Middle States Geographer, 2000, 33:1-9 ART AS A GEOGRAPHIC TOOL FOR LANDSCAPE EXPLANATION Roger Balm Rutgers University

ABSTRACT: Although geography is often proclaimed as a discipline with visuality at its core, the relative disregard of how visual artists respond to landscape suggests otherwise. This paper points out some points of intersection between art imagery and geography and then goes on to discuss applications of those points of intersection in the context offieldwork in England and Wales where drawings and paintings were made to record the last remains of heavy industry on the landscape. It is argued that full use of art images and art methodologies entails a dual engagement with both objective landscapes offact and the expressive and subjective landscapes of feeling. This dual engagement is described in the context of industrial landscape as a transition from mimetic picture-making to the construction of visual substitutions that incorporate references to fossil excavation and associated concepts of memory and preservation. To produce fuller explanations of landscape geographers may profitably use two common components of contemporary art imagery: expressive selectivity and visual reconfiguration. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. INTRODUCTION impoverished form of representation that takes little account of the rich variety of viewpoint and allusio