In May 2022, I received an artist residency in Denmark from the Hamilton family. The goal was to steep myself in Denmark, and to eventually learn to express the particular light and space and shapes that make up that land. During my time there I was struck by both the familiarity of a landscape which I had never seen before, and the ancient layers of history and story, cultivation and preservation. Denmark is a land made up of coastline, it is truly a liminal place. We visited bronze age burial grounds, with stones that glaciers and trade brought from across the North Sea. Denmark is a low land, an ancient seabed mainly made of flint, chalk, limestone, and sand.

“The low undulating Danish landscape was silent and serene, mysteriously wide-awake in the hour before sunrise. There was not a cloud in the pale sky, not a shadow along the dim, pearly fields, hills and woods. The mist was lifting from the valleys and hollows, the air was cool, the grass and the foliage dripping wet with morning-dew. Unwatched by the eyes of man, and undisturbed by his activity, the country breathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate.” (Isak Dinesen, “Sorrow Acre”)

Landscape exists within the aperture of our eye. The whole idea of landscape is a remarkably human one. Nature exists and is brought into composition, context, and inhabited by human experience and imagination. In a sense, the history of the landscape, the layers of story and existence, continue in a living way through its current inhabitants. Landscapes are peopled by those who have trod on the same ground before us, who are buried underneath stones set in circles, who have imagined beings–and conjured them into life through breathing out words caught and imagined into new lives by the hearers. Landscapes have a life of their own too: they are inhabited by the interconnectedness of plants and animals–which we catch glimpses of or disrupt by our own presence. Through shared vision, shared story, we come to inhabit landscapes, and they, in turn, form our stories.

In most fairy tales the element of place is often vague or universalized: “a forest,” “the castle,” “in a land.” In the most ancient folk tales collected by Grimm, this is certainly the case. These universalized stories can be “placed” in any place, and often have been. Stories like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumplestiltskin” have existed for 4,000 years, and bear the evidence in their linguistic patterning. Vestiges of these stories can be found in the oral storytelling traditions from Northern Europe to Asia. Their settings, the landscapes that these stories inhabit, are equally recognizable and adaptable to ancient China, second century Rome, 18th century France, Victorian England, through to today.

But newer fairytales, ones that are written in the wake of Modernism, often are intensely “placed.” The setting of these new stories are the inhabited landscapes of particular expression. Hans Christian Andersen sets his stories, not in Anyplace, but in Denmark. The stories are full of plants and animals that are native to that land. Situating the stories in such a way, the reader enters into a familiar landscape of experience and imagination.

“All the same, a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and the other began. The grey line of a road, winding across the plain and up and down hills, was the fixed materialization of human longing, and of the human notion that it is better to be in one place than another.” (Dinesen, Sorrow Acre)

In these paintings I tried to capture this sense of “Inhabited Landscapes”--be it by animals native to the place like the stork, (re)imagined into characters we recognize from familiar tales, or by the layers of habitation evidenced by grave mounds, arboreal linear cultivation, field lines, dwellings, or even the ominous remnant hulking forms of nazi bunkers. Perhaps in some of these paintings the viewer of the painting comes to be the inhabitant of the landscape, participating by focusing their gaze on it–recalling an experience, a story, or a memory.