LANDSCAPE

For me the art of landscape is also the art of time. Nothing looks more removed from the world of words, of messages and of morals than an unpeopled landscape. However, the cultures and people I have encountered while travelling through those same landscapes, serve as a constant reminder that trees and flowers, animals and stones have long been invested with religious and mythological powers -- where mountains might reach towards some empyrean paradise -- all are permeated by a sacred presence or promise often leading to a reassuring sense of proximity to sanctity, to eternity, to divinity for the traveler.

In art or reality, I believe the emotional response to landscape becomes ever more keenly felt with time. Age sensitizes the eye to the pace of natures change, to the pathos of the blighted tree, the heedless damage of the rushing torrent, to what Germans refer to as "the tooth of time". But there's also a heightened sense of nature's beauty despite time's bite, of the miracle of light from sun, moon or stars, reflected by water or filtered through clouds' passage -- an essential reminder of a something else, a somewhere else, or a someone else.