Into the Valleys.

A great documentary about the painters Augustus John and James Dickson Innes who, in 1911, left London for the wild Arenig Valley in North Wales was shown on BBC Four last night.

 

What surprised me about the painters was just how little they knew of their landscape before they ventured many miles to depict it. Something I would find a little odd. Whilst I didn't know the precise location of my shoot, I had a good idea of the surrounding area and wanted to leave a lot of the spontaneity that comes with exploring a new landscape for the day of filming, so as to let the enthusiasm spill into the work.

I guess this marks one of the appeals to me about the natural landscapes relation to art, that through many centuries and countless developments in both media and exhibition, there will always be a fascination with the world in which we live in and people will always strive to depict it and the similarities through each media's depiction are always so apparent that it becomes less about how they are depicted and the media used but more about 'Land Art' as a medium itself.