The Third Ray

Nature and landscape photography is in a rut. The same style of imagery that we have seen for decades hasn’t changed. While fun for amateur photographers to engage in and learn how to execute ‘the perfect landscape’, such photography has nothing left to say. It’s time to move on. But where to? Sergi

“You see, as a kid growing up in Orange County, nature was this place we drove to.” This quote is from an essay by James M Brown which was the winning essay in this year’s WOLFoundation annual writing competition (download full essay here). It expresses what is in danger of happening as a result of

Last night I went to a benefit party in New York for a wonderful organization that uses art and performance to make cleaning up the local environment fun. Earth Celebrations was founded by Felicia Young as an organization that uses art and performance to raise local awareness in New York City about

Apart from making art that focuses our minds on ‘saving the environment’, artists can, themselves, start making direct contributions by addressing the use of polluting materials and the enormous amounts of waste that contemporary art tends to generate. In an article in today’s Observer – ‘Can art be

Can the concept of “sustainability” be visualized. The Guardian newspaper in collaboration with Getty Images have tried to pick a series of images that visualize the concept of sustainability. Have they been successful? Sustainability is an idea that is gaining widespread usage, widespread support a

  I remember when, a few years ago, I visited the Joan Miro museum in Barcelona. There were two large, wall-sized paintings that each consisted just of one single curved line painted in black on white paper. I remember looking at these simple paintings and being overcome by a very strong emotional s

“Our world should be called ‘Water’ not ‘Earth’” according to Spanish photographer Hector Garrido. Water is a fundamental source of life and our planet is made up largely of water – as is our own body. Yet water has, over the years, received relatively less attention than the land in the environment

Today I came across this gallery in the small town of Cambria, on the central Californian coast. The gallery stocks a wonderful range of contemporary artists’ work among them the magical landscapes of Eyvind Earle. Ever since the David Hockney exhibit, the subject of a previous post, I have been on

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are possibly the best known among those artists who work outside of the gallery in urban and rural environments. Many of their projects involve wrapping stuff in fabric – be it the Reichstag in Berlin, the Kunsthalle in Bern, a medieval tower in Spoleto, etc. Their latest p

David Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most important of contemporary artists; all the more so because, like that other contemporary great, Gerhardt Richter, he hasn’t been seduced into the ever increasingly ridiculous nonsense that goes under the rubric of contemporary ‘conceptual art’.  His lates