What kind of landscapes are you drawn to--peaceful, stormy, mythological, realistic, bright or chiaroscuro, minimalist or detailed?
If you create landscapes, what kind, and in what medium?
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If you were to guess what sort of landscape people universally like--from Africa to America to Asia to Australia--how would you describe it? According to aesthetic philosopher Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, it would be similar to the landscape of our Pleistocene ancestors: open spaces with low grasses and copses of trees, especially those that fork near the ground (for easy escape from predators?). An example is the scene below from South Africa. There could be evidence of water, animals, and birds. And the picture could contain a path or road, a riverbank or shoreline, extending into the distance, as though beckoning us to follow it. What's particularly fascinating is that this landscape is regarded as beautiful by people in countries that don't even have such terrain. Dutton points out that it shows up on calendars and postcards, in designs of golf courses and public parks, and in framed pictures hanging on living room walls around the world. Artists create all kinds of landscapes for all kinds of reasons. In the late-19th- and early-20th-century, many Western artists were driven to create landscapes in part because of their dissatisfaction with the modern city. They imagined earthly paradises in paint. Others simply have wanted to capture impressionistically the essence of Nature's beauty around them, or to remember a place they visited. Some wanted to realistically depict the details, especially before photography was invented. And then there's simply the desire to delight in colors and shapes. Based on certain philosophical traditions, a spiritual element might be integral to the landscape picture, creating more of a "mindscape," as in this painting by Australian artist Maria Gorton, or that of Canadian artist Lawren Harris, currently exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Landscapes have gone in and out of fashion in the art world, but they still command our attention. They can be exotic or familiar, bucolic or grand, remote and wild, fantastic or mystical, totally abstract or fully representational. They can be screen-printed, painted in oils, watercolors or acrylics, composed with textiles, sketched in ink, charcoal, pastel or pencil, etched, engraved, captured by camera, and so much more. Here are a few from different times and places and in different mediums. Can you guess when, where, and how? In an interview conducted by Krista Tippett for her program "On Being," the Irish poet John O'Donohue says, "What amazes me about landscape is its Zen thereness. In a certain sense, landscape recalls you into a mindful moment of stillness, silence, and solitude, where you can truly receive time." "The beauty of nature," O'Donohue continues, "is its generosity." He refers to the Celtic view of landscape as not just matter but actually something alive. It's not simply the outer presence of the landscape that affects us. There's also something that connects us to the elemental, to the rhythm of the universe. Questions and Comments:
What kind of landscapes are you drawn to--peaceful, stormy, mythological, realistic, bright or chiaroscuro, minimalist or detailed? If you create landscapes, what kind, and in what medium?
8 Comments
3/27/2016 08:21:27 am
Wonderful post, Mirka. I loved looking at the works you chose to illustrate. I am fascinated by landscape, and take lots of photos, but had shied away from deliberate attempts to make landscapes in my art. However, I have been working on a weekly series of small textile/mixed media pieces that seems to veer toward landscape, though that has not necessarily been deliberate. That is, I do not set out to make a landscape, but my end result is often clearly reminiscent of one. Your post today gives me a lot of food for thought.
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Susan Fenerty
3/27/2016 09:53:58 am
Hi Mirka, here is the dialogue you made happen with this post, bear with me. When prompted to paint abstractly in painting class I opt for landscape as the only way I can approach painting abstracts. A fellow student observed that mine look kinda like J M Turner's I guess in brush strokes, ephemeral quality atmospheric renditioning. I actually took up quilting to teach me how to paint abstracts. Not sure how that worked but I got a lot of quilts made for the family and met some amazing fabric artists (You mainly) who still inspire my efforts to paint modernly. Yesterday at painting class/studio, as I was composing the picture, I realized for me, landscape really boils down to a question of scale. As I look at the illustrative choices you made in this post, scale is still the element I relate to best. The feelings of space, peacefulness, detached emotional responses all boil down to depiction of scale for me. Once asked what my favorite lens for my camera with which to shoot was, fast and easy response was: the telephoto. Even for close-ups. I had not before this latest class and my efforts to compose the picture to get the feeling and viewpoint for the viewer I want what the term and what it actually means in a work was, but it finally dawned on me and scale it is. In Turner's most recent exhibition in SF, from the Tate in London, were paintings done late in his life, I was struck by how modern they were. I am a fan. His painting of a furnace, mostly black, really defined space and atmosphere not well defined by light, and made me realize that approaching my painting with three layers of dark oil colors to get to a black without using black for the background and ground from which to begin,and where to begin, I needed to define the space and distance from which a viewer would be. With the sketch begun and my mind engaged in working that all out, I realized that I needed to consider scale in a broader sense than simply the size of images depicted- although that is the how and really the definition of scale, somehow the act of attempting to get the effect I wanted opened up a whole universe of contemplation about scale in more than just the application of paint. As do the landscapes you have chosen to send out. Perhaps it is this that is so universal and that humans who do not need to consider scale relate to. Deeply ingrained. Hope I have made sense, hard to express, and maybe even I have not used the right word. But, as usual, you have struck a chord, thanks, Mirka Yay landscapes.
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Susan,
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3/27/2016 01:43:57 pm
Thank you. You always give me food for thought. I am not drawn to realistic landscapes. I have not been able to create a fabric landscape. Not sure why? I am drawn to the bare, stark landscapes. Why does one person feel drawn to something another dismisses? I think it is the individuals human qualities? Isn't the diversity WONDERFUL?
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Judith Selby Lang
3/28/2016 10:52:22 am
Your blog post about landscapes reminded me of "People's Choice" the ground breaking work of Komar and Melamid- collaborators from Russia who in 1994 surveyed hundreds of people to find their "Most Wanted" and "Most Unwanted" painting. Regardless of country the results were remarkably similar. You guessed it - they were landscapes and mostly they were blue.
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Mirka KnasterI am a fiber/mixed-media artist with a decades-long career as a writer. Working with textiles and handmade paper from around the world and exploring the heart of art evoke my joy daily. *Blog continues on my website. Click link below for my recent posts.
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