Empty landscape synonym12/19/2023 One of the many canvases Frankenthaler painted while on her honeymoon in France. “Untitled” by Helen Frankenthaler in 1958. Sacks’ patient couldn’t bear museums or seeing pictures of his family, as Sacks wrote, “not just because they were bereft of colour, but because they looked intolerably wrong.” It was, he said, like living in a world ‘molded in lead.’įrom Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars More than this: the observer would have to lose, as he himself had, the neural knowledge of colour. The only way he could express it, he felt, was to make a completely grey room for others to experience – but of course, he pointed out, the observer himself would have to be painted grey, so he would be part of the world, not just observing it. But black and white for him was a reality, all around him, 360 degrees, solid and three-dimensional, twenty-four hours a day. pointed out, we accept black-and-white photographs or films because they are representations of the world-images that we can look at, or away from, when we want. The effect of this, in three dimensions and in a different tonal scale from the ‘black and white’ we are all accustomed to, was indeed macabre, and wholly unlike that of a black-and-white photograph.Īs Mr I. Sacks details the patient's disorientation: His despair of conveying what his uselessness of the usual black-and-white analogies, finally drove him, some weeks later, to create an entire grey room, a grey universe, in his studio, in which tables, chairs, and an elaborate dinner ready for serving were all painted in a range of greys. This vast, intimate space is necessary for retreat and renewal, so what happens when we lose our defining ability to conjure this inner landscape?ĭuring his long career connecting neurological disorders with behavioral abnormalities, neurologist Oliver Sacks encountered a patient with achromatopsia, a brain condition characterized by complete loss of color vision. It enhances the conceptual aspect of the painted space. “Mountains and Sea” by Helen Frankenthaler in 1952 was a breakthrough of a new soak-stain technique in which Frankenthaler used an unprimed canvas and highly thinned paint to give the impression of watercolor. “My life was written on these tree-lined streets,” wrote novelist Graham Greene of his formation of self, echoing poet Maya Angelou, who noted we carry the gristle of home behind our ears and in our mind. Macfarlane’s consoling thought is we do not merely venture into the landscape we carry it forth in our minds. A Tibetan Buddhist text from around 600 years ago uses the word shul to mean ‘a mark that remains after that which has made it has passed by’: footprints are shul, a path is shul, and such impressions draw one backwards into awareness of past events. These traces – which include place names, stories, songs and relics – are sometimes called by the Apache biké goz’áá – ‘footprints,’ ‘tracks.’ To the Thcho people of north-western Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for ‘knowledge’ and their term for ‘footprint’ can be used interchangeably. Keith Basso has written of how, for the Cibecue Apache, the past is figured as a path or trail (‘ intin), trodden by ancestors but largely invisible to the living, which has to be re-approached indirectly via the prompts of certain memorial traces. In non-Western cultures, the ideas of footfall as knowledge and walking as a mode of thinking are widespread, often operating in particular as a metaphor for recollection – history as a region one walks back into. Robert Macfarlane’s writing on the paths we forge and how landscapes can be maps of human invention and interest centers itself on the entwined relationship between movement and cognition: We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought but actively produce it. What is your inner landscape? I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. I had the landscapes in my mind and shoulder and wrist.” Learn more. “I had the landscape in my arms when I painted it. “Interior Landscape” by Helen Frankenthaler, 1964.
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