Paintings of Portugal & Paintings of Italy

 
 
Paintings of Portugal

by Angela Pan

self-published
2024
 

 

Paintings of Italy
by Angela Pan
self-published

2024 

 
 
Paintings of Portugal and Paintings of Italy are a pair of self-published art books by Canadian artist Angela Pan. They're similar to Pan's earlier Paintings of Japan books that I read previously, though longer - the "Japan" books were about 40 pages each, while Portugal and Italy are about double that.
 
Paintings of Portugal collects city scenes from three trips Pan made to Portugal from 2021 to 2024. Italy covers two trips there from around the same time; it's mostly views of the city, but includes a few countryside landscapes from Tuscany and the Dolomite mountains. Pan paints using acrylic, and her paintings use a mix of bright colors and pastels. There's not a drop of black or brow or gray here - nothing is drab; everything is the color of candy.
 
The paintings are accompanied by a sort of travel diary describing where Pan went and what scenes she sought out. She's an intensely crepuscular painter - most of her scenes are captured in the 'golden hour' after sunrise or before sunset or the 'blue hour' before it's up or after it's down. In Portugal, she was usually able to find an elevated viewpoint to capture the cities from above; in Italy more of them are from ground level.
 
Pan has visibly grown as an artist since her earlier books, and I was most aware of the refinement of her technique in Portugal. That book also benefits from the relative novelty of its subjects. Lisbon and Porto and the like are simply much less scene in art than Venice and Rome and such. If I had one complaint, it's that I wish she'd say a bit more about the places she visits beyond naming the cities and describing the walks to and from her chosen viewpoints.

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

Paintings of Japan Autumn & Paintings of Japan Spring

 
Paintings of Japan - Autumn

by Angela Pan

self-published

adapted from the zine 21 Days in Japan by Angela Pan 

2019, reprinted 2023

 

Paintings of Japan - Spring

by Angela Pan

self-published

2023

 

 

Paintings of Japan - Autumn and Paintings of Japan - Spring are a pair of art books by Angela Pan about two trips she took to Japan in 2019 and 2022. Autumn is an expanded reprinting of Pan's earlier art zine 21 Days in Japan, and Spring is wholly new. On both trips, she was based in Tokyo, and took additional day-trips by train.
 
In each book, Pan pairs essays about each site with a series of paintings she made there. Mount Fuji and historic Kyoto get plenty of space in both. Spring also features a lot of cherry blossoms. Each book is only about 40 pages long, so while these are bigger than zines, they're still quick reads.

Pan paints in acrylics. Her art is bright and colorful with lots of pinks and oranges, blues and purples. I felt like I noticed some improvement over the two books. The images in Spring seem a both tighter and more detailed than the ones in Autumn.

On the other hand, the art in Autumn seems a bit more varied and experimental. Pan includes images of food, people and cats she saw, and even inserts herself into some scenes. In Spring she focuses exclusively on cityscapes and broader landscapes. Those are the most common images in Autumn too, but not the only ones. Perhaps Pan's refinement of her technique has included a conscious decision to restrict her subject matter and focus on the larger scale. Or perhaps her goal of viewing the cherry blossoms on that trip made her want to give all her attention to the landscapes.

Mudlark

 
 

Mudlark

In Search of London's Past along the River Thames

by Laura Maiklem

Liveright

2019

 

 

Mudlark combines journalistic accounts of specific mudlarking trips author Lara Maiklem took while writing this book, memoirist accounts of both her earlier life, how she got into the hobby, descriptions of her own and other mudlarks' notable finds, the laws governing treasure hunting in England, the effects of climate change on the river, bits of British history, and imaginative accounts of how people might've used (and lost) some of the items she finds. 'Mudlarking' here refers specifically to searching the muddy shoreline of the Thames, in England, at low tide.

The book is organized, kind of, by location, starting at the Tidal Head where the river Thames first starts rising and falling with the tides, passing west to east through London, and ending at the Estuary where the river flows into the North Sea. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from British literary history, mostly unflattering descriptions of mudlarks from times when they were very poor and collected river debris to resell, as a career, out of economic necessity, a far cry from Maiklem and other modern mudlarks, who are hobbyists, mostly treasure hunting as a leisure activity.

Each chapter also has another theme or two, although Maiklem moves from thought to thought without being strongly bound to a single topic. I imagine this conversational style would make Mudlark an enjoyable audio book. I think I would've preferred the book to be a bit more structured, though I acknowledge that as personal preference. But my favorite chapters were the ones with the strongest themes, like 'Hammersmith,' which is mostly about a famous lost font that the original typesetter dumped in the river rather than giving to his business partner. That story's been in the news in the last few years.

The thing I think would've liked best, I think, is if the book had included photographs. Maiklem is acting a bit as an amateur archaeologist and hobbyist museum curator - I would've liked to see the shore, and more of her found objects than fit on the cover. Her descriptions are very good! But photos would've added something.

Photos would especially drive home a point she makes over and over - that nearly everything she finds is either broken or very small, or both. She finds buttons, beads, pins, coins and metal tokens, parts of clay pipes, and an awful lot of fragments of glass bottles and pottery vessels. Almost nothing is large or whole. Some things get lost in the river, many are thrown away because they're already damaged, and while the anoxic mud preserves, time and salt water both destroy. Maiklem is a treasure hunter, but these are treasures for their historic and sentimental value, not because they're worth a lot of money.

I think lots of kids have collections like Maiklem did, of interesting looking rocks and shells and other found objects, though hers sounds much larger and better tended than mine was. There was a book I loved as a kid, a guide to treasure hunting, that was fully illustrated, and I checked out over and over from the school library. I never got into the real thing, but the vicarious, imaginative thrill of discovery is part of what I like about games like D&D. I'd kind of hoped I would like Maiklem's book the way I did that one as a kid, which was probably too much to ask for. But it was interesting to see what the real life of an actual hobby treasure hunter looks like.

Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.

Islands of Abandonment

 
 
Islands of Abandonment

Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn

Viking

2021

 

 

In the introduction to Islands of Abandonment, author Cal Flyn explains that she started her project of visiting and reporting on places that humans no longer lived or used expecting to talk only about the devastation. There are good reasons why humans have designated these places as off-limits, and yet what Flyn found, when she looked, was evidence that the absence of humans was more beneficial to life in these places than presence of whatever we're avoiding (the radiation, or toxic spills, or unexploded ordinance, or whatever) was harmful.

The general finding at each site she visited was that slowly, eventually, after humans had been away long enough, diverse plants and animal species moved back in to the place people left behind, and these places often go on to become some of the most biodiverse places the world, providing stopping points for migratory birds, habitat for endangered species. These are some of the most dangerous and polluted places on Earth, and they are also refuges for species that might otherwise be extinct.

The technical name for this process is 'succession.' Pollen and spores blow in. Roots extend. Different kinds of plants jockey for space, then settle into niches. Often, forest regrows. Insects lay eggs. Animals seek temporary shelter, then make homes. Without intervention, a new ecosystem thrives. There are few areas of untouched wilderness left, but these reclaimed spaces represent a kind of feral nature.

Flyn goes to Chernobyl, closed off due to radiation, to the Zone Rouge in France, where forest grows over denuded WWI battlefields, except for a spot where they burned all the unused chemical weapons, and still nothing grows in the toxic ash. She visits the DMZ dividing the island of Cyprus, and to the abandoned collective farms left fallow after the fall of the USSR. She goes to a former colonial botanical garden in Tanzania, to a small island off Scotland where the people left but the cows remained, become feral and de-domesticated along with the land.

Flyn's book is divided into 4 parts. In the first part, she looks at clear success stories of re-wilding. In the second, she focuses on partially-abandoned places where people still live, including depopulated Detroit. As Flyn notes, every place she visited has some human presence, both people who stayed, and people who moved in after the others left. In the third part, she looks at places where the human impact lingers, so that it's not a return to the previous ecology but the birth of something hybrid and new.

And in the last part, she looks at the island of Montserrat, where volcanic ash now buries ⅔ of the land, and the Salton Sea in California, where over the course of the 20th century, suprise flooding turned a desert basin into an inland sea, and then evaporation turned it first toxic, then back to desert. These are places made unlivable by natural processes, but in their scale and scope, Flyn sees premonitions of the effects of climate change and pollution caused by human activity. If most of the book has seemed sort of hopeful (that the Earth can and has recovered from some of the worst we've done to it, just by being left alone) this section reminds us to still fear what human survival will look like as the planet continues to warm and change.

Underland

 
Underland
A Deep Time Journey

by Robert MacFarlane

Norton
2019

 

 

Underland was a Christmas present a couple years ago. It's non-fiction, combining nature writing and travel writing, as MacFarlane travels to a number of underground sites, and both writes about the experience and uses it as a jumping off point to talk about history or climate change or whatever else is relevant.

 
MacFarlane goes caving in the limestone karst sort of near his home in England, visits a dark matter detection lab inside an abandoned salt mine, learns about the 'wood wide web' of fungal mycelia in forests, spends a week in the Paris catacombs, visits an underground river, goes mountaineering around caves and sinkholes in Slovenia where Nazis and Communists hid out from and executed one another during WWII, visits cave paintings, meets a fisherman-turned-environmentalist who opposes off-shore oil drilling in Norway, climbs up a glacier, clumbs down a glacial crevasse, and tours a site being prepared to store nuclear waste.

 
MacFarlane often narrates via a series of images. He gets a bit elagaic in the latter half of the book. A few of his caving and climbing feats seem stupidly dangerous, and he reports feeling fear during them, although he must be a fairly experienced hiker and climber, the way he gets around.

 
There are recurring motifs of him being awed by the size or depth or oldness of something he's encountered, of having no words to describe these unhuman places. There's also a running thread of his awareness of the damage humans are doing to the planet, and the near geoligical scale of our pollution or the effect of global warming. You could easily read just one chapter on a topic that interested you, but I was glad to take the whole tour.