Face to face with your own maker

Flattering or fanciful, mocking or downright menacing, the self-portrait has often been sidelined by art historians or dismissed as mere narcissism. Far from it, says Observer art critic Laura Cumming in a new book: from Lucian Freud's poor bare fork'd animal to Frida Kahlo's buzz cut, these works offer a unique insight into the mind of the artist - as well as revealing us to ourselves

On a winter's day in 1905, a museum guard was patrolling the Alte Pinakothek in Munich when he noticed that one of the paintings had changed since the last time he looked. The eyes of Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait - the most famous eyes in German art - had lost their piercing charisma. Ferocious little rips were discovered in the pupils that had probably been made with a hatpin and whoever attacked the painting may well have used such an easily concealed weapon, for it seems that nobody noticed. Somebody unseen, who would never be caught, had tried to put out Dürer's eyes.

Dürer's eyes - that's what we say, not bothering to distinguish between the painter and his self-portrait; and we do the same with portraits too. Mona Lisa is what we call both the picture and the woman who sat for Leonardo. But it feels more natural with self-portraits, since artist and sitter are one and the same, personally inter-related. And in the case of Dürer's 1500 self-portrait, one would become the counterpart of the other as never before in painting.

This old picture of a man with prodigious hair and alarming eyes has been kissed and excoriated, worshipped and attacked, carried through the streets and mounted on an altar like an icon. It has been accused of self-love, sacrilege and shocking froideur. Women have loved it like a man. The German writer Bettina von Arnim became so infatuated with it that she had a copy made for her own private purposes. But was she in love with the portrait, or the man, or the idea of an artist who could create such a transfixing image?

One summer of my childhood was spent in bed with measles. A family friend braved the quarantine bearing what she called her portable museum, dozens of old master postcards in a shoebox. Among the many portraits were some that stood out, having that intensity about the eyes that even a child recognises as the sign of a self-portrait; one was this Dürer. Too modern to have been painted so long ago, too vital to be trapped behind ancient varnish, the picture captivated me with its coldly glowing stare. It made me aware for the first time that people in paintings could be as exciting as people in life, that art could be as powerful as reality.

For some children that realisation comes through other kinds of art; for me it came with self-portraits, catching my eye so deliberately from the gallery wall. And even when it was explained that this intensity of look originated in the mirror - the artist studying him or herself - I still felt a frisson of recognition, something like chancing on one's own reflection. This switch that self-portraiture effects, putting you in their position, seeing the artists as they saw - or wanted to see - themselves, is so unique and human that it has led me to write a book examining how and what self-portraits communicate and why they come to look as they do. Decades later, for instance, trying to comprehend the Dürer's surpassing strangeness - its golden radiance (no gold is used), its powerful symmetry, its overwhelming resemblance to Christ - I came across the report of the attack buried in the Alte Pinakothek archive. Even there, among dry details of repairs, the experts acknowledge the painting's force of personality. Why was it blinded? Because of the way he/it looked at the assailant, of course, because of "Dürer's penetrating stare".

The artist as his own masterpiece: I took Dürer to school and was astonished when my art teacher disapproved. "There is too much of the artist," he shrugged, "in the picture." It's a common charge - self-portraits are too personal, essentially promotional, all front; certainly they're often treated this way, reproduced on the covers of monographs and fictional lives, displayed at the door of the museum retrospective like the party host, a preface to the real work that follows. But my teacher's words were revealing none the less. With all portraits, no matter how mediocre the image, how brief and faltering its illusion, there is always the sense of coming face to face with another person before that person reverts to an image. Self-portraits go further. Whatever they show of the outer appearance - and they may be fanciful, flattering or downright inconsistent, Rembrandt being a case in point, never the same from one picture to the next - they always offer a special class of inner truth, a pressure from within that determines what appears without, how an artist chooses to picture himself both in and as a work of art.

I take these truths to be significant and am struck by the reticence of Poussin, fastidiously withdrawing into a booth of his own paintings, enclosed by his art; by the unstoppable ego of Courbet trying to thrust his way out of the picture space. By Salvator Rosa with his glowering mountain-man pose looming above a tablet engraved with the injunction to shut up if you've nothing better to say, the solemnity of both the words and the image half-mocked by the melodramatic pose.

Rosa speaks loudly, no matter that he is affecting to keep silent, and self-portraiture is rarely as introverted as people claim. When Munch painted Self-Portrait in Hell, in which he appears up to his waist in sulphurous paint, he wasn't simply describing the lonely anguish of being abandoned by a lover who had brought him so much grief that the artist had turned a gun on himself (strategically missing everything but one fingertip of his non-painting hand). He was issuing a public j'accuse specifically for display in an Oslo gallery where anyone, including the newspapers, could see it. Love letter, mission statement, suicide note - self-portraiture offers an obvious opportunity to put across one's side of the story.

Its special look, so sharp, so expectant, shifts straight into the first-person address, and self-portraiture has its counterparts in soliloquy and monologue, as well as fiction and memoir. Quite apart from its sublime qualities as a painting, Velázquez's Las Meninas, with its maze of relationships, may be the one great novel in art. But directness and potential intimacy come fraught with dilemmas. Should self-portrayers show themselves in the act of painting - true to the moment of creation - or doing something completely different, say, twanging a lute, that might appear less plausible but more impressive? And if painting, should the picture on the easel be this or another? And if this one, what about the paradox of timing - I show myself painting but my picture is patently finished. The supposedly direct relation between mirror and canvas is confusing too. Who is this in the mirror: I or she? And when painted, has this self become someone independent of me? Some artists, for instance Sargent in an image so devoid of inner stresses it might as well be a portrait, or Titian looking away and clearly impatient to be gone, justify their presence by appearing in the alibi of the third person.

Why do artists choose to show themselves in the first place, exposing themselves to accusations of narcissism among critics who seem to confuse self-representation with self-regard? Historically, there has never been much money or glory in it; self-portraits, unlike portraits, are rarely commissioned or appraised as the high point of an artist's career, even if by Rembrandt or Velázquez. But they're often called for in more intimate ways. Goya painted himself in the arms of the doctor who saved him from dying, a token of gratitude. Murillo painted a self-portrait at his children's request, to live among them after his death.

Self-portraits make artists present as the embodiment of their art; it sounds so neat and succinct. But they often do so only to ask who or what this person is who is looking back from the mirror, how dismaying it is to be alone, how hard it is to represent or even just to be oneself.

I only know for certain the exact circumstances in which one such self-portrait was made but my sense is that something in this artist's experience may speak to a universal truth.

She was my mother, Elizabeth Cumming, studying painting at Edinburgh College of Art not long after the second world war and surrounded by men who fought that war, many of them still in uniform at the easel. Compared to these heroes who had seen - and changed - the world, she felt she knew about nothing more significant than herself. College days were spent painting the external world on which she had such a powerless grasp, but one night, when everyone else had gone home, she took a canvas and made a self-portrait in secret. There was more conviction in that image, she said, than all the heaped apples and nudes she ever painted. She had made herself real, momentarily, to herself.

My mother would be horrified to think that her painting should be mentioned on the same page as Las Meninas, but they have something in common. Self-portraits stand in the same relation to each other as human beings - possessed of a self, members of the same infinitely various race.

If one thing connects them, for me, it is that the behaviour of people in self-portraits has a strange tendency to reflect the behaviour of people in life. One might say this of portraits too, but it is not so easy to think of a portrait in which the sitter tears at his face, pulls out his hair, looms up at a mirror in disbelief or recoils quite openly from it; still less where the sitter is masturbating like Egon Schiele, or, like Tracey Emin, wallowing stark naked in cash. Nor do many portraits express what it is like to live deep inside the sitter's mind. Rembrandt's depth of knowledge is not an illusion. Van Gogh's mind teems like his brushstrokes. Velázquez senses the brevity of our life's brief day in the sun as few other painters in art.

We all have a self and a public existence, however limited, and it is the daily requirement that we put together some sort of face to the world. The thought of having to create a definitive face for all time might make even an extrovert falter, so it is no surprise that stage fright is so common or that many artists produce serial self-portraits as if giving themselves another chance. The opportunity to put oneself across as completely as one cannot in life has its obvious appeal - and terror. The most poignant self-portrait I know is by Annibale Carracci, who shows himself as an unfinished self-portrait, a little bit of painted canvas on a rickety easel in the gloaming: there and not there, like all men a work in progress.

Art historians do not concern themselves much with the power of art to move, excite or disturb; yet it is hard to think of an artist even in the past century whose ambitions are exclusively formal.

Self-portraiture offers a perfect instance of this dichotomy. Historians sometimes treat it as the remote and insignificant twig of the far greater branch of portraiture, finding in self-portraits a profession's collective representation of itself, a way of signing works, advertising style; where there is no written evidence, they ignore its human content. But I cannot believe that self-portrayers are never thinking of themselves and their lives, that self-portraits have no subjective or personal significance as in some sense fragments of somebody's self.

I cannot see Rembrandt's self-portraits solely in terms of the art market in 17th-century Holland any more than

I can look at Dürer's 1500 self-portrait, even after historians have tried to put out its fire with theological explanations, and not be amazed. These self-portraits have human mystery as part of their content.

Peculiarly testing for the artist, who has to hit upon some kind of self to represent, peculiarly rich in the self-knowledge on which it can call, self-portraiture draws forth some of the most profound and advanced picture-making in art. But its appeal is never just visual. Self-portraits put you exactly where these artists once were, contemplating themselves, an experience that resonates with every attempt to come to terms with oneself. They turn the subject inside out, remaking him or her as an indivisible trinity: here is the work of art, the image of the maker, but also the truth of how he or she wished to be seen, how they chose - as we all must choose - to present themselves to the world.

• Laura Cumming;s book A Face to the World is published on 13 July by HarperPress at £30. To order a copy for £27 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847.

A portrait of the artist

Lucian Freud, Painter Working, Reflection, 1993

Lucian Freud casts a cold eye over his body in its mortal condition. Confronting his own reflection at 71, heavy workmen's boots unlaced and flapping like the fetlocks of some hooved animal, he is a bare King Lear of the studio, a satyr or perhaps something more devilish. There is no reliance on the usual combination of pose, clothes and expression to put oneself across; identity emerges even naked. Whatever we are as human beings, we are infinitely more than our bodies. Freud brandishes his palette knife like a baton – maestro, subject and audience of his own solo performance.

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889

A Starry Night in daytime, dazzling yet solemn, this is Van Gogh's final self-portrait. He is of a piece with his own painting, speaking of himself in the same language he uses for fir trees and stars. The artist never quite explained how his colour effects should work, but the strange outcome of so much blue radiance here is uplifting calm. Sane and free of self-pity: the opposite of Van Gogh as clichéd martyr.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940

The severed hair has active life, falling, tangling, dancing in retort to the man's rejection above: 'If I loved you it was for your hair, now that you have no hair I don't love you any more.' This is not a literal illustration (the incident never happened, though Kahlo painted it when Diego Rivera divorced her) but a pictorial metaphor with a sardonic twist, written in Kahlo's own hair.

Jacques-Louis David, Self-Portrait, 1784

David is oppressively alone, not quite recognising himself immediately or completely in the mirror. There is a trace of bewilderment, even grievance and one imagines he has lost all sense of the brush and palette he grips so tightly. Imprisoned for his association with Robespierre in the French Revolution, David is literally in solitary confinement.

Ron Mueck, Mask, 1997

Three polyester-resin feet of glowering frown from knotted brow to bristled chin, super-real down to the spittle. Mueck wanted to see how he appeared to his little girls when trying to shout them into bed. Self-portraiture in the spirit of Burns's gift to see ourselves as others see us.

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969

Wilfully awkward, self-satirising, full of humour – an artist attempting a self-portrait with a sheet over his head, puffing away at his fag and his art – this is Guston as anti-hero, picturing himself as a cruddy hood in a near-cartoon. Yet everything is filtered through high art: curtains from Vermeer, light bulb from Guernica, the silvers, greys and pinks of Velazquez. Why paint yourself painting? This scene gives the greatest answer, assembled piece by piece from everything Guston knows and loves about painting. He is not separate but a humble part, like his smouldering brush, of art's working tradition.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638

Head tilting, body kiltering, Gentileschi rises to the creative moment like an action painter three centuries in advance. She could have shown herself sedately doing nothing, like most women before her. Instead she embodies her own legend as the most celebrated female artist of her time. Gentileschi wastes no time on eye contact, on social introductions, but gets straight down to work: a painter of strong women, a strong woman painter.

Heart of stone

Drawing on natural forms - hives, spider webs, nautilus shells - Peter Randall-Page's sculptures are deeply connected to pleasure and the comfort of physical contact. By Marina Warner

One of Peter Randall-Page's rather famous precursors in the great art of sculpture describes, in a sonnet on his art and its relations to love, how the sculptor discovers inside the stone the form that lies within, waiting for the artist to make it appear.

Number 151 of the Rime or Rhymes of Michelangelo opens with the quatrain (in a recent translation by AS Kline):

The best of sculptors has not one idea
The un-worked marble does not hold
Inside itself: the hand alone attains it
That is commanded so by the intellect.

It seems to me that in Michelangelo's metaphor we have Randall-Page's consummate art, which also liberates living forms from within his materials as he yields to the granite, the flints, the fossil-rich marbles, and softer limestones of the boulders he works. At the the same time, he takes possession of them, animating them and changing their presence in the world through the patient, visionary movement of hand and eye, hammer and chisel, until the stone, in some cases the most ancient, the most dead phenomena in the universe, comes back to life as art.

I am reminded of a story I heard from a journalist who had interviewed an astronaut. She asked him if there was a moment when they could smell the atmosphere in outer space. He said no, because of course it would kill them to be in contact with that frozen, airless void. But, he added, for a moment after they returned inside the spaceship, they could smell it on their clothes. It smelled, he said, like banging one stone against another.

This image, which gives a sense of infinite coldness, of ringing immutabilty, also gives us a sense of the extent of Randall-Page's opposing, liberating, and revivifying work. He often invokes the aesthetics of domestic forms as well as the private beauty of bodies in every bodily activity, in every biological species. In his early works, currently on display at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and in the brilliant array of small, spontaneous squidged-out clay pieces, he has made one body of pleasure after another. We met in the late 1980s after I bought a small piece of his - a bronze cast of one of his small clay pieces - at the Contemporary Art Society annual show. I saw the series of antic, almost absurdist dancing bronze figurines he had made in the same way, by squeezing the earth in his hand, hollowing out the body of the form with his thumb like a potter shaping the bowl. I often take my piece into my creative writing class at Essex and invite the students to write a response to it - without any prompting, they find themselves sparked, lit up.

But the organic relations between Randall-Page as a sculptor and his materials have taken a different direction in the last few years, and he also now searches inside the stones for the concealed geometric patterns that structure the universe, at the level of the cell to the reaches of the galaxies: vortices such as those formed by the Fibonacci series, which can be found in the dumbfounding loveliness of the nautilus shell's inner spiral, in the radiating halo of a sunflower's face, in the vast revolutions of the Milky Way.

Not only vortices: Randall-Page engages with natural stacking structures such as hives, packed inside with bees' hexagonal architecture, the wasps' clever chewing up of paper to make their fragile three-dimensional webs and spiders' funnels and nets. The mathematical pattern-making of plants caught his eye and gave him ways of thinking about his own structural forms and inventions. Flora and fauna are the natural precursors to and inspiration of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes - his "Bucky balls" - as Randall-Page calls them.

If he is in some way an heir to Michelangelo - and while flattering, this has its drawbacks - he is not backward-looking. After all, he never approaches the figurative directly, but always through metaphors and association brewed by long thought and wide reading (his notebooks, on view in the gallery, are a revelation). Randall-Page's sculpture fulfills the principle that the French metaphysician Paul Ricoeur formulated when he was thinking about the growth of secular mysticism in contemporary culture: "The subject does not know itself directly," he wrote, "but only through the symbols deposited in its memory and in its imaginary by the great cultures ... The symbol gives rise to thought." In the era of Florentine humanism and Michelangelo, the human body symbolised their world view. Today, in strong contrast, we are learning to recognise ourselves through different metaphors and to reject the arrogance of anthropocentricism, trying to put the question of recognising ourselves and our place in the world from another vantage point. Darwin evoked wonder as the appropriate stance, wonder as both awe and inquiry (as in "How wonderful" and "I wonder why?"). Randall-Page's works and their condensation of forms hint at many corporeal entities, but metamorphose them, never simply making their portraits from appearances only.

One of the most spectacular and puzzling dynamics of evolution has given us the tiger's stripes, the eyes on a butterfly's wings, the dappled hide of the deer, the flower-like hummingbird, the spots on a toadstool. There is nothing stranger than the transformation of a caterpillar into the exact, repellent likeness of a bird dropping, or the clever masquerade of a harmless fruit fly into the guise of a wasp, or the peacock's tail, or the angel fish's fins.

Randall-Page has studied the morphological rhymes of different species and has wondered at these beautiful correspondences between the giraffe's markings, the cypress nut's hexagons, tortoise shells and mackerel stripes and clouds forming. In order to grasp them, his processes involve him in a range of media - in low-relief carving and painted stone, in drawing, casting, baking in terracotta. The close-up magnified drawings of walnuts, or the Euclidean Egg anatomies, recall Samurai warriors arrayed for battle - and the Japanese warriors are themselves imitating nature's beetling insects, death's-head hawkmoths and other frighteningly marked and bristling creatures.

The camouflage flows both ways; and Randall-Page plays on this, giving us naturally occurring Rorschach tests, abstract pictures of our own thinking that he calls "Mind Maps".

When I was at the sculpture park last year, I saw an exhibition of works by Isamu Noguchi, and thought of Randall-Page. He corresponded with Noguchi when he was a student and just starting out as a stone carver. His art responds to Noguchi and also departs from him in rich and significant ways.

Noguchi designed an adventure playground for children in New York, which was never built because it was thought to be too adventurous. The model looked fabulous - architectural fantasy combined with a real sense of play, of the fun of rushing and running around, or climbing and swinging, hide and seek. Randall-Page's work possesses these qualities as well - the work of ravelling and unravelling labyrinths on the surface, of arranging and discovering symmetries, of excavating the spirit of the stone, involving us in memories of experiences that are deeply connected to pleasure, to the comfort and the delight of contact - of being enfolded, squeezed.

Symbolic forms that connect and reconnect us to love, to play, to growth, to symmetries and twisters and other underlying riddles of the universe - these are some of the areas where his work takes us. Finally, he also explores the deepest mystery of all, that of time: the mystery with which sculpture has an intimate relation, so intimate that the terms for eternity and for worked stone are almost interchangeable - pyramids and obelisks, ziggurats and menhirs, the Parthenon, the Sphinx, the Elgin marbles, Stonehenge - these are the most ancient traces that show we were long ago doing something with our minds and hands.

Fossils, one of Randall-Page formal sources, are nature's way of working stone. It's also significant that many of the first tools which give evidence of humankind are themselves carved - flints and jaspers - and later in our evolution, were used to make some of the first marks which distinguish human culture: for example instruments which were heated and then applied to oracle bones to crack them, in order to prognosticate, produced the earliest form of inscriptions ever found - the beginning of writing.

The sculptures and works in other media assembled here in an authoritative and generous display, have similarly read the world of forms as if it were a codex, packed with significance that can be revealed, and which will bring sensory pleasure and take us somewhere beyond our usual boundaries of perception.

• Peter Randall-Page's exhibition is at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield (01924 832631) until January 2010.

'Where it always rains'

Edward Lear's rarely seen Lake District sketches show a young artist following in the footsteps of the great masters, but also finding his own way to produce landscapes that are skilful and accurate yet atmospheric. Jenny Uglow tracks him down in Grasmere

On Saturday 20 August 1836, the 24-year-old Edward Lear made a little drawing, wryly titled "Umbrellifera". This was not a sketch to accompany an early nonsense poem, but a record of Kendal on market day, a huddle of women under their umbrellas. "Nature's slopbasin," Lear called the town, "where it always rains." Anyone who knows the driving rain of the Lakes in summer storms will sympathise. The clouds followed him as he visited the southern flanks of the Lake District, and travelled west to Holker Hall, and the abbeys of Cartmel and Furness, where he sketched the great Norman arches. All the time he looked forward to travelling north, to the high mountains.

Lear's Lake District sketches are rarely seen, and the new exhibition at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Edward Lear the Landscape Artist, gives us a rare view of his youthful talent and ambition. A trip to the lakes was a must for any aspiring artist, treading in the steps of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, and Lear's careful homework shows in the way that several of the sketches are made from exactly the same position as the prints in contemporary guidebooks. But although he had preconceived ideas that shaped his vision, he was also agog for new impressions. On his way he stayed in Lancaster with a young patron, Edmund Hornby, summing up his visit in self-mocking raptures: "Mrs Hornby - the mountains of Westmoreland - the Castle - & the Lunatic Asylum - are all balanced in my mind - you might see them all at once - & each was perfection in its way."

The perfection was marred by the fact that everywhere Lear went, it rained. "I have now been a month in the Lake Country," he lamented in early September "& have seen nothing of a Lake at all! ... almost all this time I have only made studies of rain." There were, however, some magical compensations, especially Levens Hall, still a refuge for visitors today, sheltering under the yews or taking refuge inside, in the panelled halls with their great carved fireplaces. Lear loved everything about Levens, from the gardens to the dancing and dining in the hall, "where ghosts are as common as mice, - & you sit among armour & starched ruffs till you find even your own limbs growing stiff & mouldy".

Levens and the other old houses Lear visited were indeed like a fairy-tale world, far distant from the world of his own childhood. He was the 20th of 21 children, 17 of whom survived, and the family was always threatened by the spectre of poverty. He suffered from epilepsy and was often ill, and his education, such as it was, was taken care of by his older sisters Ann and Sarah. When his father retired in 1827, Lear, at 14 and "literally without a farthing", set up home in Gray's Inn Road with Ann. He had no formal education to fall back on, but his sisters had taught him drawing and he became an unofficial apprentice to Prideaux John Selby, on the multi-volume Illustrations of British Ornithology. At the age of 19 he made his own name, with his book on parrots, issued in 12 parts from 1830-32, with hand-coloured lithographs. His beautiful plates were the model for John Gould's ambitious Birds of Europe, to which Lear also contributed some illustrations.

All the time he was desperate to hone his craft. He learned lithography from the jovial printer Charles Hullmandel, and improved his technique with the landscape artist James Duffield Harding, a stern man, whom Ruskin called "the greatest master of foliage in Europe". Lear rubbed shoulders with artists from the Royal Academy, and began to harbour ambitions of his own. At 20, according to Harding's pupil Daniel Fowler, although "tall, not handsome, and rather ungainly in figure", Lear was "very agreeable and genial in manner. There indeed was partly the secret of his great success in life; he was all things to all people."

Some of those people were very influential, and Lear did not scruple to accept their help. His natural history work, for example, caught the eye of Lord Stanley, president of the Zoological Society, and after Stanley inherited the title of Lord Derby in 1834, he invited Lear to draw his private menagerie at Knowsley House near Liverpool. From here in 1835, in a summer of cricket and raspberries and grand dinners, he wrote - rather unconvincingly - to his friend George Coombe: "I am sick of splendour - vomiting with excess of pomp - longing for a little porter out of a pewter pot."

At Knowsley, where, he later said "children and mirth abounded", he discovered the joy of limericks, and jotted down the first nonsense rhymes and drawings. This aspect of Lear is also present in the current exhibition, in the many letters on display. His eye for the absurd is found in his raptures on the gardens of Levens Hall, with the huge yews, "30 or 40 feet high - cut into cows - bottles - hats - & every possible shape - unaltered by an inch since 1680!! Imagine turf between walls of high beech trees - all magically short quite even - & looking like fable & nonsense!!" And you can almost see the accompanying drawing, as he notes a reply from the deaf Lord Derby to an inquiry about his headache: "'Oh' - replied he - 'I have found a remedy for that. I have taken all the little birds out & put in one Cockatoo & three large Macaws.'"

Knowsley was fun, but more important, it gave Lear the chance to travel. In 1835 different groups went from there to north Wales, and then to Ireland, to attend the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Dublin. During the latter trip, Lear and companions made a hasty dash around the Wicklow mountains, where Lear drew round towers and mountains, waterfalls and lakes, markets and mansions. But this was nothing compared with a tour of the Lakes the following year, when he set off armed with invitations to the grandees of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

At last, after that first rainy month, he reached the fells and lakes that were his real goal. On 9 September 1836, Lear was at Storrs Hall on Windermere, but at that point he refused further grand invitations. "This sort of life is all very fine," he decided, tongue-in-cheek, "but very improper." Instead he packed his bag, put on his boots, and set out. He took with him a portfolio with sheafs of blue-grey paper, a supply of pencils and stump, the wad used for shading, white chalk for heightening, and perhaps some watercolours. Meticulously, he dated each sketch and numbered them in sequence in pen and brown ink. This detailed sequence, begun on 9 September 1836 and clarified by Lear's letters, has allowed Charles Nugent, the curator of this exhibition, to work out Lear's routes - with a few gaps - over the following month.

The sketches show a landscape at once familiar and strange to the modern eye. The first, for example, is the postcard view from the landing stage at Lowwood, on the eastern shore of Windermere south of Ambleside, looking across the lake and up the distant valleys to the Langdale Pikes, the peaks just emerging from the drifting clouds. In his sketch tourists gather, pointing westwards, as they would always do - it was here that Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell would meet, and talk, and drift on the lake - and it looks much the same today, although crowded with yachts and boats. But then Lear went north, past Wordsworth's home at Rydal Mount, through Grasmere and up over Dunmail Raise, the old county border between Cumberland and Westmoreland. From here he sketched the view towards Thirlmere, showing us a looping, hourglass shaped lake, with three linked bridges spanning its shallowest point, a view lost when the valley was drowned to form a reservoir.

Usually Lear walked, but sometimes he hired a horse and at least once, when he headed for Calder Hall near the western coast, he probably took the coach. In mid-September he was at Wastwater, drawing Kirkfell, Yewbarrow and Great Gable, and scrambling up high among the crags. "I know every corner of Westmoreland," he wrote later, "Scawfell Pikes is my cousin, and Skiddaw is my mother-in-law." From Wasdale he marched over the old packhorse route of Styhead Pass and down into Borrowdale, stopping, as most walkers do, to take a break at the top, looking down over the tarn towards the Borrowdale Fells, with Blencathra in the background. This is one of the most successful sketches, not a guidebook standard, but an out-of-the-way view, in which Lear conjures the great fells and the misty distances with his simple, broken pencil lines, shading and highlights. The looseness and freedom of his drawing is itself like a holiday, after the years of detailed, intricate work on his illustrations of birds.

More sketches show him travelling around Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, but by the end of the month Lear was in the western lakes again. He paced the shores of Buttermere to get a good view of Fleetwith Pike and haystacks, drawing Crummock Water and Loweswater. Then he climbed over to Ennerdale, stopping in the high, lonely uplands to sketch marshes and burns and tarns, and looking up towards "t'Pillar" as he calls it, mimicking the local voice. His sketches zigzag across the fells. He winds his way back to Grasmere and the Langdales. He stops to catch the drama of waterfalls like Skewith Force in spate. He can't resist - who can - the jagged silhouette of Crinkle Crags against a western sky. He slogs up the long, long stretch of Mickleden to Rossett Gill and over to Watendlath and Borrowdale again. For his final few days he turns east, walking from Dunmail Raise up to Grisedale Tarn and over to Patterdale, exploring Ullswater before circling back over Kirkstone to Windermere. Now his great tour was over. By 30 October he was back at Knowsley, having paid a final visit to Levens Hall on the way.

In theory, this trip had put money in his purse. Lake District prints were popular, and lithographs from his sketches would have been a handy money-spinner. He did write of working them up over the winter, but only one lithograph survives, Wastwater & the Screes, from Wasdale. By the spring of 1837, Lear had other plans. That year he left for Rome, funded by the generous Derby. For the next 50 years, until his death in 1888, he was based chiefly on the continent. He abandoned the idea of making Lake District prints, and over the years he handed out his drawings on their blue-grey paper as casual gifts to friends.

The exhibition has found a perfect home at Dove Cottage, since anyone who loves or visits the area will pore over the drawings with fascination. But the exhibition is, in itself, a reason to travel north. The sketches that have been so carefully tracked down reveal far more than lakeland topography. They are a record of a young artist finding his way, skilful and deft, accurate yet atmospheric. Lear was, rightly, pleased with himself and his work. He wrote to John Gould, with whom he was still working on the illustrations of birds,

"Really it is impossible to tell you how, & how enormously I have enjoyed the whole Autumn. The counties of Cumberland and Westmd are superb indeed, & tho' the weather has been miserable, yet I have contrived to walk pretty well over the whole ground, & to sketch a good deal beside. I hope too, I have improved somewhat."

He had. His work of 1836 points forward to the superb lithographs he would produce of scenes in Italy and in later years, of views in Greece, Egypt, Palestine and India. He was now "Edward Lear the Landscape Artist".

• The exhibition catalogue Edward Lear the Landscape Artist: Tours of Ireland and the English Lakes 1835 and 1836 is published by the Wordsworth Trust. The exhibition at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, is open until 4 October.

A funeral, a procession, and sci-fi sprouts

Jeremy Deller kicks off his Procession, Thomas Hirschhorn hosts a bloodthirsty funeral, and brussels sprouts get a sci-fi makeover in Liverpool

Sound the fanfare! Manchester International festival opens this weekend with theatrical flourish. This biennial festival in its second edition has quickly gained international significance, and among a cacophony of new and ambitious events are wonderful shows from artists. Highlights include a performance exhibition in an emptied-out Whitworth Gallery of artists chosen by, and including, the queen of endurance, Marina Abramović. She will be asking visitors to promise not to leave for several hours if they visit. Also taking place this weekend is Jeremy Deller's Procession, involving local groups including Bolton's Black Out Crew and their modified cars, goths, emo-kids, ramblers and chip-shop owners, all marching their way down Deansgate on Sunday. Deller's procession is likely to be a sweetly subcultural thing of ramshackle beauty.

If you're nearer to London but are interested in the idea of processions as artwork, then visit Parades and Processions – Here Comes Everybody at Parasol Unit, in which Deller is also a participant, filming and photographing the peculiar atmosphere of a veteran's parade in the US. Indeed, the spectre of war hangs over this exhibition – quite literally in the case of Fiona Banner's work, which features models of the world's fighter planes suspended from the ceiling, unpainted, like a swarm of locusts. Thomas Hirschhorn's sprawling, disturbing installation of cut-out newspaper headlines and grafitti scrawls covers almost the entire first floor of the gallery. From out of his piles of blood-red foam on the floor rise mannequin hands, which support the coffins of dead soldiers, pasted in more newspaper headlines. It's a procession of media outpouring that appears to carry the dead to their graves.

Should you need a quieter, more contemplative moment after this, stop into the Approach, near Bethnal Green, which has a beautifully sensitive exhibition from Alice Channer, entitled Worn Work. The gallery almost seems to wear Channer's sculptures, which include adapted bronze bangles and long swathes of gingham and striped fabric that hang from the ceiling. Clothes, more than any other object, need a wearer to bring them to life, and Channer creates sculptures that activate the empty space around them.

In Liverpool, Daniel Pasteiner manages to create celestial magic from common domestic objects, which are on view at the A Foundation. Red and blue sculptures, a little like giant double helixes, twist and spread around the space like genetic constructions from another planet. It's a little less extra-terrestrial when you realise they're sculpted from brussels sprouts. Elsewhere, a collection of snow globes, containing tiny models of a wintery New York City, are combined around a larger glass globe to make a cell-like form. Placed on a glowing overhead projector, the globes send refracted light and rainbows shooting around the room.

Lastly, if you're in Birmingham, check out Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan's exhibition at Eastside Projects, entitled Does Your Contemplation of the Situation Fuck With the Flow of Circulation. This pair are always acerbically deadpan – they once filled Glasgow's Tramway Gallery with a huge black sculpture of the words Heroin Kills, and then asked glamorous art-world types to wear a gold necklace bearing the same words to the Venice Biennale. In their hands, language becomes empty and socially ambiguous. In this exhibition, they've included a poster advertising a techno night called Ecstasy Kills, as well as a large, patterned Z-shaped tunnel for visitors to crawl through, so that they might better imagine the pair's thinking process.

Arthur Erickson's architectural triumphs

He may not have the fame of Frank Gehry or the kudos of Rem Koolhaas, but this versatile Canadian architect leaves a far-reaching legacy

Remembering Arthur Erickson, Canada's most renowned modernist architect, on our national day yesterday, I couldn't help but think how his work embodied the Canadian ideal at its most promising: clean, contemporary design, rooted in natural inspiration, open to the world.

Too often, the man and his architecture rubbed up against that other Canada – the one of petty, Presbyterian sensibilities that confuse parochialism with patriotism and never fully appreciated his vision. But at his 14 June memorial service, held on what would have been Erickson's 85th birthday, I came away with a renewed sense of what his work was all about.

The service was held at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Erickson's magnificent 1965 campus, located on Burnaby Mountain, half an hour's drive from downtown Vancouver, and designed with his then partner Geoffrey Massey. As tributes were paid to the man and his work, we all stood under the glorious glass and concrete canopy that frames the university's central mall.

I grew up here, when my parents were students in the early 70s, and always used to joke with Erickson that I was a product of his architecture. When the campus and I turned 40, I interviewed him for a fledgling documentary called Architecture of My Childhood.

SFU, a temple to learning, with a nod to Greek and Islamic architecture (Erickson spoke of Cairo's Al-Azhar University), had a sense of processing down the mountainside. From the Academic Quadrangle, with its Moghul-like pond at the summit, down to the westernmost student residences, the campus was conceived as a series of open terraces extending down the slope.

The central, open-plan mall was the place where it all came together, quite literally. Designed as a way to erase boundaries between disciplines – arts and sciences, professors and students – the area was the site of many cultural happenings and student protests in the heady years of SFU's childhood. With its native plants, water features and sense of grandeur, it seemed to embody the promise of Canada.

But while the country still struggles to live up to the ideals contained in SFU's design, Erickson's legacy lives on. Vancouver will always be the richer for his late 70s Robson Square complex, a high-rise plaza laid on its side across three city blocks, and his 1976 Museum of Anthropology, a cliff-top modernist ode to traditional northwest architecture.

But it's not just in his hometown that his legacy remains compelling. From the Canadian embassy in Washington DC, which slyly mocks American imperial arrogance even as it pays homage to it, to the Tacoma Museum of Glass, with its temple of Hatshepsut-inspired ramps and shimmering slanted cone, Erickson's elegant style has left its mark on a far-reaching landscape.

Indeed, I wonder how the vision of Erickson, who was noted for his long conversations about Zen philosophy and whose work always seemed to have a vaguely Babylonian feel, would have transformed Baghdad. I'll always remember his story of being commissioned to redesign Abu Nawas, the historic riverside neighbourhood, and meeting Saddam Hussein in a bunker on the eve of the Iran-Iraq war. His plans were cut short by the eight-year conflict, but I'm sure they would have brought an exquisitely designed sense of place, and a tranquil modernism, to the banks of the Tigris.