Wednesday 20 April 2011

Prospect and refuge in a beer glass

The vivid green-and-yellow coastscape yesterday reminded me a lot of this design on a Badger Brewery glass I photographed a while back.  It seems a classic example of Jay Appleton's "prospect-refuge theory" (see previously: Landscapes in mind) - the idea that satisfying landscape images should contain a view ahead in the background (the prospect) and a safe place in the foreground (the refuge).  In this case the prospect is the cliffscape, with possibilities further indicated by the signpost; and there are two refuges, the badger field and the folksy village.  It is a very satisfying image.

- Ray

3 comments:

  1. Very nice ... and very nicely observed :-)

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  2. As an additional pleasure, the captcha password with which which Blogger just presented me as I left the last comment was "wangsman" ... presumably a habitual player of Mitchell and Webb's "Numberwang" :-)

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  3. The design is very well-constructed, both as a psychologically appealing scene and as a fictitious but characteristic Dorset landscape. In fact it's very close to my own ideal coastscape, probably shaped by places like Freshwater Bay.

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