I came by plane:
During take off and landing a young man imitates a sheep. The English mates laugh loud and drink another beer.

Countryside also means living with animals and monsters.
We said before the rural is (can be) a cruel place. Going for details, difference and preciseness is what I needed when I left myvillage to study elsewhere. The Lake District is such a different place, don’t get it at all. This English people look quite familiar to me, but I have not idea where I am. This place is also cruel but in a touristy way: it is over marketed and over signed. Tourist places can make me very moody, we are lucky it is not the season. Where are we? Grizedale Arts, Lawson Park what is it?

After the first –one day- visit to Lawson Park (September 2006) I bought the book “the lamp of beauty’ by John Ruskin and was occupied with this book and especially with his opinion on Dutch Landscape. “Dutch Light” is read as a disinterest in the lower live. Ruskin: “I should attach greater importance to this rural feeling [in Dutch landscape] if there were any true humanity in it, or any feeling of beauty. But there is neither. No incidents of this lower life are painted for the sake of the incidents, but only for the effects of the light. You will find that the Dutch painters do not care about this people, but about the lustres on them. Paulus Potter, their best herd and cattle painter, does not care even for sheep, but only for wool; regards not cows, but cowhide. He attains great dexterity in drawing tufts and locks. Lingers in the little parallel ravines and furrows of fleece that open across sheep’s back as they turn; is unsurpassed in twisting a horn or pointing a nose; but he cannot paint eyes, nor perceive any conditions of an animals mind, except it’s desire of grazing. Cuyp can indeed paint sunlight, the best that Holland’s sun can show; he is a man of large natural gift, and sees broadly, nay, even seriously; finds out – a wonderful thing for men to find out in those days - that there are reflections in water, and that boats require often to be painted upside down. A brewer by trade, he feels the quite of a summer afternoon and his work will make you marvellously drowsy. It is good for nothing else that I know of; strong; but unhelpful and unthoughtful. Nothing happens in this picture, except some indifferent person asking the way of somebody else, who by this cast of countenance, seems not likely to know is. For further entertainment perhaps, a red cow and a white one; or puppies at play, not playfully; the mans heart not even with the puppies. Essentially he sees nothing than the shine on the flaps of their ears.”
I like to look at the Dutch light, I like the passion for the lower life in the critic of Ruskin, I like the signs and the postcards that sell the landscapes of the Lake District, and for the same price I can hate them. Moods and opinions are shifting by looking at these things. The good thing is that we still can see the paintings of Cuyp and Potter. They are material. Looking at material and dealing with things I like that in art. That you can walk away and the thing is still there and when you come back, you have to deal with the thing again.
Lets see what objects can do to us and how we can differentiate our views and acts by using them – rethink resee reuse reshape re re rethings

Posted by Wapke Feenstra on 12/05/07 at 21:07 : 0 Comments