My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The landscape you grow up in speaks to you in a way that nowhere else does.
The sea was at the bottom of my road, and I seemed to spend my childhood in it or on it, hearing, tasting, smelling it. Now, still, I need to be near water as often as possible.
I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.
I find the presence of the sea quite inspiring, and sometimes I do just get out and walk around and take in the sea breeze to try and clear my mind.
There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land.
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
I like a certain grandeur to a landscape, which both the Arctic and coastal BC have. I like it to be at all times clear that people aren't the dominant fact of a particular geography.
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
I live by the sea, but the body of water I have the most feeling about is the Mississippi River, where I used to row and skate, ride on the ferry in childhood, watch the logs or just dream.
The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.