Walking 'Round Britain

I love to walk, and I love Scotland because you can walk anywhere; it's a country so criss-crossed with footpaths that sometimes it's faster to walk than drive. Scots don't bat an eyelid about a three or four mile walk, and just about any evening I can look out my kitchen window and watch people strolling by in groups of twos and threes. Some of my best weekends at St Andrews have included all-day walks with Breakaway, and recently Julia and I have started taking our own epic coastal walks (but more on that later!).

It would follow that when I found out my furniture professor of last term was teaching a class called "Walking Art" I was understandably intrigued. This from David:

"Walking as a method of appreciating landscape is a natural part of our sensory experience -- everybody does it or has done it. But it first became an artistic pursuit during the Romantic tradition of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turner, Constable, Wordsworth and pioneers of landscape preservation such as John Muir contributed towards the alteration of its status. Artists' relationships with the act of walking developed in an unhurried way until the beginning of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, painters such as John Piper and Paul Nash began producing 'mind landscapes' that were inspired by walking and traveling in new and unusual places. In these, the moods and emotions of the artists themselves were projected on to the landscape in a way that was to become influential upon later practitioners of 'walking art.'
In the nineteen sixties, walking itself became the subject matter and medium of a form known as 'land art' -- although some artists, such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, have sought to disassociate themselves from this art historical pigeonhole.
This course seeks to investigate the beginnings of walking as an art form and will then proceed to trace its development during the twentieth and twenty first centuries, exploring its assimilation into the current phenomenon of land art."

As you know from the post following my trip to RCA I have a *hard* time with contemporary, abstract, and conceptual art. It just isn't my bag. Give me a Chippendale sideboard and I'm over the moon, but the idea of a bundle of sticks tied up with twine leaves me cold. I would say [with confidence] that 'walking art' falls much further on the side of stick-bundles than Chippendale sideboards, but I'm afraid of leaving university without having some background in contemporary art so I thought I should give it a go. I'm hoping to come away from the course with an understanding of contemporary art and maybe even -- dare I say it? -- an appreciation.

Regardless, we get to take some pretty bangin' walks around Scotland. We took our first walk last week in Northern Fife and I was appointed the official photographer, so here are the fruits of my labour:

Click here to rock.

We're going on another walk tomorrow through a more "planned landscape," so no more windswept beaches for me I suppose. Have I gained an appreciation for contemporary art? It's hard to say. Check back in a few weeks.