Landscape painting will never lose it allure for buyers of art. There could be a multitude of reasons for purchasing a landscape painting from nostalgia to romanticism to belief in an idyll and it was obvious from what I saw today across a number of galleries, painters of the landscape understand colour, composition and paint application and accompanied their works with heartfelt statements that specified time and place. Some were also clever in their use of inverted warm/cool values, aerial perspective and scale to establish a sense of distance, while others were loaded with detail in both foreground background. But what were they lacking? Why did I find all of them more akin to still lives or in French ‘nature mort’? The answer seems simple. In an attempt to stop time, they had removed one essential factor. Nature is a living, breathing organism and without exception, the conception of nature in the work of the artists I saw, failed to register any sense of life at all for all of the vivid colour, modelled gestural paint and leading sight lines.
How much landscape painting has been reduced to a formula is open to question. In reality, much landscape painting seems to be concerned at some level with already formulated ideas rather than exploration – artists dip into their kitbag of effects and select a combination they know will work. There is the wide-sweeping vista or the tightly packed corner of the world; there is scaling to establish distance; there is colour. Recently I saw a painting where an oversized and detailed Piping Shrike had been laboriously rendered in the foreground, no doubt at the behest of a painting tutor who demanded an object of focus in the belief that such a device was an inherent part of the lexicon of landscape painting. It was simply clumsy.
Landscape as a subject in its own right is sparce before the 19th century. The word landscape was only introduced into the language — purely as a term for works of art — around the start of the 17th century. In Renaissance painting the landscape formed a backdrop to more prominent human subject matter as it did with Narrative painting — typically biblical or mythological stories —and for several centuries Italian and French artists promoted landscapes into history paintings by adding figures to make a narrative scene. Many Dutch artists of the 17th century specialized in landscape painting, developing subtle techniques for realistically depicting light and weather. Certain types of scenes repeatedly appear in inventories of the period, including “moonlight,” “woodland,” “farm,” and “village” scenes. In England, landscapes mostly figured as backgrounds to portraits, suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner. Romanticism, which emphasized emotion, individualism, and the glorification of nature was a later addition. The Australian Heidelberg painters opted for landscape as a vehicle to accompany the civilising effect of human occupation but gradually, the human factor became irrelevant as successive generations saw no value in human activity unless it was the evidence of demise – the abandoned farmhouse, the fence going nowhere, the car left to rust in a gulley.
At least part of the problem comes down to a confusion between the human eye and the camera – a problem that should have been resolved a century ago. The camera is capable of capturing distance through adjustable focal depth and depending upon the quality of the lens, an infinite amount of detail. While the eye can adjust quite rapidly to survey foreground and background, it cannot do both at once. To also put a rectangular bounding box around nature, in imitation of the camera frame as though this is a reality is equally absurd. To lead the eye along some constructed path into the distance is fallacious and highly selective. Most of the landscape works I saw rendered distance and close up equally sharply. I have no doubt that it was done deliberately according to some principal or accepted practice, but it is hardly what art is about. It could be argued that most people in institutions who claim to teach art, in fact have little idea what it is or how it works. Too often art has to have ‘meaning’ and the number of school exam questions asking for the message in say, a van Gogh, miss the point entirely as does praising the execution of detail as a legitimate measure of a good painting.
Time and place are obvious triggers to both memory and experience – rendering light though colour at a specific moment in time to capture a moment of beauty is not a new idea but such moments are rapidly superseded. Such is the nature of light. Time, however, does not stand still and this is the essential problem for artists. To stop time by rendering everything in nature as one clearly defined moment, is false. It assumes that this is the way the eye/brain interface works and hence, the ‘deadness’ I observed.
Does any painter of landscape manage to avoid this trap? If I had to pick two examples, it would be in the work of David Mankin and Frank Bowling. Mankin’s scapes of beach and sea writhe with energy, are devoid of limiting horizons and accentuate the paint itself. Bowling has carried with him a memory of his native Guyana and the flickering light on water he experienced as a child, again denying a horizon and any sense of artificial distance through scale or colour and yet capturing both the fleeting moment and the enduring memory by bringing everything up to the picture plane and revelling in the way paint and other materials behave.
