DRAWING AND PAINT

We are natural creatures, reacting to nature paintings in a deeply visceral way.  In our real lives, when we see a rich sunset, we admire it in the midst of our busy day.  When we see a wave break upon a beach, we pause to await the next one.  We know absolutely that Nature will renew itself.  The mountains may be worn down with the erosion of a glacier, but they will rise in another location, thrust upwards by upheavals too strong for granite to withstand.  More and more, our 21^st century lifestyles make us treasure Nature and desire to reconnect with our basic human origins and qualities.

Nature paintings do for us what they have done for others in centuries past: they exalt us as we see on canvas what the artist has captured from nature’s creations.  A mountain’s peak, a sunrise, a blanket of stars, or the roiling stormy sea, it makes no difference; nature’s splendor holds us captive.  It doesn’t matter if we have seen a similar scene with our own eyes or not; the artist whose style is true and real taps into his audience’s cultural memories and thus his work resonates profoundly within us.  Whether working from a photograph or in the actual plain air of the scene, an artist captures nature and brings it indoors so we can enjoy it in any weather or any circumstances.  Think how heavenly it will be to gaze upon a sunny beach painting in the midst of January’s dreary days!                                                                                           

The scope of a nature painting is vast.  A client who specializes in mycology may commission a painting of a colorful Amanita mushroom, bright red and round with specks of gold.  Someone interested in zoology may find an amorphous Paramecium with its waving cilia an amusing bit of decoration for his wall.  More traditionally, animal portraits of creatures we have seen in zoos and wish to bring into our homes offer a touch of nature: the elephant and the dolphin represent the intelligence of nature’s creatures.  Moving on to still lifes, those studies of fruit baskets and gleaming apples whose techniques of portrayal are among the very first which artists learn, nature here is shaped by the hand of man, who plucked the apple in its harvest and shaped the basket from natural materials.  Stepping backward to an even grander vista of nature, the broad landscape of a mountain range or the windswept expanse of a seascape offers views that only the privileged few can look out their window and see everyday.  Adjusting the focus even more broadly, the planets and outer space may be said to be nature paintings.  It is up to us to decide which subject we desire to purchase and hang upon our walls.

From a group as distinguished as Audubon, O’Keeffe, and the Hudson River school, we ought to be able to find a subject from among their works and apply this choice to a fine contemporary artist.  An abstract artist may even distill the natural experience further, to the very essence of nature in its glory.