Eye‐opener: Drawing landscape near and far

Abstract

This paper is about learning to see the world anewbut also about doubting and qualifying that newness. Drawing on a practice-led art-geography collaboration, in which en plein air painting and drawing was the primary medium, it aims to further extend understandings of the affective spatialities of landscape. The paper offers a sequence of extended reflections on the phenomenologies and materialities of the perceptual experience of landscape drawing. After initial discussion of this work's location and germination, a first substantive section investigates the spaces of the canvas itself. Subsequently, the core and culmination of the paper consists of an account of this form of landscape experience, organised around two headings: "Drawn into the world" and "So near and yet so far." The concluding section of the paper consolidates its arguments in respect of theories of landscape specifically, and also comments on the paper's relation to current work in creative geographies.creativity, distance, drawing, landscape, painting, phenomenology | INTRODUCTIONThis paper is about learning to draw, sketch and paint outdoors, en plein air. It aims to show how working through these practices, and reflecting on them in writing, can be a means of hopefully extending current understanding of the spatialities and affectivities of landscape in geography, and in cognate disciplines such as cultural anthropology, visual studies and performance studies. The paper is thus about learning to encounter and see landscape anew. But it is equally about working through and qualifying that sense of newness. I am especially interested here in further investigating landscape as a particular form of affective spatiality, a visual and haptic experience which, from the outset, enrols human and non-human, hands and eyes, one and many, the lived and the abstract. To anticipate later arguments, this is a sense of landscape as perhaps sometimes near and intimate, but as always nonetheless in some way distant.I am writing in the first person, but the wider project I am drawing on here was strongly collaborative and dialogical in nature, and this is a co-authored paper. This project was a year-long collaboration with a contemporary visual artist, Catrin Webster, in which, among other activities, we undertook a practice-led inquiry into the relationship between en plein air painting and drawing, and conceptualisations of landscape, visuality, materiality and relationality (Figure 1). 1 When I say practice-led, what I mean is that, over the course of a year, we regularly sat together side-by-side outdoors drawing and conversing; talking about technique, about light, shadow, line, depth, colour and so on, but talking together also about differing accounts of painting and drawing from visual arts traditions, from within cultural geography, and more widely from phenomenological, poststructural and new materialist writings. If I adopt a first-person voice here, it is first to try to convey more directly the in situ, dialogical and experiential character of t...

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