I realize I am always seeking images of spaces that feel secret, hidden, that invite you inside them, that are human sized or even child sized. I think this is the space of poems and the space of fairy tales.
What do such spaces do? They feel enclosing, safe, even if they are in some way strange. They echo an interior world even if they are exterior spaces. Shadows are necessary to such spaces. Rain really helps to create such spaces inside the larger landscape.
I imagine how happy the first small bands of humans were to discover caves in the limestone of a mountain; and farther back, how our earlier mammal ancestors were tree dwellers. We want to be sheltered and also have a space for mystery, or a space to peer out from. The atavistic body does not forget. What feels like safety, and also like hidden knowledge? The imagination digs deep into those dreamed memories.
Jenkins Arboretum (the last year the paulownia bloomed)
Chanticleer Garden
Chanticleer Garden
Chanticleer Garden
Jenkins Arboretum
Likewise: Whenever I make a trip to the Phila Museum of Art, I am drawn back to the medieval* section.
For me these paintings harbor a very specific emotion in their depiction of space. I love the interiors – how everything is foreshortened, and flattened, and the space feels – for lack of a better word – cozy. It feels human sized. It feels big enough to house the idea and nothing but the idea. You’re going to kill me for assigning “cottagecore vibe” to important works of European art… but, the same things that attract me to the cottagecore décor aesthetic also attract me to these paintings. It is a kind of closeness, of built or imagined space which actively holds the inhabitants.
Then, beyond those interior spaces, there’s always a landscape – presumably, the landscape of medieval Italy or the Netherlands – but it’s completely magical, hold the realism. Because of the medieval approach to perspective, the exteriors – the landscapes – have the same sense of nearness and enclosure as the rooms. Even though there’s a misty distance with mountains, oceans, all of it is somehow flattened in the same way that the interior is flattened, so that you see all of the world at once. You see what you know or believe is there, rather than what you can visually assess is there.
These paintings have a foreground, and a background, but no middle distance. Everything is collapsed in a way that feels almost childlike: there is no vast space that cannot be enfolded in towards the viewer. And it has the same effect that the interiors have on me, mystery yet accessibility, relatability.
(I am making quite an assertion here, about perspective and space broadly, and art historians might have a fit. Maybe it’s more correct to say that the middle ground is simply being foreshortened, rather than lost entirely. Either way, the impression of closeness of the distant landscape is what strikes me.)
This is one of my favorite examples at the PMA; there’s so much realism to the sitter’s face and hands, and then the space he’s in makes almost no sense, despite the perfect straightness of the room’s lines. Beyond the two windows, the views of the landscape are both unconnected and entirely imaginary; a mountain here, a castle there. Rather like that Andrew Wyeth painting, what you see beyond the frame is a composite.
Portrait of Ludovico Portinari, ca. 1469
Andrew Wyeth, Night Sleeper, 1979
This anonymous Annuciation (Netherlandish, 1440-1470) has both the truncated interior space and the expansive landscape beyond. Look how the ceiling is right over their (seated) heads! Yet I don’t feel cramped by it; I feel there’s something very safe here. It might help that even though the Angel Gabriel is male**, as a kid I read almost all angels in these paintings as “female” and thus in my eternal child’s calculus (very difficult to extract from your adult brain), this is a painting of two women exchanging important secrets.
**I know, yes, technically Biblical angels were asexual in some weird theosophical fashion.
The Annunciation, 1450-1470
Another great example in Crivelli’s Annunciation (1486): there are interior rooms (spaces? cubbyholes?), where the walls have been helpfully removed so the viewer can peer inwards, almost as if in a child’s dollhouse. Then you have this courtyard on the left, which is – presumably – outdoors (the artist decided it had to be, in order for the Holy Spirit to descend from heaven!) yet is framed as if it’s a room. And the space is not just restricted from foreground to background; it also has that typical side-to-side collapsing (necessitated by the size of the altarpiece?), so that all characters can fit into the tableau.
Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, 1486
(Also I feel like I’m looking at Remedios Varo’s major inspiration here? And maybe that’s why I love her work too… the spaces are very similar; they are not about realism, but rather about a felt reality.)
Remedios Varo, The Creation of the Birds, 1958
Two more landscape details from PMA:
And finally here are two images I’ve saved in my Pinterest board under “cottagecore.” (I told you we’d come back to this.)
Credit: [dunno]
What’s going on with this aesthetic? It’s definitely about green spaces, but not wildernesses, no; it’s about cultivation of a particularly human-mediated space – a meadow, a trellis with roses growing up it. Cottagecore is certainly a reaction – analog as a reaction to the constant sensory offense of digital; person-sized spaces as a reaction to our imposed identity as numberless “consumers.” But I also think there is intrisic affirmation in the cottagecore ethos – we exist in the natural world and are of it, we cultivate it and negotiate with it but are not masters of it. And now I also see how these particular images, which I saved years ago, are explicitly spaces for creation – one for writing, and one for painting.
This kind of space – these interiors and interior-exteriors – have always, always appealed to me, as I can see now, across various art historical eras, and into my own created landscapes. When I manage to re-invent it – or re-discover it – in a photo, I feel I am getting a glimpse into something magical, and then I try to figure out how to transfer that feeling into writing. This space always calls me back. It invites; it is the opposite of “sublime.” It is sized for a person, though it opens out on some kind of infinite.
[*Late Middle Ages? Early Renaissance? The dates are confusing but you’ll know the change in style I’m talking about; after this period, interiors and exteriors did not look like this.]
Another favorite “interior-exterior” photo, Meadow at Ashbridge Preserve