What is your relationship with the landscape?
Stimulating, enjoyable, instructive and rejuvenating 'Landscape perception' workshops.
Here you will come and meet nature and yourselves in many different creative ways.
These workshops in the beautiful setting and radiant climate near the French Pyrenees, offer you the opportunity to expand your awareness and experiences of landscape.
Here you will explore differing landscapes and their meaning for you through walking, direct observation, experimental exercises, drawing or painting, study and discussion.
We will approach the landscape from differing points of view to widen your personal experiences, with the help of disciplines such as Goethean Observation (See first two articles on 'Resources' page) and Landscape Phenomenology. These disciplines will help us to get away from abstract thoughts and to become aware of actual phenomena, our own thought and feeling processes and how we form judgements,
We would like to stress that the course is suitable for everyone (professionals, academic and non-academic) who lives with one or more of the following questions;
- What is my personal relationship with the landscape?
- Is there a method of reading landscape, which we can share with others?
- Why do we find certain landscapes beautiful?
- How does landscape affect me?
- Can I discover abilities and qualities within myself to read natural processes within nature?
- How far and why do we all notice different elements within the landscape?
There will also be one workshop specifically for those who want to paint within the landscape.
If your interested to explore further, please send us a message through the contact form on the right.
The 7-day workshop for 7-12 people will take place in the department of Ariège and Aude. Each day will have it’s own theme; e.g. plant observation, natural and cultural landscapes, our sense organs and what they reveal, environmental aesthetics.
The workshops will be structured so that days of long walks will be alternated with days of study and short walks. The priority will be to exercise your observations e.g. through drawing, but this can be supplemented through other mediums such as paint or word. We will share these experiences with each other at the end of each day.
This year we will have three visitors supporting the workshops; the botanic and landscape phenomenolgist Jan Diek van Mansvelt, the professional artist Ben Stolk and the Owen Barfield's biographer Simon Blaxland-de Lange.
There will also be time for just relaxing and enjoying each others company in these beautiful surroundings.
Accommodation will be in a hotel/auberge, a holiday house or camping.
Drawing
Making a drawing of a plant or landscape is an excellent way to see and relate to it. It encourages you to observe well, to discover the big line, to zoom into details: what forms do you see, what kind of atmosphere do you experience? It is impossible to put everything you see on paper so you have to make choices. What elements of the landscape are important to you, what are the characteristics?
Experience with drawing is not required.
What will you gain by this workshop?
- Introduction to Goethean Science and Phenomenology and gateways for further explorations.
- An experience in "Landscape Reading" methods, which you can implement in your own landscape and with others.
- The ability to look at things from many different points of view and to understand other peoples views.
- To become acquainted with the European Landscape Convention and what it entails.
- Discover ways to enhance or widen your own personal relationship to your own landscape.
- And perhaps a discovery that you can draw after all.
- And last but not least; In having a very nice time!
For further Information
Adriaan Luijk
Le Fort
09300 Lieurac
France
Tel; 0033 (0)5 61 05 27 60
Email; adriaan(at)regarding-landscapes(dot)com