A Geomorphological Assessment of Constable Landscapes

I took this post from the River Management Blog, and the post is by Simon Dixon. John Constable is one the greatest English landscape painter, and, in the words of the blog authors, contributed very much to the idea of what a natural landscape is. However, reading the post, you can realize that his paintings portrait not so natural landscapes.

Click, as usual on the painting to jump on the post.

Lawren S. Harris, Mount Lefroy

From a few years, I have an eye for paintings representing the hydrological cycle or emotions that call to me something connected with the arguments or the tools, or something else I am doing. The origin of this mood came from a paper by Bill Dietrich and collaborators, about the realism of modeling nature, the paper entitled
"Geomorphic Transport Laws for Predicting Landscape Form and Dynamic" was published in "Prediction in Geomorphology, Geophysical Monograph, 13, 2003, and can be found here. Whatever one thinks about the paper, she/he could not stay indifferent behind the pieces of art, like the one here. Obviously what realism is, is a matter of opinions. However, with Galilei, physical science chose to perform experiments to assess it. Which is not matter of opinions, but of set-ups, and repeatability. Unfortunately Earth Science cannot, at the very end, perform very controlled experiments, in which single factors, and boundary conditions can be controlled. We have events, in place of experiments. This makes our work more challenging.