dreamscape links & quotes, a random selection
Afterlife Cemetery: A photo documentary of a Victorian-era Streatham cemetery in London. Dreamy, haunting, moving. Photos, some slightly animated, and music. Above the photo, there’s a line listing the seasons; click a season, and to see more photos from that season, click the small crosses that follow the list. Winter has the most landscape photos. Adobe Flash must be enabled.
Fairy Tales: Artist Didier Massard’s “Fairy Tales” imaginary landscapes are also haunting and slightly surreal. There’s an interview with him at this Dec. 2007 The Morning News link.
“‘I’ve never seen anything like this landscape before,’ Lindman said. ‘Not in the west, not up in Härjedalen. Here Sweden simply slopes down to the sea and ends. All this mud and fog. It’s very strange. I’m trying to find my feet in a landscape that’s completely alien to me.’
“Linda mumbled that fog was fog, mud was mud. What could possibly be strange about something so ordinary?“
Henning Mankell, Before the Frost (2004)
Maya Beano’s Landscapes: Photos, paintings, ‘earth stories.’ “Fantasy-esque themes permeate landscapes she’s photographed on her travels and lend themselves to other-worldly creations. ‘I am inspired by our connection to nature, by the unique and by the unknown,’ Beano says. ‘Whenever I find myself engulfed by any surreal atmosphere, I impart the feelings associated with the experience of my photos.'” They’re playful, but “there is a definite air of melancholy and emptiness that often seeps through. … ‘Empty landscapes and their raw beauty speak to me in a way that cities never will,’ she explains. ‘I draw on themes that affect me strongly, such as memory, loss and nostalgia.’ She’s on Instagram, too.
John Pfahl’s ‘Altered Landscapes’, at Joseph Bellows Gallery. “Pfahl physically changes the environment, fabricating the view to question our perception of the landscape through added elements that reference mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans, and diagrams. … The picturesque scenes are at once interrupted and completed by the artist’s involvement in creating the photograph.”
“Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,’ said Rhoda, ‘to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams.”
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
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Landing Page for write 31 days – dreamscape
Featured image: front yard in rain, June 2011 (manipulated with deep art effects)
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