The day I was born, I knew immediately I’d probably made a mistake, thinking another life in Midgard would be easy. This life would be difficult, but I couldn’t go back. I am committed now. The Mystic Landscape presents a myth—or perhaps a fairy tale—about a mortal man and woman and the way they find each other. Through their travels through the nine worlds, they discover a deep love for each other. They encounter devils, demons, ogres, shamans, angels, and gods through the course of a journey up into mountains and down to the bottom of oceans. Through the nine worlds of mythology, they ultimately find their love for each other remaining even after death. This is a story told through imagination and intuition beyond and behind the physical material world that most of us believe we know. This narrative blends prose and poetry to share an imaginative tale about the love of two people as it spans time, place, and worlds of mythology, even defying death.
This book is intended to help home-owners in Marin County, California with their landscape design process. It includes hundreds of local photos organized by topics as well as detailed portraits of local landscapes created by author and landscape designer Dane Rose.
Focusing on idealists and visionaries who believed that Justice could reign in our world, this book explores the desire to experience utopia on earth. Reluctant to await another existence, individuals with ghuluww, or exaggeration, emerged at the advent of Islam, expecting to attain the apocalyptic horizon of Truth.
Learn to cultivate a traditional, beneficial relationship with the land by embracing the forgotten practices of our ancestors • Details the ancient art of geomancy and Earth magic, including how to work with ley lines, astrology, and the four directions to honor a space and make it a place of power • Explores the magic of the land around us and how our ancestors interacted with Earth energies and the forces of Nature • Discusses the power of boundaries and magic circles, the proper “feng shui” of graveyards and cemeteries, and magically powerful places such as crossroads, fairgrounds, and the mystic triangles found in “no-man’s lands” Our ancestors were deeply aware of the magical power of their local landscape, no matter where they lived. Every interaction with their environment--from building to farming to the layout of ancient cities--took into account terrestrial energies, ancestral memory, and the many seen and unseen presences in Nature. They developed sophisticated procedures for orienting their living spaces and respectfully working with the magic of the landscape. Yet, much of the art of geomancy and of working with the forces of Nature has been forgotten by modern builders, architects, foresters, gardeners, and homeowners. The treatment of land as mere property has led to a loss of its meaning for those who dwell upon it. Our landscape has become disenchanted. In this book, geomancy expert and scholar Nigel Pennick details the ancient and sacred practices of geomancy and Earth magic and reveals how we can reenchant and reconnect to the sacred landscape that surrounds us, whether you live rurally, in the suburbs, or in cities. Pennick begins with a vivid look at our modern “wasteland” and what he calls “the ensouled world,” with specific examples from Britain and Iceland of our ancestors’ way of perceiving the world they lived in. Exploring the art of geomancy, he examines how its techniques work with ley lines, astrology, and the old understanding of the four directions and the eight winds to honor a space and make it a place of power. He looks at the power of boundaries and magic circles, including laying ghosts and dismissing spirits, as well as the proper “feng shui” for cemeteries and graveyards. The author then takes the reader back into the traditional landscape to discuss magically powerful places, such as crossroads, the occult nature of the “fairground,” and the mystic triangles found in what are popularly known as “no-man’s lands.” Revealing how the landscape can be reenchanted, Pennick shows how the magic of place is a living system that each of us can interact with.
Although considered a minor genre for a long time, the art of landscape has risen above its forebears - religious and historic painting - to become a genre of its own. Giorgione in Italy, the Brueghels of the Flemish School, Claude Lorrain and Poussain of the French School, the Dutch landscape painters and Turner and Constable of England are just a few of the great landscapists who have left their indelible mark on the history of landscape and the art of painting as a whole. After serving for a long time as a backdrop for paintings and as a skill-practising exercise for artists, nature came to be observed for its own sake and was incorporated into works of art as an illustration of an enlightened and scientific study of the world. Through continual change, it has inspired the greatest painters and has allowed some others, like Turner, to transcend the relentless search for mere realism in pictorial representation. Through this study, Émile Michel offers an exceptional panorama, from the 15th century to the present, of art and the way artists portray the world in all its splendour.
This richly illustrated volume explores mystical themes in European, Scandinavian, and North American landscape paintings from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This book features works by Emily Carr, Marc Chagall, Arthur Dove, Paul Gauguin, Lawren Harris, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler, among others. Common to their work is the expression of the spiritual crisis that arose in society and the arts in reaction to the disillusionments of the modern age, and against the malaise that resulted in the Great War. Many artists turned their backs on institutional religion, searching for truth in universal spiritual philosophies. This book includes essays investigating mystical landscape genres and their migration from Scandinavia to North America, with a focus upon the Group of Seven and their Canadian and American counterparts. Accompanying an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d'Orsay, this book offers a penetrating look at the Symbolist influence on the landscape genre.
A pioneer in landscape studies takes us on a tour of landscapes past and present to show how our surroundings reflect our culture. "No one who cares deeply about landscape issues can overlook the scores of brilliant insights and challenges to the mind, eye and conscience contained in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. It is a book to be deeply cherished and to be read and pondered many times."--Wilbur Zelinsky, Landscape "While it is fashionable to speak of man as alienated from his environment, Mr. Jackson shows us all the ties that bind us to it, consciously or unconsciously. He teaches us to speak intelligently--rather than polemically or wistfully--of the sense of place."--Anatole Broyard, New York Times "This book is a vital and seminal text: do beg, borrow or buy it."--Robert Holden, Landscape Design (London) "Incisive and overpoweringly influential. It will probably tell you something about how you live that you've never thought about."--Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer "No one can come close to Jackson in his unique combination of historical scholarship and field experience, in his deep knowledge of European high culture as well as of American trailer parks, in his archivist's nose for the unusual fact and his philosopher's mind for the trenchant, surprising question."--Yi-Fu Tuan
The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau. Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. It suggests resonances between Inness's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist/philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most importanttenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.
This book is about the complexity and power of landscape. The authors - geographers, anthropologists and archaeologists - explore landscape as something subjective that alters through time and space and that is created by people through their experience and contact with the world around them.
