Landscape Painting depicts the scenery of the natural world with the views that impact the artist’s eye. In an effort to represent the beauty that meets the eye, the artist tries to capture that fleeting moment in time and space, for all time, thus becoming a co-creator with the original Creator.
In these visions may be any element that may be natural or man-made. Flora and fauna, the weather, light and darkness all will play a part. There may or might not be, form and color, for even the lack of it shows the painter's perception in the quest for artistry.
From the point of view of the public there is the slight difference of the merely pictorial and the melding of the artist's own sensibilities and creativity. In other words, one contains the spark of the Divine and is art while the other, merely representation.
"Landscape is a state of mind." Swiss essayist, Henri Frederic Amiel, nineteenth century.
Landscape painters are also painters of light. It is said that, the overall flood of constant heat and light in the Orient created the monochromatic styles there and the use of pure line as a graphic description. In the West, the ever shifting seasons and subtleties of changing, suffused light, created a very different style of painting, championed by artists such as the Dutch Masters, the Romantics and the sublime, W.J.M. Turner, the Impressionists and Luminists in the United States of America.
In Western art, Landscape painting before the sixteenth century, with few exceptions, such as wall pictures in the Hellenistic period, have been mostly a decorative backdrop until the seventeenth century when serious artists of 'pure' landscape were active. Even then, they were thought of as very low on the scale of subject matter, second only to the flowers and fruit varieties.
Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the Earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes and stars capes for example.
The word landscape is from the Dutch, lands chap meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the late seventeenth century.
In Europe, as John Ruskin realized, and Sir Kenneth Clark brought to view, in a series of lectures to the Slade School of Art, London, that Landscape Painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century," with the result that in the following period people were "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity”.
In Clark's analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches:
• By the acceptance of descriptive symbols,
• By curiosity about the facts of nature,
• By the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature,
• By the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved?
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