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    Aspiring to the Landscape
    On Painting and the Subject of Nature

    Petra Halkes (Author)

    9780802038944

    Hardback, published 12 February 2006

    270 pages
    23.6 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

    The idea of nature as a cultural construction has been discussed extensively in postmodern theory. Less attention, however, has been paid to the underlying motivations shaping the ideologies of nature, in particular the desire to submit to some larger order outside of oneself. Aspiring to the Landscape examines this persistent desire and how it is made manifest in contemporary landscape art.

    Four installations of large-scale paintings by Canadian artists Eleanor Bond, Susan Feindel, Stephen Hutchings, and Wanda Koop are the focus of Petra Halkes's study. The works vary widely in style and iconography but are drawn together by the way they invite a reflection on the troubled relationship between culture and nature and our contradictory and simultaneous longing to conquer and to succumb to nature.

    It is the tension between modern and postmodern interpretations of the subject of nature that makes the theory and the artwork discussed in Aspiring to the Landscape so important to contemporary Canadian culture.

    List of Figures

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    1. A Longing for the Impossible Place: Wanda Koop’s Paintings for Dimly Lit Rooms and Paintings for Brightly Lit Rooms
    2. The Allegorical Impulse in Stephen Hutchings’s Plants, Bushes, and Hedges
    3. Speaking the Wild: The Apophatic Representation of Nature in Susan Feindel’s Paintings
    4. Cosmoville: The Unmanageable Surfaces of Eleanor Bond’s Rotterdam Paintings

    Conclusion (or Beginning): Opening Up the Conversation

    Appendix: Artists’ Biographies

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

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