The Visionary Landscape

Japanese gardens are found throughout the world today—their unique forms now considered a universal art form. This stunning Japanese gardening book examines the work of five leading landscape architects in North America who are exploring the extraordinary power of Japanese-style garden design to create an immersive experience promoting personal and social well-being. Master garden designers Hoichi Kurisu, Takeo Uesugi, David Slawson, Shin Abe and Marc Keane have each interpreted the style and meaning of the Japanese garden in unique ways in their innovative designs for private, commercial and public spaces. Several recent Japanese-style gardens by each designer are featured in this book with detailed descriptions and sumptuous color photos. Hoichi Kurisu—transformative spaces for spiritual and physical equilibrium. Takeo Uesugi—bright, flowing gardens that evoke joyful living. David Slawson—evocations of native place that fuse with the surrounding landscape. Shin Abe—dynamically balanced "visual stories" that produce meaning and comfort. Marc Keane—reflections on human connections with nature through the art of gardens. Also included are essays on the designers and mini-essays by them about gardens in Japan which have most inspired their work, as well as commentaries by patrons and visitors to their North American gardens. The book focuses on recently-created gardens to suggest how the art form is currently evolving, and to understand how Japanese garden design principles and practices are being adapted to suit the needs and ways of people living and working outside Japan today.

The American landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the most thoughtful and inventive artists of his generation. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape presents both a concise overview of Inness's life and work and a focused examination of his philosophical and religious preoccupations. It shows how Inness, inspired by the ideas of the scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688- 1772), devised a new artistic vocabulary to convey his understanding of the personal visionary experience. Moreover, it reveals commonalities between Inness's prescient work and efforts by the psychologist- philosopher William James (1842-1910) to validate mystical states of mind. It explains for the first time how Inness treated landscape painting as a form of philosophical inquiry that could communicate his holistic belief in the unity of nature and spirit.

This is the first book on the widely celebrated filmmaker Nina Danino. Visionary Landscapes includes detailed documentation and analysis of Danino's seminal films, such as First Memory, 1980, a haunting re-visiting of a strange and isolated childhood, Close to Home, 1985, an implicitly political narrative on Danino's personal journey and Stabat Mater, 1990, one of the most important expressions of the British avant garde. Danino's in-depth exploration of the religious experience, a theme that permeates the majority of her films, is unlike that of any other artist. In these works, she skillfully subverts a strictly Catholic interpretation by her use of close-up shots to suggest a narrative of sexual ecstasy. Essays on cinema, sound and the sacred are accompanied by striking images from her films. The book also closely examines the relationship between image and sound, exploring Danino's collaborations with New York vocalist Shelley Hirsch, Russian diva Sainkho Namtchylak and English soprano Catherine Bott. 120 colour & b/w illustrations

The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau. Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. It suggests resonances between Inness's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist/philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most importanttenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.

Paperback re-print of Earthstars The Visionary Landscape. London's Sacred sites are not scattered about the capital at random.Many form a recognisable pattern of sacred geometry, a vast temple groundplan identical to the design used to lay out Stonehenge's megaliths over 3,500 years ago. Astonishingly, it also relates to the measures and proportions of the New Jerusalem, The City of Revelation. If the conclusions drawn by the author are correct, this pattern is a circuit diagram of the forces of creation and a new evolutionary impulse is coming through our sacred sites, a transformatory influence which will change the way we perceive the world

Basic principles : "Sustainability" in context -- Principle 1 : Keep healthy sites healthy -- Principle 2 : Heal injured soils and sites -- Principle 3 : Favor living, flexible materials -- Principle 4 : Respect the waters of life -- Principle 5 : Pave less -- Principle 6 : Consider origin and fate of materials -- Principle 7 : Know the costs of energy over time -- Principle 8 : Celebrate light, respect darkness -- Principle 9 : Quietly defend silence -- Principle 10 : Maintain to sustain -- Principle 11 : Demonstrate performance, learn from failure -- Sustaining principles, evolving efforts.

The essential book on the innovative American landscape painter, with a new preface by the author. A “rare, valuable and luminously illustrated monograph.” (Booklist) This eloquent examination of Inness' most important paintings illuminates the artist’s philosophical and religious preoccupations. It provides an overview of his life and situates Inness within the contexts of key issues in American history, such as the Hudson River School, Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, and the work of William James. It explains for the first time how Inness treated landscape painting as a form of philosophical inquiry that could communicate his holistic belief in the unity of nature and spirit. “Bell’s handsomely illustrated, eloquently written, and well-documented text considerably expands previous scholarship. ..[A] first-rate study. Highly recommended.” (Choice)