Consideration of landscapes as decorative backdrops, altered visions leading to fantasy, and a summary of the series.
landscape
Seurat painted five series of paintings carefully constructed to help form 3D space.
Study 25 landscapes by 19 artists over 400 years, to examine how they represent the landscape.
The earliest landscape paintings – and very many since – have fundamentally been visual records of the world.
Some paintings have figures and action which goes beyond staffage, and provides narrative, meaning, or puzzles.
Two painters whose visions were particularly clearly articulated, and contrasting: Caspar David Friedrich and Samuel Palmer.
No matter how old and jaded you get, you can always appreciate the breath-taking view from the top of a hill, as the earth sweeps out in myriad details, as far as the distant horizon.
From the early years of landscape painting as a genre in its own right, artists have used it to depict the awe-inspiring but fascinating horrors of the sublime.
Because these landscape elements are constrained within the overall work, the artist has complete control over them, something reflected in their reading too. Such cameo landscapes are never awe-inspiring, but subjugate to the whole.
I am going to try getting inside the artistic imagination of important landscape painters, and discovering the vision that each had of the landscape. Here are some hors d’oeuvres.
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