CELEBRATING LANDSCAPES

Today is Earth Day! Besides actually sitting outside and enjoying nature, what is the next best way to appreciate the natural world around us? That's right! Landscapes.

Within landscapes there is not only amazing natural scenes but emotion and a spiritual element. The added spiritual elements in landscape started in East Asian art with Daoism, and in then the West there was Romanticism. Where landscapes (with no added spiritual element) started with frescos in Greece and hunting trips depicted in Egypt.

Romanticism is the type of landscapes that we think of when we think of the stereotypical landscape. There were many prolific Romantic landscapes artists: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Frederic Edwin Church, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Thomas Cole, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and many MANY more. In the 19th Century romantic landscapes were prominent in Dutch and American tradition of painting where they would have special schools devoted to learning about a genre of art like the Hudson River School. It started with a craze for landscape painting with the Dutch in the 17th Century with Realism but it really caught on in the 19th Century again starting with the Dutch. Quickly American artists jumped on the romantic landscape bandwagon to show off their new frontier which was different from the European atmosphere art enthusiasts were used to.

Let's look at how not only the composition of these pieces create great strength and pride but also include an emotional feeling attached, either through the weather or the colors and brushstrokes.

Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Hudson River School

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, German Romanticism

John Constable, Stonnehenge, 1836, Victoria and Albert Museum London

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, 1836, Yaler Center for British Art

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836, Metropoliatan Museum of Art New York

 Now in East Asian Art, landscape is considered their most valuable contribution to the art world. They didn't have a mad craze for landscape, instead landscape was deep within their culture and was spread out over many centuries. William Watson wrote that "It has been said that the role of landscape art in Chinese painting corresponds to that of the nude in the west, as a theme unvarying in itself but made the vehicle of infinite nuances of vision and feeling." A lot of East Asian landscapes are monochrome which is attributed to Wang Wei's paintings where he devoided the use of figures and shifted to monochrome style of painting. The Song Dynasty Southern School has some of the highest regarded landscape paintings. There is a shan shui tradition where the landscapes were never intended to represent real locations even if they were named after them.

Song Xu, Landscape After Wang Wei's Wangchuan Picture, 1574, Ming Dynasty

Tang Yin, A Fisher in Autumn, 1523, China

There is so much more in the history of landscape and how it evolved in every culture around the globe. There are many books of the topic and papers written about artists who were devoted to the landscape. So, if you are interested you should check it out!

STILL LIFES AREN'T BORING

When you first start as an artist, or if you are walking through any art museum you see tons and tons of still lifes. Many people imagine it is the basis of all art forms, you know once you've practiced with enough boring things like apples and oranges then you can start to branch out to figures. But, still lifes weren't even apart of the Western Art World until the late 16th Century. Before then almost all paintings were religious or documentary. And so if any still lifes were made they still held religious symbolism.

The first types of still lifes that were created were of course within Egyptian tombs. They would have artists paint any sort of riches from food to items on the walls of the tomb thinking that in the afterlife they would be there for the deceased. Some of the other earliest recounts of still lifes were within Pompeii and were Roman mosaics used for decoration and signs of hospitality. None of the still lifes up until the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the late 16th Century were what you'd think are typical still lifes we see covering museums today. The Dutch and Flemish painters were in a craze for still lifes because of the combination of religious images being banned in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church (which led to the symbolism within still lifes) and the simple obsession with horticulture that the Dutch had.

Egyptian wall painting of food (http://www.timetrips.co.uk/still_life_history.htm)

uncovered still life found at Herculaneum showing Roman still life (https://sketchesandscratches.wordpress.com/tag/vanitas/)

Willem Kalf, Still Life with Ewer, Vessels and Pomegranate, oil on canvas, mid-1640s, The J. Paul Getty Museum

Jan van Huysum, 1723, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/huysum.html)

Something funny and interesting that I found about still lifes is that there was a genre of still lifes known as "breakfast paintings" which would be the presentation of the upper class breakfasts while also a religious reminder not to be gluttonous.

Willem Claeszoon Heda, Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie, 1631, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister

As you can imagine, still lifes evolved along with the many art movements, being the cornerstone of all styles and genres of art. You can find a still life of any genre and style of art you desire and probably by any artist you desire as well. It is the basis of all artists today and a great way to study the aesthetic elements, but it shouldn't be thrown aside as a beginners form of art.

Ori Gersht, Blow Up, photographs and videos, 2007

Still lifes allow the artist to impose any sort of composition and arrangement of elements within the artwork. This sort of freedom allows for many styles and genres of art to take place, which led to how contemporary still lifes will include two-dimensional or three-dimensional mixed media and sometimes even video or sound.

Next time you think Still Lifes are "boring" or "too beginner", think again.