Autumn Light

International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, 2024

The Senses and Society, 2015

ABSTRACT In this article, I focus on how four artists working with light can reveal the different capacities of illumination and darkness in shaping human apprehension of the world. These artists, I contend, foreground the very particular human ways in which the visual system operates in making sense of the world, for their work explores the different ways in which we sense space at various scales, from the body to the landscape. In Kielder Forest, Northumberland, a Skyspace, created by James Turrell isolates the qualities of daylight and focuses attention on the impact of the sky’s light on the landscape. Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation highlights the ocular perception and emotional experience of colour, while Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a Timeless Garden highlights the temporality of visual perception as well as the persistence of notions about the sublime to appreciation of landscape. Both works underscore the partialities of specifically human ways of perception. Finally, Tino Seghal’s This Variation investigates the impact of darkness on the perception of space and its potential for fostering conviviality and sociality.

Wallace Stevens Journal, 2019

The transcript was heavily edited for readability and circulated among participants for fine-tuning; it thus reproduces the dynamic of exchange without in any way striving to be literal. Readers who come upon this material outside the special issue to which it belongs are advised to read the editorial introduction for an account of the rationale behind the following discussion. Like an epistoLary noveL about HomeLessness ER: Before I read the first poem in this session, "The Novel," I thought it might be worth saying a few words about The Auroras of Autumn in general. We haven't always discussed the books in which poems appeared, though yesterday we debated how "Parochial Theme" fits into Parts of a World. 1 The Auroras of Autumn, as you're aware, has had a slightly checkered history in terms of its reception. Randall Jarrell, in particular, was critical of Stevens's supposedly icy poems that he charged with being inhuman. In one of his reviews, he suggested these poems would be sailing above our heads for centuries-I'm paraphrasing. Despite having some very strong poems in it, the volume has been denounced by several critics

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2010

The painterly properties of James Thomson's long poem The Seasons (1730) and the poem's descriptiveness were routinely remarked upon by its earliest readers. Dr. Johnson noted: "His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful.. .. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm, that our thoughts expand with his imagery, and kindle with his sentiments." 1 Robert Heron praised the "countless profusion of particular images," while Robert Shiels had denominated description as the "peculiar talent of Thomson." 2 Joseph Warton, among others, hailed the authenticity of Thomson's descriptions but, like Johnson, embedded them in a moral framework, remarking that "pathetic reflection, properly introduced into a descriptive poem, will have a still greater force and beauty, and more deeply interest a reader, than a moral one." 3 Scenes and episodes from Thomson's poem were adapted, visually interpreted, and translated into different media that ranged from Chelsea softpaste candlesticks in the 1750s, Meissen and Derby figurines of allegorical "seasons" (produced throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), porcelain vases and creamware, to sculpture, decorative fireplace and floor

2006

Landscape Research

This paper focuses on the much-neglected contribution of light to the conceptualization of landscape. I discuss how light circulates through our visual system and around the spaces we see, refuting notions that we can be detached from the landscapes that we view and characterize. Though we see with the vital light and the landscape, I emphasize that our experiences are invariably entangled with prevalent cultural values, meanings and representations. By drawing upon the experience of walking around an area of raised moorland in the Peak District, I suggest that the experience of particular landscapes can be distinguished by the changing light that radiates upon them and to which we continuously become attuned. By composing an autoethnographic account that highlights key moments when its effects seemed particularly acute, I exemplify the distinctive ways in which the shifting light interacts with elements within this particular landscape

2017

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2013

William B. Hutchings's work on James Thomson's The Seasons (1730-44) marks a significant departure from much of Thomson criticism that examines natural description. 1 He usefully discusses how "Thomson places emphasis upon verbs of motion" and "identif[ies] description with process, beauty with the action of perceiving it," and the "virtual" reality with which his images are endowed. 2 Focusing on the poet's landscapes, Hutchings offers insights into the evocative qualities of Thomson's language and images that are more widely applicable to passages from the poem that would not strictly be characterized as natural description. I wish to extend Hutchings's argument on the complex techniques of the poet's image-making processes by examining some types of images that contribute to generating Thomson's vision of poetic representation. Special attention will be given to the "capacity [of Thomson's images] to provoke the reader's imaginative experience through the power of their language and syntactic organization." 3 Thomson creates images that are tonally and modally determined and that enable him to produce an effectively varied long poem in which he skillfully modulates passages of discourse with passages of description. 4 In doing so, Thomson, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, "varies the principle of realizing the invisible": the "nature of the poetic enterprise makes imagining the most important" capacity in the poet's synesthetic realm of constructed perception. 5 The complex interconnectedness of the various elements of Thomson's poetic images is realized and apprehended with an imaginative exploration of these images' very