If You Paint Landscapes, This One's for You:

Open Letter To Artists

Are you good at it? Do you describe the Great Outdoors in ways that invite others to feel it?

Maybe because it's so hot in my Florida location that "The Hunters in the Snow" by 16th-century painter Jan Bruegel comes to mind. This painting conveys the shivery, frozen river in the distance with his hunched foreground figures as they trudge through snow. The sharpness of the forms, trees and figures alike, also imparts how icy the air is. It's like writer James Dickey describing the appearance of approaching night as a sheet being thrown over the characters in "Deliverance." By that word-picture, you sense the curtain as the witching time descends.

Florida landscape painting should give the impression of its hot breath swirling in your face, and the cushioning quiet of its nights. Too often it doesn’t. In most renderings I see, there's no tactile sense. You can't smell dawn's dewy grass or the coolness of its shade. Painters show you the particulars of the land without the atmosphere. And you're left wondering why the scene was painted at all.

Landscape painters need to aim for the carotid artery, for the visceral. The poet William Blake's reaction to a sketch of a tree by John Constable makes my point: "This is not drawing," he said. "It's inspirational!" I can't remember when I last sensed the heaviness of summer air in the sodden look of painted foliage, in heat-vaporous greenery, in its stifling thickness when you almost hear the vegetation moaning under the weight of the heat.

And rank and file landscape painters aren't the only ones who fail. The art of Gregory Amenoff comes highly recommended. Calling his starry skies wilder than Van Gogh's, New York art critic Donald Kuspit has hailed Amenoff's work as "allegorical psychodrama." Don't believe it. In Van Gogh's "Starry Night," he ringed the moon and stars with lines of radiance. He departed from appearance to convey his excitement. The starry night sky in Amenoff's "The Wat'ry Shore V" is nowhere near as fervid and furious. It's too spelled-out, too simple - falling somewhere between the absolutely prosaic and the ponderous.

Not that you have to go back to Breugel or Van Gogh to find good landscape painting. Twentieth century America is known for showing the grandeur of the Great Outdoors so persuasively that the depictions have been known to strike observers as religious events. Which is all the more remarkable when you think that before cities were paved over, artists made the land secondary in their picture-making.

I'm thinking about the Renaissance, when landscapes were made subordinate to the human figure, when Mona Lisa's smile was made so observable that the alpine scenery behind her is barely noticeable.

But odes to Mother Nature in the last century came from painters you'd least expect – the social realists:

George Bellows, known for picturing boxers fighting it out in a crowded back room of a New York saloon painted "Sun Glow" - an uninhabited coastline where loamy breakers meet unyielding rocks. George Luks, known for showing a drunk being thrown from a saloon, painted a sudsy sea hugging impregnable rocks made soft by rich daylight called "The Ledge." And John Sloan, known for painting blowzy people in rumpled furnished rooms, painted "A Neighbor's Garden" - a jungly scene high-colored with an unstinting palette reminiscent of a fairytale illustration. If you paint landscapes and leave out the way you feel about it, try fly-fishing.

— by Joan Altabe  |  September 11, 2006

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