Bas Ketelaars

We commonly look at landscapes from a distance, but we experience walking through nature from up close, as the world that immediately surrounds us. When trying to gain access to a landscape, we stop and pause to contemplate the panorama in front of us, yet when walking in nature we also need to avoid tripping over roots and rocks, which requires a slightly downward look. The Dutch visual artist Bas Ketelaars has explored the latter perspective in his photographs and drawings, giving rise to the characteristic close-up views in these works, which strongly contribute to their contemplative style.

When roaming woods and forests, we walk through and step on all sorts of textures of organic and inorganic materials that most of us will hardly be able to identify. This does not seem to bother us, however, as we enjoy being out in the open and take in the world around us. In his photography, Ketelaars concentrates on capturing this particular experience. His close-up photographs and drawings present textures of soil, stone, moss, plants, and trees, but without specifying these materials. In this essay, I investigate the different ways of looking encouraged by his artworks, also by exploring his use of photography and drawing as media.

The particular interest of Ketelaars in landscapes follows in a long tradition in the history of Dutch art. The term “landschap” [landscape] as a genre in art was used for the first time by the Netherlandish painter and author Karel van Mander in his Schilder-boeck (Book of Painting), published in 1604. In this study, Van Mander mainly describes the use of landscape as background for biblical or mythological scenes, but he also suggests the option of landscape as a painterly genre in its own right.ⁱ In the next four centuries, landscape painting would grow increasingly popular among Western-European artists. Their approach of landscapes, however, was largely infused by “distance,” in order to be able to contemplate a more comprehensive sense of landscape. This is not the kind of approach followed by Ketelaars. His close-up views in fact lack any illusionistic depth. As such, his artistic practice calls forth philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “Earth-Mapping.” In his similarly entitled study, Casey rethinks art as a form of mapping. He bases his definition of mapping on a quote by landscape architect James Corner from his 1999 essay on “The Agency of Mapping”: “Mapping [is about] digging, finding, and exposing on the one hand, and relating, connecting, and structuring on the other … in this sense, mapping is returned to its origins as a process of exploration, discovery, and enablement … like a nomadic grazer, the exploratory mapper detours around the obvious so as to engage what remains hidden.”ⁱⁱ

Ketelaars’s artistic way of working is quite similar. On his hikes through woods and forests in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Poland, Lithuana, and elsewhere, he will deploy his camera largely to engage in “earth-mapping.” In his studio back home, he subsequently isolates and blows up particular details from these photographs, transforming them by means of graphite pencils into large and detailed line drawings. This stage also involves a kind of mapping. Casey describes “drawing” quite literally as the act of drawing a pencil across a sheet of paper. In order “[t]o know the surface of anything – not just paper, but the earth itself as a geographic surface – we must drag a physical body directly over that surface in such a way as to trace a path there, make a trail.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

The resulting drawings encourage the spectator to glance over their surfaces. This means that one is not drawn into some illusionistic depth, but it is also true that this act of looking will differ from reading a map with the intention of gaining information on routes to be followed. Instead, the spectator is encouraged to engage in an act of mapping, in the abovementioned original sense of the process of exploration and discovery. Although looking from a fixed point of view at a landscape drawing based on an illusionistic effect of depth appears to be a “natural way” of looking, this is rather a convention of looking at a representation. As argued by landscape historian Marc Treib, in his critical reflection on linear perspective, studies have established “that the eye moves differently when it is scanning a scene – the so-called saccadic movement – than when it is tracking a specific object,” adding that “the eye is always in movement, even when seated, even when at rest.”^iv

If Ketelaars’s mapping concentrates on surfaces, he does not aim to classify them; rather, he adopts a meta-perspective on the surfaces of the forests he visits in order to reflect on these surfaces. As a result of his using black-and-white (analogue) photography and only black graphite pencils in various degrees of hardness, any color differences are eliminated. The different shades of grey in the photographs are transformed into very small pencil lines. Strokes of the pencil may represent cracks in soil, stone, or bark, as well as blades of grass, or nerfs of moss or ferns, which are all basically linear structures that form heterogenous surfaces. Through reducing the materiality of organic and inorganic materials to lines, their outward shape is not marked by their outlines. The drawings basically present “surface details of landscapes,” or rather “the skin of landscape” as a result of earth-mapping.

If drawing and photography both have a history of representation in black-and-white, it is surprising that these media are rarely discussed in tandem. Photography tends to be discussed in relation to painting and film, while drawing is most often addressed in relation to painting. Of course, the slowness of the technique of line drawing sharply contrasts with the little time it takes to make a photograph. While photographs are commonly referred to as “frozen moments,” drawing is rather associated with a process of becoming, much like walking involves a process.^v Both media, however, are valued for their full transparency. A photo camera will record everything that is visible in front of the lens, much like a line drawing will leave every pencil stroke visible for the viewer. And if landscape photography may be considered as more “objective” than landscape drawing, it is noteworthy that photography theorist Liz Wells characterizes landscape photography as dealing with a sense of location, related to complex articulation of assumed objectivity within a personal vision. Wells explains this paradox in reference to a phrase from art historian Lucy Lippard: “living the ordinary while sensing the extraordinary.”^vi Moreover, the term “trace” is often used to characterize both photography and drawing as “presenting traces,” if in different meanings. A photograph is considered to be a trace of what was in front of the camera, whereas a drawing shows traces of the act of using the pencil. In a similar vein, Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings may be interpreted or understood as “traces of surfaces.”

The importance of surfaces in the work of Ketelaars brings to mind historian Joseph A. Amato’s fascination for surfaces in his in-depth study Surfaces: A History. How, exactly, does the notion of “surface” feature in the case of Ketelaars’s project? Of course, the many kinds of surfaces he perceived in the woods and forests figure prominently in his work, but one should also refer here to the surfaces of paper and pencil, as human-made materials that rely on two natural materials: cellulose (taken from trees) and graphite (from stone). Moreover, the digitized analogue photographs are printed on paper with a quite rough surface. Amato argues that humans can be understood as “a set of surfaces living among other, greater, and more varied sets of surfaces.” And even more in general he claims: “As coverings and epidermises – homogeneous and heterogeneous, permeable and impermeable, permanent and transient – surfaces constitute an immediate and tangible geography of the world and a prima facie index of all its different things.” This motivated Amato to investigate human interactions with natural and human-made surfaces.^vii He actually draws analogies between earth and body, nature and human handiwork, cracks in clay and wrinkles in human skin.^viii If the experience of walking through a forest usually includes perceiving forms, colors, and smells, Ketelaars aims to ignore these various sensorial stimuli in his photographs and drawings by foregrounding surfaces instead. The nature of these surfaces is often hard to identify, which may remind us of Amato’s observation that surfaces “both reveal and veil things … [and] appear and vanish.”^ix

How, then, do the physical photographs and drawings by Ketelaars position themselves in-between the physicality of the forest and the presence of the spectator? I suggest that they should be positioned in the so-called “contact zone,” a concept coined by literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt to identify zones where heterogenous elements meet each other halfway in a dynamic relationship, rather than that they merge.^x Although we will enjoy walking in a forest, as humans we differ too much from the environment to be able to merge with it. In this respect, the editors of Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision have put forward the interesting observation that humans consider landscape as “always already there,” which leads to “the perplexing ironies of landscape: it is regarded as natural and eternally present, and yet it is also ignored as if it did not matter.”^xi Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings create a “contact-zone,” enabling the landscape and the spectator to meet each other halfway in a dynamic relationship.

The spectator may be attracted to the surfaces of the drawings and photographs in order to understand what one is looking at. However, the lines and tones will then be perceived as increasingly abstract. This experience made me think of an “eye-opener” experiment by geographer John Wylie in collaboration with artist Catrin Webster, which consisted of making drawings of landscapes en plein air. Wylie’s final conclusion about this project is thought-provoking in particular. He experienced “a sense of landscape as perhaps sometimes near and intimate, but as always nonetheless in some way distant … so near and yet so far.” Elsewhere in his essay he described his experience of “drawing-into-the-world” as a “drawing-out.”^xii In the case of looking at Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings, this experience even gains in strength due to the differences in size: the blown-up details in the drawings next to the often hard-to-identify scale of the landscape photographs. In particular the double-exposure photographs could be either structures of branches of trees or blown-up textures of rocks or even mosses. When combined in the present photobook, the variety of scales is even more striking – paraphrasing Wylie – through the switching between “so near and yet so far.” As a result, glancing through this photobook evokes associations with how geographer Denis Cosgrove has described the use of an atlas:

Its user can leaf through the atlas in any direction and across scale changes, connecting images to each other in innovative and imaginative ways. Nonuniformity of scale permits mobility: a virtual journey over and across earth space, which is vastly more flexible than physical movement because it permits simultaneous activation of scale, direction, and distance. The atlas may be regarded as a tool of mobility for picturing and witnessing global landscape.^xiii

Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings invite us to identify his artistic practice as a specific way of earth-mapping. The reduction to black-and-white tones and the small strokes of his graphite pencils encourage us to look at the surfaces of these artworks as traces of surfaces of landscapes of an unidentified scale. In this respect, we should understand the “edges” (as in the book’s title, Edges of Landscape) not only as outer boundaries of the drawings and photographs that frame the bottom edges of landscape, but also as pertaining to the very surfaces of the photographs and drawings, as existing in-between the spectator and the represented surfaces of the landscapes – “so near and yet so far.”