That's a fascinating post, Chris, about bushfires as the sublime of the
Australian landscape. A terror
that 'we' face.
But I don't know how to respond beyond saying that canada is, in this
dealing with landscape, very much like Australia, although here we did not
quite go the terra nullis route. But certainly a Romanticising of the
landscape, & a tendency to see it as empty.
As to Whiteley, well, he always seemed very modern to me (so post-Romantic,
& maybe a highly erotic romanticising of his own generation in many of the
portraist etc. It's interesting to me that he was such a close friend of
Robert Adamson, who has also both romaticised & then undermined that very
romanticising of land & people). So that what you pass on of this
critiquing of his work seems to me to leave out the most important aspects:
what it looks like how it works, often the immense size of his canvases
(the ones I've seen in the galleries there), but also the way he would take
on the sketch, as in that wonderful little book of his year in Paris. I
tend to respond in terms of what I see, not what the art is supposed to
'say'.
And thanks for that mention in the other post.
And, given those photos, admittedly near Sydney, I still hope you're
breathing easy where you are. The way journalism romanticises not just the
fires, but politics, & much else, is just another of the banes we must live
with...
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages
turning
its dark pages.
Denise Levertov
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