Portraits of place: images of Southern Africa in landscape painting.
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Date
1993
Authors
Lammas, Rebecca Caroline
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Abstract
Place is an elusive but vibrant geographical entity. It comprises the human facet of the
environment that is textured by subjective impulses and collective ideologies. The meaning
of places is symbolically expressed in art: geographical myths are generated, perpetuated and
anticipated in literary and visual creative images. In South Africa, the opportunities for using
art to understand place have rarely been explored. Local geographers are more comfortable
in the sterile landscapes born of theoretical and quantitative analysis than with their emotional
and imaginative reconstitution as art. Yet, an abundance of indigenous qualitative material
awaits sensitive investigation. Tracing the fingerprints of social and personal imagery in
landscape painting illuminates the sense of place in southern Africa. The local environment
has been interpreted variously through the lenses of colonialism, nationalism and a
contemporary resistance movement as a foreign, alien, silent and violent landscape.
Articulating the myths in visual terms, .painters offer the geographer a bridge into southern Africa as it is confronted by the people who live here. Art is a celebration of the human
environment; landscape paintings are portraits of place
Description
Keywords
Landscape painting -- South Africa., South Africa -- Description and travel.