Perspectives

I read an article recently where a painter was talking about 'assembling' landscapes, something I have heard before with relation to painters. They manipulate landscape - move bushes or trees, shift a spire - to heighten drama and perspective, to make the painting stronger than the real landscape.

Her approach was to consider foreground, middle ground and background or distance, in layers perhaps like the old 18th century landscape painters who had rules for the drama of paintings. I have found it interesting when photographing cities how much of the city is relegated to the middle of the picture, so that the foreground is occupied by river or road and the top half by sky; the complexities of urban life are squeezed into the middle third of the picture. But this artist was talking about depth of image, not vertical structure. It has always intrigued me how a picture can only record what is seen, not what is felt or heard or smelled, or even tasted. Writing about Liverpool recently I remembered the salt-grease-varnish taste of the thick wooden handrails of the old ferry boats; memory and landscape intertwined.

But beyond this is a different approcah to landscape. My landscape ideas are inevitably associated with memory and memory of place, especially with my urban work where the physical presence of the city IS the landscape, and so are far more abstract in mood than a physical representation of a landscape. They are both more and less 'representational'. And I suppose that a writer is far more a part of a landscape than a painter/photographer; the landscape is seen far more through the writer's eyes, so perhaps I manipulate as much as the painter does.