Don 't expect valuable journeys to be easy<.
72. Frcdcric F.dwin Church. The Iceberg, 1891
Remembering Nature
The Importance of the South
Anticipating Autumn
The Sense of What is Beautiful
Nature
The New Artists of Nature
We are so familiar with the idea that nature is attractive that it can be a struggle to recollect that often in the history of humanity, and in our own experience too, it hasn't seemed at all obvious that it is worth admiring. Occasionally (to a hard-pressed Scottish crofter, for example), the natural world may have felt like the enemy, but mostly it's not that we dislike nature, just that other concerns are more pressing or immediately rewarding. There are plenty of reminders of the appeal of nature: perhaps a photograph of the Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina, or a postcard of the Jungfrau mountain seen from a lush Alpine valley. These can be immediately seductive, but if we are asked to expand on why they matter to us, what their meaning in our lives should be, it can be surprisingly hard to give a proper answer. Our encounters with nature can be poignant because they remind us that nature is something we are always meaning to get more interested in, but rarely get around to actually attending to.
We have psychological frailties connected with looking at nature. Nature itself is not articulate about its powers, while we are unable to isolate its best parts and do not always accept the significance of the experiences we have in its presence. For help, here too we can turn to art.
Art is a record of good observation and encourages us to follow its spirit, even if only a few of us end up replicating its products. For three decades, the British artist Hamish Fulton has been recording his walks around different parts of the world, listing their time, place, route and the prevailing meteorological conditions (73). These are written up in solemn fonts on large, framed prints, some many metres high and wide. The effect is incongruous. We expect this sort of treatment for the commemoration of a battle or the efforts of a national government. That it is merely a walk by an ordinary citizen is an argument for us to reconsider the value of this sort of activity. Fulton doesn't tell us what he thought about or felt when he left the northern suburbs of Kyoto on foot and made a circuit of Mount Hiei. We are left - intriguingly - to imagine. His concern is more elemental. The august, refined lettering and the short, precise statements of his work conveys the dignity he rightly feels that his walks, and ours, deserve. He wants us to recognize that some walks Con a circuit of ancient paths') can be central events in our lives; our inner transitions assisted by our outer wanderings.
Remembering Nature
The project of according prestige to our encounters with nature is further developed by more representational works that guide our perception in greater detail. In his small painting Л Rising Path, Corot is doing with precision what Fulton was pursuing in outline with his
TEN ONE DAY WALKS FROM AND TO KYOTO TRAVELLING BY WAY OF MOUNT HIEI WALKING ROUND THE HILL ON A CIRCUIT OF ANCIENT PATHS FIVE DAYS WEST TO NORTH TO EAST TO SOUTH TO WEST
FIVE DAYS WEST TO SOUTH TO EAST TO NORTH TO WEST
JAPAN JULY 1994
Making more of a fuss about going for a walk - in a good way.
73. Hamish Fulton. Ten One Day Walks front and to Kyoto. 1994. 1996
FULL MOON
memorial statement (74). He too is pointing to the significance of nature, but at the same time he can show us what exactly it was about the path and the surrounding greenery that touched him.
A painter does not just reproduce whatever happens to be around; given the limitations of the canvas, there is no option but to emphasize certain features and omit others, which allows the attention of the viewer to be directed in specific ways. Corot gets us to appreciate a sense of enclosure; we feel the grassy hill rising above us and we are alive to the stillness. He likes the rocks either side of the sandy path and the scrubby vegetation, so these are given prominence. Note also what he leaves out: there are few sharp accents of focus, no precise leaf shapes, no small stones on the road. Corot is saying that it was the overall atmosphere and character of the place that enchanted him. and that he hopes will delight us too. In other words, Corot, like any good landscape artist, is trying to define - and hence help us understand - what it was about an aspect of nature that seduced him.
We can get a clearer sense of how many ways there are of looking at and loving nature by contrasting Corofs way of painting with that of another great artist (75). It is clear that Claude loves the countryside too, and shares a few broad interests with Corot; they both like bushes and hills and slightly cloudy skies. Claude, though, is particularly interested in distance. He likes glimpsing a horizon through a cluster of trees. The juxtaposition of near and far enchants him. He delights in the unfolding of layer upon layer of ridges and lines of hills that become more and more blue and hazy until they grow almost indistinguishable from the sky at dusk or dawn.
What we call the style of a landscape artist is a record of the aspects he or she focused on in nature. The aim of looking at art is not to teach us to respond exactly as a given artist did. Rather, we should be inspired by his or her underlying method, which means that we should work out what we particularly like about a given stretch of nature, take our experiences there seriously and be selective in our enthusiasms, so that nature can become a more enduring and therapeutic force within our imaginations.
London in the winter of 1949 was sombre and challenging. The weather was unremittingly damp, the economy was in crisis, food was rationed and large parts of the city remained scarred by wartime bombing. An unhappily married, thirty-six-year-old aristocratic ex-actress had recently returned to the capital and was having a particularly bad time of it. She had spent the war years in the south of France, Greece and Egypt, and, now settled in a draughty flat in Chelsea, she reported feeling an 'agonized craving for the sun; by which she meant not just the climate but the people, lifestyle and architecture of the Mediterranean. Her longings focused on food. While people in London were being served 'flour-and-water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in-the- hole,' she was dreaming of paella, cassoulet, apricots, ripe green figs, the white ewes' milk cheeses of Greece, thick, aromatic Turkish coffee, herb- scented kebabs, zuppa dipesce, spaghetti alle vongole and fried zucchini.
Elizabeth David expressed her sensory desires in a series of articles and recipes for Harper's Bazaar, which were then collected into her first published work, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950). She would go on to write a succession of beguiling and influential recipe books including French Country Cooking, Italian Food, Summer Cooking, and French Provincial Cooking. When she died in 1992, Auberon Waugh remarked, without intended hyperbole, that she was the writer who had single- handedly brought about the greatest improvement in English life in the twentieth century.