Eyeopener: drawing landscape near and far

Abstract

This paper is about learning to see the world anew – but also about doubting and qualifying that newness. Drawing on a practice‐led art–geography collaboration, in which en plein air painting and drawing was the primary medium, it aims to further extend understandings of the affective spatialities of landscape. The paper offers a sequence of extended reflections on the phenomenologies and materialities of the perceptual experience of landscape drawing. After initial discussion of this work's location and germination, a first substantive section investigates the spaces of the canvas itself. Subsequently, the core and culmination of the paper consists of an account of this form of landscape experience, organised around two headings: “Drawn into the world” and “So near and yet so far.” The concluding section of the paper consolidates its arguments in respect of theories of landscape specifically, and also comments on the paper's relation to current work in creative geographies.