Thoughts on Landscape Painting
As many people can tell by looking at my artwork, I have a profound interest in painting and sculpting animate living things including figures, animals and particular characters. Of course plant life is within the realm of the living too, but of the more quiet and subdued variety. It finds its way gently into all manner of artistic pieces including the venerable landscape painting.
Amidst all my interest in visual character development (as I like to think of it), I’ve enjoyed creating some paintings which are purely landscape in subject matter. As I think back on the landscapes I’ve painted, I notice an interest I seem to have in basic geometric organization of what appeared in my visual field at the time. There is some attention to the scenic details in these paintings, particularly in areas of foliage or underbrush. However, as I initially dove into the “field” of landscape painting, I quickly discovered the grand importance of simplification. To me, when engaging in figurative work (and that means animals as well as people), it really can be a quieting and readily focused endeavor. Despite all the possible complexities of anatomy and surface patterns, the subject can still, in my opinion, be easily thought of as a single unit – a happy, self contained, autonomous being which pretty much naturally declares back to the artist “I’m finished!” when the time has arrived.
Now an artist’s process of painting a landscape need not be conceived of any differently than that of rendering the other subjects described above. Still, I find it very easy to be dazzled and overwhelmed by all the infinite and varied elements that make up many of the outdoor scenes that meet our gaze each day. If caricature art is a crash course in the infusion of portraiture with personality, then landscape painting is indeed a crash course in the need for artistic simplification. To me, the distillation of complex visual information into moving poetic expression finds perhaps it’s most intense application in an artist’s handling of landscape subject matter.
The beauty of artistic composition lies, in part, in the fact that, despite the existence of true principles, there really are no rules per se. There are as many ways of handling landscape painting as there are landscape painters, and then some. There are myriad contemporary landscape painters that take the concept of simplified geometry to a relative extreme, including no detail at all, to speak of, in their paintings. Then, there are those historic painters such as Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and others of the Hudson River School who have awed us with their mega-dramatic scenery and masterful handling of detail. In either of these extremes, landscape artists have had to choose, to one degree or another, how much of their depicted scene to leave out, in some cases what to add in, and in all cases how to make the inspiringly complex world of the great outdoors work to their advantage as a convincing artistic statement.