Walking, Art And Nature (10)



Camino, Spain


I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. THOREAU Walking

The political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) believed that human beings were inherently good, and that they were only corrupted by the evils of society. He gradually lived an ever simpler life, becoming closer and closer to nature, studying botany, and enjoying the solitary walks he recounted in his ten, classic meditations Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

Walking, art and nature - these three things are so bound up in Rousseau, and, since his time, have been inextricably linked.  



Camino, Spain

Walking, art and nature. We think of Thoreau's ecstasies in Walden and in his Journals; the mystical outpourings of Richard Jefferies in The Story Of My Heart; William Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'; the labourer-poet John Clare's walks among the dispossessed pastures of English agricultural history; Gary Syder's Beat and Buddhist mountain treks; Richard Mabey's gentle, literary eco-strolls through the Chilterns and Norfolk; Robert Macfarlane's explorations on foot of Britain's wild places; John Constable walking and painting in Dedham Vale; JMW Turner walking and painting in Europe.    



Camino, Spain

As well as walking in nature being an inspiration for art and literature, walking itself can be an art form in its own right. Richard Long, whom I've written about before, gives walking a totemic resonance through natural artworks created on the walk, or even through the signature of the actual walk itself: its mark, footprint and track across the landscape.

 

Camino, Spain

Sadly (for me at least!) I've reached the end of my ten-part journey through walking country. I hope some of it has been inspirational, or at least informative. Most of all I hope that's it's motivated you to go walking, or, if you're walkers already (which I know many of you are), to go walking even more. It's a land without class, without prejudice, without materialism, without competition, without complication, without compromise, without celebrity culture, without bonds. Rousseau famously wrote at the beginning of The Social Contract: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Why don't you throw off those chains, and start walking?



Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain



Here's the Roman arch at Caparra in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I walked under it nearly a year ago on my pilgrimage along the Via de la Plata. Why don't you join me as I step beneath it again, right now? Let's walk together towards those distant hills, that blue horizon. You never know what we might find... 

Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain

I Walk, Therefore I Am

My work has become a simple metaphor for life. A figure walking down his road, making his mark. I am content with the vocabulary of universal and common means; walking, placing, stones, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads. RICHARD LONG

My work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature as its source. I enjoy the simple pleasures of ... eating, dreaming, happenstance, of passing through the land and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces along the way, of finding a new campsite each night. And then moving on. RICHARD LONG

What has evolved is a project that goes beyond art as an object to be looked at, to something that is a part of a landscape to be lived in. ANDY GOLDSWORTHY (Talking of his 16 year old, ongoing project of creating artworks in the Haute Provence landscape near Digne-les-Bains)

I think, therefore I am. DESCARTES

I walk, therefore I am. PIERRE GASSENDI

I Walk The Line

I've wanted to write something on this blog about Richard Long for ages. Long's art is hard to define in a few words. He makes art in the natural landscape from pieces of it - sticks, stones, seaweed, slates, pine needles. Out of these naturally evolved, 'found' objects he creates alignments, cairns, circles, spirals and other forms. These temporary structures made of natural materials are then left to the elements to be worked on and altered by nature itself. But he also uses his own two feet to crease lines, marks, patterns and indentations into the landscape - all in quite soft and eco-friendly ways. These consciously placed imprints may last for some time or may disappear overnight. Long deliberately seeks this impermanent, transient quality in his art. Only the photographs he takes remain as a record of the tracks and traces of his brief passing. The artist himself is invisible, has walked on.

Long is a walking artist - but not in any grand, Romantic, Wordsworthian sense. His eyes are fixed firmly on the ground, watching his feet and where they are taking him. He often walks in straight lines, measuring his progress by leaving stones at equal distances along the path. He's excited by the very idea of walking itself - and all the different styles of walking: walking as exercise and recreation; walking as a channel for reflection or poetic inspiration; walking as pilgrimage. But he's interested above all in new and original ways of walking. Once he threw a stone all the way round an Irish mountain which resulted in just one photograph - captioned Throwing A Stone Around McGillycuddy's Reeks (1977).


Such philosophical ideas about walking, and about old and new ways to walk, interest me too. I'm reminded of Tubewalkers, who trace the London Tube lines above ground from station to station, like human metal detectors or dowsing rods; Pyrenean and Alpine shepherds who still practise transhumance by walking herds and flocks to higher pastures for the summer; walker-adventurers who follow as closely as possible a particular line of latitude or longitude; walker-writers like Iain Sinclair who pioneered his own London orbital walking route shadowing the M25 motorway.


There are many different ways in which to walk and many different paths to follow - both literal and metaphorical. When I think about it, this is in essence what my blog's really about, the common theme which runs through its variousness. Walking in a line or in a circle; walking up a mountain or round a mountain; walking for penitential, religious reasons or purely for pleasure; walking for recreation or inspiration; walking solo or with others; city walking or rural walking; walking across the world or walking in one's own back yard; walking in the mind; walking through life; just walking per se, on its own - can be a creative and artistic act.

The top picture is Richard Long's A Line In Scotland (1981) and the bottom picture is Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking (1967).