Category: landscape

The Canal

Photographer Unknown, Venice Canal

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you’ve got to swallow this morning, you feel it’s not over for you yet.

No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you’ve been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it’s time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air.”

-Joseph Brodsky

 

Witold Ziomek

Witold Ziomek, “Waterfall”, 2017

Witold Ziomek ia a photogrpher from Kraków, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland. This photograph of a solitary figure dwarfed by a waterfall in Iceland was the wnner in the 2017 Chromatic Discovery of the Year category. The Chromatic Awards is a celebration of color photography annual contest. There were over 3000 entries across 20 categories from 75 countries in 2017.

David Hockney

David Hockney, “Pearblossom Hwy. 11- 18th April 1986, #2″, Chromogenic Print, J. Paul Getty Museum

“Pearblossom Highway (the painting) shows a crossroads in a very wide open space, which you only get a sense of in the western United States… . [The] picture was not just about a crossroads, but about us driving around. I’d had three days of driving and being the passenger. The driver and the passenger see the road in different ways. When you drive you read all the road signs, but when you’re the passenger, you don’t, you can decide to look where you want. And the picture dealt with that: on the right-hand side of the road it’s as if you’re the driver, reading traffic signs to tell you what to do and so on, and on the left-hand side it’s as if you’re a passenger going along the road more slowly, looking all around. So the picture is about driving without the car being in it.”     – David Hockney

Thus David Hockney described the circumstances leading to the creation of this photocollage of the scenic Pearblossom Highway north of Los Angeles. His detailed collage reveals the more mundane observations of a road trip. The littered cans and bottles and the meandering line where the pavement ends and the sand begins point to the interruption of the desert landscape by the roads cutting through it and the imprint of careless travelers.

Wenzel Hablik

Wenzel Hablik, “Gewitter an der Stör”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, Dimensions Unknown, Wenzel Hablik Museum, Itzehoe, Germany

Wenzel August Hablik was a graphic artist, painter architect, designer and craftsman associated with the German Expressionism movement. He was trained as a master cabinetmaker in Vienna and Prague; however, when he settled in Itzehoe he pursued architectual and interior design projects. He produced designs for furniture, textiles, jewelry and wallpapers.

He is best known for his etchings and paintings and his links with the major German Expressionist movements and figures, including the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst and The Glass Chain. In 1909 he published his “Schaffende Kräfte” (Creative Forces), a portfolio of twenty etchings of crystaline structures.  His visual art is known for its highly imaginative aspects.

Ho Thuy Tien Water Park

Ho Thuy Tien Water Park, Huong Thuy, Vietnam

Ho Thuy Tien is an abandoned water park in central Vietnam. Opened in 2004 at a price tag of three million US dollars provided by Company Hue Tourism, the water park was only partially completed. Within a few years, the business experienced problems and shortages of funds. As recently as 2013, plans were made to turn it into an eco-park; but these plans never reached fruition. Located eight kilometers outside of the town of Huong Thuy, it now exists as a overgrown jungle purgatory between worlds- with a sometimes quasi-guard at the gate collecting “admission” to the site.