I don't think England is that gray but India is like a long drone.
I'm often stunned when I come up over Mulholland, and I'm looking down at the Valley, and I can see for thirty miles; I can see the mountains, or all the way to the ocean.
It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape.
Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.
I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.
Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.
I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.
Landscape to me is a planar thing, just a view. Environment is everything down to the ecosystem. Big difference.
Oahu in the distance, a group of grey, barren peaks rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an exception to the rule that the first sight of land is a disappointment.
If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.
What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car!
We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there.
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.
I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.
I don't see a lot of nature in L.A. Then again, I don't see a lot when I go back to St. Louis, either.
