SURVIVAL IN THE LANDSCAPE

Jay Appleton wrote, in 1975, an absolutely great meditation about how we interpret a visual landscape. He centers his thesis on what he terms Prospect-Refuge theory.

-Prospect is the ability to see without being seen: this allows you to control your immediate environment: you see your prey before it sees you. This increases your chances of biological survival, which then brings you pleasure.

-Refuge is your ability to hide from your adversaries, which is also its own form of pleasure, because you survive.

Appleton’s thesis is that we understand a landscape painting basically on our ability to survive in it. This applies to any realistic landscape painted in Representational Spacetime that you would see on a wall in a museum. One that has been kicked around in these pages is Brunell’s The Harvest.

Think of any Hudson River School painting, with the wild and untamed landscape. Or, let’s think about Thomas Cole’s Landscape Scene from “Last of the Mohicans”, shown, below, which is close to my home in a museum. Appleton will say that we apply the concepts of prospect-refuge in our gut emotional response to the painting. It is easy to imagine yourself in locations of prospect and refuge in Cole’s painting. And he also believes that this is what we call beauty. To use the B word, beauty is not an inalienable quality. Instead, it derives from either actually or symbolically meeting deep biological needs of the viewer. Taste, or what we like, is really a preference for the satisfaction of inborn desires

I kept thinking that he was building toward what might be termed a universal set of quantification parameters as the ultimate extension of his theory. We saw this ultimate application of a theory in Alexander’s work. This did not happen, and that’s great. Instead, the book is what we have called in these pages open source. He invites others to take up his concepts for the betterment of knowledge.

“It has never been my intention to prove anything, but rather to open up discussion.” Appleton p262.

PARALLEL PATHWAYS

My purpose in including Appleton in our discussion are the parallel pathways of The Experience of Landscape and Transparent Drawing. What I mean by that is the parallel pathway of process; of another way to structure our knowledge. With either EOL or TD, you will look at the arrangement of the opaque blobs of paint distributed on a plane differently that you did before.

Here are a couple more quotes, which I have selected to demonstrate this conceptual affinity, if not an unrealized yearning for transparency.

“The approach of the art critic and art historian is not aimed directly at our problem. We find, for instance, much attention paid by the critics to the actual techniques of painting, the use of materials, the style of brushwork, the structure of composition in the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, rather than to the objects portrayed in their three-dimensional arrangement on the ground.” Appleton. p 18

“Only when we refuse to be intimidated by the authority of the specialist or inhibited by the awareness of our own ignorance can we break thru the diversity of disciplines and find the themes which transgress their boundaries.” Appleton p 260

I’m amazed by the cost of some of the books that were written in the 70’s and 80’s. Appletons book is listed on Abe Books at around $150. I guess that is because it is not in print. So to conserve dollars, I read the book on the Internet Archive. If you register, you can check the book out an hour at a time, which is what I did, and that worked great.

1. Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape. Rev. ed. Chichester: Wiley. 1996.