Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1890 This is a photo I took on my phone of a painting in the Tate's superb Cézanne exhibition. I won't attempt to discuss this exhibition (you can read Laura Cumming); instead I will talk about T. J. Clark's book about the artist, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present which I recently read. I thought I might try to distil here some of what he says about the landscape paintings, although as ArtForum's reviewer Joseph Henry points out in his review, the book 'confirms that Clark should rarely be read for his “takeaways” or “arguments ..read more

Today I found myself lying in bed with a cold, listening to an old album by Steven R. Smith, Autumn is the End (1998). The record label describes this as 'an instrumental soundtrack for more introspective moments, when time seems to wind itself down, and one gains opportunity for perspective on the landscape.' Smith was one of the Californian Jewelled Antler collective of musician/artists who often recorded outdoors and drew inspiration from nature. Last year Aquarium Drunkard had a feature by Brent Sirota on Jewelled Antler, which was originally a CD-R label founded by Loren Chasse and Glen ..read more

  It was good to be able to visit London's Small Publishers Fair again last month, where I have found various unusual landscape-related books in the past (five years ago, for example, it was some Scots translations of classical Chinese poems). If this event had been going in the 1920s it might have had a stall for The Vine Press of Steyning, run by the poet and former acolyte of Aleister Crowley, Victor Neuburg. Justin Hopper has recently put together an anthology, Obsolete Spells, providing samples from these books and a short biography of Neuburg (whose other claim to fame was 'discove ..read more

M. K. Čiurlionis, My Road I-III, 1907 Dulwich Picture Gallery has frequently provided material for this blog - see my earlier posts on Adam Elsheimer (2006), Paul Nash (2010), Salvator Rosa (2010), Tom Thomson (2011), James McNeill Whistler (2013), Emily Carr (2015), Eric Ravilious (2015), Adriaen van der Velde (2016), Tove Jansson (2018), Edward Bawden (2018) and Harald Sohlberg (2019). Yesterday we went to see their new show devoted to M. K. Čiurlionis, the Lithuanian artist-composer whose work I described here ten years ago. I was looking forward to seeing Fuga (1908), the striking semi-ab ..read more

  I remembered how from the air the valleys, hills and rivers gained a certain distinction but wholly lost that quality which is perceived by a countryman whose day's travel is bounded by the earth of three of four meadows, and whose view for most of his life may be constricted by some local rising of the ground. In the air there is no feeling or smell of earth, and I have often observed that the backyards of houses or the smoke curling up through cottage chimneys, although at times they seem to have a certain pathos, do as a rule, when one is several thousand feet above them, appear bo ..read more

Isamu Noguchi, Double Red Mountain, 1968   I instinctively liked this sculpted landscape in the Barbican's Isamu Noguchi exhibition because of its beautiful colour and the texture of the marble. I tried to imagine owning such an object, but as usual found it impossible to conceive of an artwork surviving long in our messy house before being submerged under junk mail, coffee mugs and discarded clothes. Noguchi is certainly easy to criticise and Jonathan Jones was scathing in his review: 'what struck me most is how nice these objects would look in a smart luxury house or apartment. Noguchi ..read more

  Eugène Delacroix, Sunset, c. 1850 I have been reading the Journals of Eugène Delacroix in a lovely, pristine Folio edition I found in a secondhand bookshop in York (the selections were originally translated by Lucy Norton for Phaidon in 1951). Most of what Delacroix writes about concerns art - how to achieve the effects he wants and admires in great artists of the past like Rubens and Titian. Landscape art as such was not a particular concern for him, although he was always looking at the way other artists painted skies, trees and waves. The appeal of the journals is the way they mix hi ..read more

December's Wire magazine included an interesting 'Aeolian Harp Music 15' chart compiled by Irish experimental musician Natalia Beylis. There is no explanatory text, just the list, but a bit more info on a Dublin Digital Radio mixcloud site: 'I went to buy a theremin off a retired plumber in Clare. He toured me through his workshop of trinkets & said "I'm building an aeolian harp inspired by this fellow" & showed me a copy of an lp by Sverre Larssen. Back at home, I fell down a windharp rabbit hole & put this show together...' You can listen to the Sverre Larssen album shown above ..read more

Albrecht Dürer, Trintberg - Dosso di Trento, 1495   I recently visited the National Gallery's Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, which I had been looking forward to all year, although I was forewarned that it would be a disappointment by Laura Cummings' Guardian review. She notes that  There is no clear chronology and barely any discernible narrative. The show feels on the one hand congested – too many passengers on board – and on the other, lacking in the forcefield presence of the German master. A humdrum portrait medal of Dürer, instead of a single one of his man ..read more

 Thomas Gainsborough, A View in Suffolk, c.1746 In 2017 Lindsay Stainton discovered that an album of 25 drawings in the Royal Collection were the work of the young Thomas Gainsborough. They are currently on show at York Art Gallery. These views may have been influenced by Dutch painting but they also reflect a deep engagement with the patterns and shapes of trees and paths near Gainsborough's home. I particularly enjoyed seeing his experimentation with different techniques. In the example below, he uses black and white chalk, sharpened and held in a porte-crayon. The curators note that ..read more