MIST (modest homage to Gerhardt Richter)
"Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful' (even if I did not always find a way of showing it); and by 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at nature – nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves, absolutely inhuman." ~ Gerhardt Richter; Writings, Interviews & Letters, 1961-2007. Thames & Hudson
Last week I saw Richter's 'Panorama' retrospective at the Tate Modern and was once again acquainted with his powerful renderings of rural landscapes (taken from photographs). I'd photographed him in the mid 1980s and had seen some of his work then, but as with so many things I failed to follow up on his genius. So to see some of his other work more than twenty years later was a delight, especially since I had moved on so much in the intervening years. The work spoke to me powerfully, and gave me one of those extraordinary rushes of renewed interest in the landscape; dormant for some time.
So this morning as I set out for an early walk in an autumnal mist, I took my camera with me to pay homage to the man and his extraordinary talent, with my modest one.
