Lights and Water from James Adamson on Vimeo.
Who would have thought that an out of focus lens could produce such an engaging video?
Interesting feature on the Radio 4 travel show, Excess Baggage. Jeremy Poolman cites Isaac Levitan‘s painting as the inspiration for his book about the Vladimirka Road.
A note from the muistardeaux collective:
Isaac Ilyich Levitan, August 30, 1860 – August 4, 1900.
Born in Kybartai shtetl, Kaunas, Lithuania, to a rabbi’s son. His Moscow School of Painting fellow student, Nikolai Chekhov, introduced him to brother Anton, who became the artist’s lifelong friend. Levitan excelled in the landscape of mood, wherein nature is spiritualized (whatever that means). His melancholic, pastoral landscapes, painted en plein air, have few or no people… His Evening on the Volga (1887-88), with its little boats on the shore, slate-blue water across which is a low mountain range, clouds and pale sky, has been labeled “the visible as a starting point for contemplation of the invisible,” i.e., the destiny of Russia.
Vladimirka Road (1892), the main highway for Siberia-bound exiles, contrasts nature’s immensity with man’s insignificance. Both sky and water are juxtaposed in Evening Church Bells (1892) and Over (or Above) Eternal Peace (1894), the latter contrasting the might of the universe with man’s transitory life. … Levitan spent his last year at Anton Chekhov’s Crimean house, not finishing Lake (1900), which he also called Rus’, thereby suggesting the embodiment of the Russian landscape, people, and history.
More information:
- more paintings by Isaac Levitan – tanais.info
- ‘L’Art russe dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, review in The Financial Times
- the Vladimirka’s modern incarnation - the M7, the Volga Highway
Map of the Volga river:
The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry
Imagination is the ability to enter someone else’s mind. To penetrate another’s experience. To feel what another feels: to see the world as they see it, to suffer their pain, participate in their sins and in their triumphs, loves, fears and hopes. Imagination is a product of memory and sympathy. Some have it, just as some have perfect pitch or athletic hand-eye coordination. Or maybe some can be trained to have it, I don’t know. A paradox is that it seems harder to penetrate one’s own mind, participate in one’s own experience and discover one’s own feelings than those of another. You might find it easier genuinely to imagine what it is to be a Guatemalan coffee grower or a Siberian oil-pipe welder, really to see the world as they see it, smell it, understand it and experience it, than to imagine what is like to be yourself, the reader of this sentence, the owner of your own eyes and personality.
August 03, 2008|Liesl Bradner
STARING out a car window while stuck in traffic is an everyday annoyance that may seemingly have no redeeming artistic elements. Elizabeth Patterson was intrigued by this dreary act and, upping the ante, turned her sights to what was actually on the windshield during sporadic Southern California rain showers.
The resulting colored pencil and graphite drawings are based on photos of L.A. streets shot through her car’s windshield.
The Pennsylvania native received accolades early in her career, but her artistic pursuits were abruptly halted by a severe injury to her drawing hand. Years later, she traveled to Hawaii and discovered the magnificence of the undersea world. The visual stimulation, along with realization that her drawing hand was functional, inspired her to resurrect her art career.
It reminded me a of a recent discussion of John Updike’s ‘pointilist description’ of raindrops on a windscreen at Paper Cuts.
Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would
abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window
screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly
solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of
rain.