Or the Art of Interior Decorating
Why do we so love landscapes?
(Ruling out those who prefer skyscrapers to skies, highway interchanges to changing tides and chainsaws to cedars…)
Why is it that we are so touched by places that benefit primarily from our absence?
Those places that owe their survival mainly to our inability or lack of need to compromise and destroy them.
Well that’s it, of course isn’t it.
What connects us to the land is what makes us human beings.
Otherwise our minds are made of concrete and steel.
As we’re treading carefully and with respect, why not add to the landscape the only thing we can add without punching a road through it, without draining, clear-cutting or putting a shopping center on it. The only touch we can bring to it without corrupting and destroying it – the touch of memory and the caress of dream: the landscapes of the mind.
Photoshop should have a program like that. Superimpose layer. Layer properties: history, myth, legend, complexity.
To us city dwellers, who shroud ourselves in a utilitarian geometry of concrete and glass, complexity is the highest quality landscapes can offer. At some point we must have confused rectitude and rectilineal, I think. We have made a religion of, or at very least erected a myriad of altars, to shapes designed principally to facilitate mass production, which is handy when you need a cheap set of bookshelves from Ikea, but not necessarily what you want to see after three days hiking from the road’s end.
That must be why real travel writing is so rewarding to read; becoming a vicarious vagabond for the price of a paperback. The stories added to the landscapes that make then all the more sublime. The BEST books of this kind have to be Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water”. Alas, I gave them to someone to read, and now must buy new copies (never lend books with titles like that, one will never return, the other one will get lost on a picnic).
Another amazing travel book is “The Rhine” by none other than Victor Hugo. There is not a vista that doesn’t trigger a flight of the imagination with Hugo, and reading his books is to navigate constantly through time and legend as well as sharing a seat on the carriage. Wonderful. Beats having your luggage lost, at any rate.
There is a Roman road not far from here (one of many, but this one isn’t blighted by that pathological habit the Swiss have of signposting everything – that is when it can’t be uprooted and transferred to a museum). Every now and then a stroll along it reconciles me with life.
HOBB & HOBB AGAIN
An illustrator friend sent me a jpeg of a book cover the other day. Goodness, this looks startlingly familiar I thought, where HAVE I seen that before? Well, not exactly, I reacted rather more quickly than that – the smoke from my tires was still hanging in the air when I burst into the local bookshop hollering “Nobody move!”. I didn’t buy all four copies – as much as I love Robin’s work, the French editor has an annoying habit of chopping thick American or English paperbacks into several slimmer volumes, which is a clever way of selling 3 or 4 books in lieu of one – but I did purchase this:
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Which is indeed quite similar to this:
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I swear your honor, it were me what drawed it first…
What I cannot for the life of me fathom is the underlying logic here. Sub-rights are cheap enough, certainly less onerous than commissioning an original piece of artwork. (Though, this may not be true. It would be ill news for the livelihood of illustrators in general if pumping out sloppy copies of other peoples’ work is a viable alternative to using the real thing.)
Needless to say, this is the kind of petty larceny that pushes all my buttons. Watch this space.
Homework:
Write one thousand times: I will only copy artwork done by dead illustrators.
