Both work with multi-sensory deployments of vista, of concealment, retrieval and the revealed. Both build slowly, over seasons, years, decades, and invest proportion and relation in all consideration. Both realise worlds within the world the footprint of both is far larger even than their actual area (histories, forces, resources bought in from well beyond the walls of rock or brick).Д«ut both are, necessarily, vessels for creation and reflection. The American artist of painted desert distances, whose shifting of vast volumes of earth to create a remarkable reception hall in a volcanic crater for the encounter with cosmic light вЂ“ with what cannot be held, only perceived вЂ“ is not, we see, so far removed from landscape gardening, the geometric architectures of the classical English countryside.

Our eyes not made for noonday sun but far more for twilight (the leaving of light), for hunting, for the gathering around flames. Instead of gardening and bird-watching I do this.Д«ut he likes gardens, follies caves, grottoes, work for domestic space. He shares correspondences and purpose, the excitement of work discovered outside of cities, the need and rewards of the quest, for artist and audience. These places and structures have certainly influenced my thinking. I admire Borobudur, Angkor Wat, Pagan, Machu Picchu, the Mayan pyramids, the Egyptian pyramids, Herodium, Old Sarum, Newgrange and the Maes Howe. He speaks of tributaries of influence, of informing travels and sitesвЂ¦ He speaks for a few minutes, priming us for exploration.

So, James Turrell, warm, approachable, a quiet but commanding presence вЂ“ dressed in shades of working blue, the stitched word вЂlightвЂ™ just visible on the shirt beneath his lapel, scripted over his heart, meets us in the dining area.

This is an undertaking driven by friendship вЂ“ from earlier acquisition, through construction, alteration and on to years of planning, building a case for a landscape of light, terrain transformed. Now Lord Cholmondeley, the amicable current owner, has called down to artвЂ™s furthest coastal frontier, to the Golden State itself, to the very idea of frontiers, of the expansion west, the threshold reached вЂ“ and crossed. Laid out on an East / West axis, the building commits itself to time as much as it does to place one eye on the past, the other for what might come an alignment of the sunвЂ™s passage and of the history of art from west to east and back again. The measure and the spur: Houghton Hall is no default siting, rather a primary location, in ways far more endowed than its founding owner Robert Walpole (BritainвЂ™s first prime minister) could have imagined. Through the lanes вЂ“ a benign maze, and past open gates into the estateвЂ™s perimeter pastures, white deer threading the dapple, reclining in small groups beneath the huge and ancient trees, their great canopies cropped sharply on the grounding edge about a manвЂ™s height from the grass, so it seems they almost are suspended, trunks dissolved in the haze, vast sails of leaves above the landscaped reach of summer. Into England вЂ“ the story of England EnglandвЂ™s imagining of itself, the green dream of the high season. Buses at Kings Lynn, but it is not hard to imagine older coaches, carts, a raggle taggle wander into fields.

The midweek, early afternoon train out, north and east, towards the sea, of course. It is a pleasure too rarely realised to venture to the end of the line, and then beyond. Sightlines: An Encounter with James Turrell

James turrell lightscape