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A Tale of Five Painters – Part III
July 4, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  2 Comments
In  A Tale of Five Painters  /  Art & Photography

Xia Gui

The second painter in this series, Xia Gui 1195-1224 was a younger contemporary of Ma Yuan and like him a master at the imperial academy of the Song court. Like Ma, Xia Gui was known for his unusual compositional style with all the weight of the painting at the bottom edge. Few (confirmed) paintings by Xia Gui have survived, but fortunately his “Pure and Remote View of Mountains and Streams” has and is now at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This painting has cemented Xia’s fame and is one of my all-time favorites. But in presenting it here, I am facing quite a few obstacles.

The first such obstacle is the work’s sheer size. It is a scroll of 9m length, so reproducing it on a computer screen is challenging. But I do want to encourage you to have a look at the whole of it. In this post however, I will only be able to show some detail view extracts.

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Attitudes
June 30, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  0 Comment
In  Lose thoughts

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Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

Chinese Proverb

There isn’t a problem that couldn’t be rendered unsolvable by elevating it to a higher level of abstraction. I know. I have been guilty of doing this countless times. Unfortunately, a certain class of problems needs this approach as all more localized, specialized solutions are just patches, not fixes.

What I am talking about? I talk about problems rooted in attitudes. Like, all environmental issues on the table (pick here your favorite horror, from global warming to tar sands and mass extinction). And when I write attitudes, I mean all our opinions about the world, we didn’t know we have. There is for example this deeply rooted narrative in the jewish-christian tradition, that man is the crown jewel of creation with a calling to conquer nature. The view that man is a higher life form and everything else is hierarchically of lower value.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part II
June 27, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  2 Comments
In  A Tale of Five Painters

Ma Yuan

The first artist in this series, Ma Yuan (1160-1225), came from a family of painters, who were all serving at the imperial court of the Song Dynasty as members of the painting academy.  As with all the masters mentioned in this series I won’t go into the biographical data (which usually anyhow are rather sparse and can be found behind the link). Instead I will focus on looking at some of their works.

One of Ma Yuan’s most famous paintings is the one above: “Walk on a Mountain Path in Spring”. The painting is made in ink on silk and has in its right upper corner a poem by Emperor Ninzong that translates as:

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part I
June 20, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  1 Comment
In  A Tale of Five Painters

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Detail from Xia Gui, A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains

Introduction

Besides at least one spoken language, we all understand visual language, communication by lines, shapes, colors and textures. When we express ourselves in a visual language we are influenced by examples seen through the course of our lives. If, for example, we would have to draw the meaning “Stop”, chances are it would resemble the responding traffic sign in our country.

Like in our spoken language, in which we with time might include vocabulary and phrasing from our favorite authors, our visual language can be influenced by the styles and visual vocabulary of our favorite artists. This is certainly true for my own work. Among my strongest influences outside of photography, it is the work of the five painters introduced in this series. Three (Ma Yuan, Xia Gui and Muqi Fachang) are Chinese painters from the Song dynasty, two (Sesshū Tōyō and Hasegawa Tōhaku) are Japanese painters from 14th and 15th century. And while they span a period of 400 years, there is a common thread connecting these painters: the discovery of emptiness as a tool of art. They explore, and teach us, to read between the lines and force us to think about what is left empty in the picture. Being suggestive rather than explicit they all open space for meditative viewing. No surprise then that two of the painters (Muqi and Sesshū) were Zen monks.

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Context – About this Blog
June 15, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  1 Comment
In  Article

In a recent article called A Disturbing Trend in Photography the photographer and educator Neal Rantoul identifies a trend in photography, where the picture seems overwhelmed by the textual narrative surrounding it. In Rantoul words:

For most works [in recent portfolio reviews], separate the photographs from the words and you have no ability to comprehend what is going on.

For most works [in recent portfolio reviews], separate the photographs from the words and you have no ability to comprehend what is going on.

He comes to the conclusion that:

This resides perilously close to using the photographs as illustrations, really another field entirely.

This resides perilously close to using the photographs as illustrations, really another field entirely.

The underlying assumption of Rantouls argument is not a new one; a good photograph should speak for itself, otherwise it is not a good photograph. No words needed for communication of a visual message. A good many classical photographers from Ansel Adams to Edward Weston indeed shied away from explaining their work.

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Photographic Journey
June 7, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  0 Comment
In  Archive  /  Article

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Many photographers describe their photographic journey as a lifelong passion for photography. I can’t claim such a history but came to photography relatively late in my life. My interest for it awoke through the nature of Finland.

Finland’s nature is quite particular in many respects. Not only does it contain some of the last wild places in Europe, but also an incredibly varied assortment of micro landscapes, rocks and lakes formed by the last ice age. The northern latitude with its harsh climate only supports coniferous forests but those are full of character and dignity. Foremost however, Finland’s nature is steeped in beautiful light, which is never really harsh and can turn magical even during the darkest season.

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Landscape and Beauty
June 7, 2016 By  Dietmar Tallroth With  0 Comment
In  Archive  /  Article

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Why Landscape Art?

Humans have for at least three thousand years depicted landscapes. First in drawings and paintings and, since the 19th century, also in photographs. What do we find attractive in landscapes that compels us to continue this practice?
What we see is that, with the digital revolution in photography, the depiction of landscapes has not only continued, but exploded. Any image search for famous landmarks on the internet turns up thousands of pictures taken by amateurs and professional photographers alike.

In the light of environmental concern and the need to rethink our relation to nature, one can ask whether this visual overload is helpful or not. Does it show our continued connection to the beauty of this planet, or are we promoting a mindset that turns nature into a form of amusement park? In this context, also landscape artists in general and landscape photographers in particular have to define their role. Is landscape photography only a form of home decoration, or can it still be “art”, enriching people’s lives through meaning – and what kind of meaning could that be?

This article is an inquiry into an answer. It’s starting point is the question, why we might find landscapes beautiful and attractive in the first place.

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