DRAWING AND PAINT

Describing the Beauty of Original Landscape Abstract Art Modern Painting.  A landscape brings us to the great outdoors even if we are busy indoors, working or relaxing, chatting with friends or reviewing an important business deal.  How inspiring it is to see the panorama of all that nature can offer, whether it is a stormy patch of weather which overhangs a mountaintop or the broad vista of cultivated fields that shows how much that mankind is dependent upon the land for our very existence.  Now and again an outstanding element comes to the fore, but in the main the emphasis in landscape paintings is the land itself, unending around us as our vision takes in the horizon stretching all around us.  From the ancient Minoans, Greeks and Romans come the first inklings that landscapes formed part of their culture, and even though the more sophisticated means of portraying scale and proportion regarding distance would not come until the Renaissance, these extremely early landscapes do show an attempt to recreate the feel of standing still and really noticing the land around us.  Working our way through history to the Dutch Masters, we see that landscape painting in the West has come to fruition with the complete understanding of the ideas of distance and perception and how to portray them in paintings.

Landscape paintings in Chinese traditional art focus upon mountains and generally show only the minimal presence of people, for instance the lone traveler leaning on his staff or perhaps even more simply, the indication of human beings represented by the hermit’s hut far atop a mountain.  For the problems of how to show intervening land between the distant mountain and the figure in the foreground, these Chinese scrolls emphasized the vertical canvas as the painters used the devices of fog obscuring the details of the landscape, or implying the intervening land as a simple ground line.  What the Chinese landscapes lacked in formal knowledge of vanishing points and horizon depictions, they made up for in the exquisite detail of each pine tree and even each pine needle.  The two schools of landscape paintings each fill a niche, as they both demonstrate traditions going back well over one thousand years.

What of imaginary landscapes?  Why should we be limited to the scenes that we or others have seen with their own eyes?  The works of the engraver Dore are a case in point.  Fantastic scenes from the works of Poe, Milton, Ariosto and other romantic writers come to light as nearly realistic, since the attention to detail that Dore infuses into each engraving and painting transcends our sense as a viewer that what we are seeing cannot possibly be real.  The sea monster of Orlando Furioso or the outer space scene of a chariot carrying characters from the earth to the moon could not have been imagined more thoroughly as they have in Dore’s works.  All painters of imaginary landscapes after Dore owe him a great deal.

Landscape paintings take us where we have been and might go.  If you include one in your home or office, you will give your visitors and yourself a flight into fancy as the painting takes you to the great outdoors, either real life-based or springing from the imagination of a fabulous artist.