LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS

From time immemorial, the artist who paints in plain air tries to capture the moment of his existence and his vision through the medium of the landscape.  It doesn’t even have to be an irregular landscape, as the plains of Kansas glow into beauty in the springtime, flatly undifferentiated but wildflower-filled.  In time, the development of landscape paintings grew from a simple horizontal line representing the ground to suggestions of mountain peaks in the background of religious paintings and at last to the portrayal of vast landholdings as seen through a window in the portraits of the rich and famous.  By the time of the Dutch masters of the 17^th century, the large landscapes of Rubens showed a mastery of the techniques of perspective and delineating the subtle textures of outdoor light.  Painters in France and America developed their own unique schools, Corot in France as part of the Barbizon School and Cole in America as starting the Hudson River school of landscapists.  Alongside these developments in Western art were the Chinese mountain-water scrolls with their emphasis on the vertical placement of their subjects, naturally enough in the case of mountains.  Landscapes continue to hold our interest, as we admire such landscapists as Turner and Bierstadt, more in tune with what we consider a modern landscape in our 21^st century.

Landscapes lend themselves to figurative painting, but to abstract depictions as well.  Though mostly considered a realist painter, Andrew Wyeth’s art contains an underlying abstraction, in that he plucks not only beauty from the natural world in his landscapes, but a certain emphasis on pure shape and color.  For example, in perhaps his most famous painting, Christina’s World, the crippled girl Christina has only her back showing to the viewer.  Wyeth has left her face to our imaginations, but we see her brave struggle to crawl through the deliberately abstract grass to reach the sanctuary of her home. She could be used as an example of symbolism, as well, for her dogged determination in the face of her infirmity is inspirational.  As an example of abstraction painting, it has barely a touch of that quality, yet the painting is within abstraction’s sliding scale.

Now that you’ve chosen a landscape as your next painting, what is it to be?  A place you wish to visit, a place of your own personal fond memory, or something that appeals completely to your sense of aesthetics?  Landscapes come in all shapes and sizes, from grand historical scenes of the Roman ruins to the tiny miniatures of your regionalist painter, and you will certainly find an appealing one to display in your home.  You have the choice of one of the classic categories of landscape painting genres, categorized by the Dutch masters so long ago:  the moonlight scene, the forest scene, the battle scene, the village scene, or the farm scene.  Add to these categories the grandeur of a mountain scene or the expanse of an aerial view of a landscape, and you will see how landscape paintings remain one of the most popular categories of art.