontal planes in modernist architecture reflect the movements of selectors in a 1930s electro-mechanical telephone exchange. 

Whether surrounded by racks of equipment in a telephone exchange or moving between the rollers of a printing press to change the plates, the workers of the 20th century were no longer standing beside machines but were inside them.

Overlapping with the emergence of modern art, the scale and power of industry began to rival that of nature. The move from purely mechanical to electrically powered machinery subtly changed inhabited landscapes by altering the relationship between

The Siedlung of working-class dwellings at 

Dessau. (b)

settlements and sources of energy and water. Although towns and cities established on fall-lines and coalfields still exist, the new places of the 20th century were freed from reliance on nature by electricity and pumped water.

The inexorable logic of the grid that came from latitude and

longitude was applied to the layout of cities such as post Haussmann Paris and New York. In his adopted home

Composition in Yellow, Blue and Red - 

Piet Mondrian - Museum of Modern Art, 

New York.

Piet Mondrian found inspiration in the grid layout of New York and the popular boogie-woogie music that was itself influenced by mechanical player-pianos. The punched-paper rolls that recorded musical notes were a successor to the Jacquard loom controlled by programmed cards. As Mondrian was abstracting nature into blocks of colour the first experimental television cameras were dissecting scenes into lines of light and dark.

Television 1938

Vertical scan yelevision

19th century 'Magic Lantern' slide projections and cinema were the first media to depend on artificial light.  Analogue Televisions glow with their own internal light even when no signal from a camera is present. By substituting a signal from a computer it became possible to create moving images of fictional or simulated events from mathematics in the 1980s. Simulations of Earth systems more ambitious than anything imagined by Alexander von Humboldt are now routinely generated. Susan Sontag's prediction ( towards a new sensibility -  against interpretation 1965 ) that a new cultural form  bridging the divide between science and art is now a distinct possibility, and in the context of the Anthropocene, a necessity.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Motivated by a desire to achieve a universal system of aesthetics Modrian's progression from impressionistic landscape pictures, through increasingly abstracted work, ended with geometric compositions that did not depend on seeing nature at all. (2) Paradoxically, science was already extending vision into the realms of the microscopic and the invisible; x-rays, infra-red, radio(radar) and  sound (sonar).

Cosmic Ray Shower

Mondrian's ambitious attempt at culminating the debate about beauty, that had engaged artists since the time of Plato and Aristotle, emulated scientific reductionism which had promised to unwrap the  complexity of nature. Science replaced mysterious correspondences within alchemy and astrology by the bold assertion that all of nature was a manifestation of just four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.

A deep simplicity underlying the intricate appearances of the world has been an appealing idea since Paleotithic cave paintings of animal-beings and the use of water features in Persian gardens to symbolise the mythical four rivers of creation. The Pharaoh Akhenaten's replacement of polytheism by the worship of the sun god Aten changed the personification of natural forces towards a nascent form of natural philosophy.

The contemporary poem of praise to the sun reveals an intuitive

.

.Above - Akhenaton,Nefertiti,and three daughters

Poem in Praise if the Sun
."When you arise from the horizon the earth grows bright;

You shine as the Aten in the sky and drive away the darkness;

When your rays gleam forth, the whole of Egypt is festive.

People wake up and stand on their feet

For you have lifted them up.

They wash their limbs and take up their clothes and dress;

They raise their arms to you in adoration.

Then the whole of the land does its work;

All cattle enjoy their pastures,

Trees and plants grow green,

Birds fly up from their nests

And raise their wings in praise of their spirit.

Goats frisk on their feet,

And all fluttering and flying things come alive.

Because you shine on them.

Boats sail up and downstream,

All ways are opened because you have appeared.

The fish in the river leap up to you

Your rays are in the deep of the sea."...

understanding of how life temporarily diverts energy that is flowing from a place of concentration. The poem's evocative description of the fecundity of life, emanating from the sun, is ascribed to Aten. Amalgamating the organising powers of previous demoted gods, Aten was an early explanation of what came to be regarded as nature. After echoing through Classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance cultures the imagination of nature evolved via history painting into a commodity with a wider audience than that of portraiture and without reliance on the patronage of the church. In the Dutch Golden Age the merchant class could express their status through a taste for portraits of nature.

Landscape art established a relationship to nature like that of the gardener who tends to specific plants. The landscape painter selected a view of nature that could imply ideas of beauty, grandeur, order, virtue, security or adventure by gathering together images of trees, rivers and mountains into a specific composition.

For landscape art to succeed aesthetically and commercially it was important for these elements garnered from the world to be placed within a recognisable spectrum of taste, from picturesque Arcadia to sublime wilderness.

Wooded landscape 
with figures walking 
Manchester Art Gallery
Polders

A Dutch painting Wooded landscape with figures walking by a sandy bank by Jan Wijnants (1632 -1684) is a picturesque scene featuring a transformed former coastline left behind by the exclusion of the sea from a polder. Wijnants left us with one of the earliest painted records of the Anthropocene, our present epoch in which nature and artifice are interacting to create a world without true wilderness and with                                           new challenges.

Large scale land reclamation from the sea coincided with a new

attitude to nature. Whereas the Greek poet Hesiod had imagined

that a process of decline caused a Golden Age to be lost to a Silver Age and then a Bronze age etc, by the time of the industrial

    The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' 

    Stone imagines the discovery of phosphorous.

revolution Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was visualising the optimism of scientific rationalism. Wright used what could now be called film noir lighting in dramatic scenes of experiments 
witnessed by awed onlookers. As well as painting fashionably sublime pictures he created Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' Stone and An Iron Forge in which sunlight is replaced by the artificial light of phosphorous and incandescent metal. In the 21st century, after the enthusiasm for the 'white heat of technology' has cooled, the Anthropocene has cast a more searching critique of technology and nature to which art is starting to respond.(3)

An Iron Forge 

Joseph Wright paintings at Derby Museuems

(1) (a) (b) GROPIUS, Walter. The New Architecture of the Bauhaus. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. (1965, 1968.)

(2) Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art Vol. 13, No. 4/5, Eleven Europeans in America (1946), pages 35 - 37.

(3) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments & Epistemologies editor Davis, H, Turpi, E . Open Humanities Press.

Utopias 6 on Blurb

Portfolio on Blurb

John Stockton Art on Facebook.

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