On Landscape Art

Does anyone ever talk about, or even notice landscape paintings anymore?  The kind hung in waiting rooms and middle class homes.  The snowy red barn.  The grey sea gull dipping over acrylic white crests.  The sweet sunrise over a lonely brown oak on a yellow prairie.  A mountain casting a dark shadow across a blue lake that’s trimmed with purple wildflowers, green grass, and maybe a black cow grazing in the foreground.  These sorts of images have no political agenda, zero sense of irony, and leave little to interpret.  The paintbrush was simply dipped and dabbed onto canvas by someone more capable than most of us of gauging scale, mixing colors, and copying the world verbatim, so to speak.  Right?

Probably.  Sometime between the carving of hieroglyphics and postmodernism there was Winslow Homer’s Sunlight on the Coast, John Constable’s Dedham Vale, and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World.  There are innumerable artists whose palettes collected pollen, snow, and sunshine in an earnest attempt for a vivid portrayal of a landscape.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines art as “creative or imaginative activity, esp. the expressive arrangement of elements within a medium.”  Landscape art, in its frame, is the painter’s glorious vista, such a curious and simple format.  One landscape can offer the viewer pain, peace, ominousness, energy, solitude, liberation.  Because the scenes are knowable, familiar even, the viewer can imagine the scents and sounds, the temperature.  Paint a person in a scene and there’s a story, like Christina’s World, where the viewer is left to wonder how the subject became so removed, and why.  Leave out a person and the viewer may simply imagine that precise moment in time.  Regardless, the landscape is made and the moment is forever frozen, the cloud that will never break apart, the moon that stays put over the glowing garden, the bird that never lands and never gets tired.

Somewhere, culture crossed a line and it became possible to read between the brushstrokes of any painting in search of rhetoric.  But in the wake of careening technology and the burgeoning, monstrous infrastructure needed to accommodate us, how is landscape art not more relevant than ever?  After the importance of “going green” has been declared by science, in politics, in our consciences, what’s the commemoration?  Is the message on the canvas redundant and simple, boring in spite of its beauty?

In his book, Life After God, Douglas Coupland says, “Thousands of years ago, a person just assumed that life for their kids would be identical to the one that they led.  Now you assume that life for the next generation — hell, life next week—is going to be shockingly different than life today.”  Art is reaction, and one of the amazing things about it is its resilience and capability to evolve.  Whether it’s music or literature or performance, art is the digestion of experience, inserted into our consciousness, broken down and expelled. In the twentieth century, experience grew accelerated and varied, like a multiplication table gone haywire.  The world fluidly evolved into God-knew-what, and the confusion, chaos, and new values became evident in Pollack’s abstract expressionism, Warhol’s pop, optical illusions, cubism, art as urban graffiti. 

In the first part of the twentieth century, electricity wasn’t powering most households, but before long cars were implemented over horses and then telephones lost their novelty. The middle of the century had spaceships blasting off and television exploding.  Did the emergence of rock n’ roll really reflect mainstream society’s new awareness of violence and confusion?  Is it a coincidence that war became unpopular only after real battle was broadcasted on the nightly news?  Why, in the twentieth century we were beginning to be told that in spite of who we were, we could do whatever we wanted.  A light bulb not long before was considered wizardry, yet here electricity was, flashing in the urban clubs, illuminating whole cities, plugging in the world. When did the novelty of recording wear away?  When did the process of microwave cooking cease to be enchanting?  When did it stop being wonderful to talk on a phone that wasn’t plugged into the wall?  At the end of the century the Internet happened.  All machines would become smaller and more efficient and anything you wanted to know could be found out in one instant.

Technological progress is overwhelming as much as it is amazing, the multiplication table that will never cease to be haywire.  We’re part of a world that doesn’t know when it will end, just that it will, and we’re not even a hundred years removed from blowing out the candles at bedtime.  The possibilities for the end are ample, war, natural disaster, famine, a dark bombardment from outer space, a new flu, a cataclysmic Chernobyl.  Or maybe somehow we’ll last five billion more years, when the sun goes supernova, expanding, dying, earnestly igniting the Earth and all of its contents. 

Artists won’t stop the digestion of experience and I hope their message is someday broadcast like some renaissance absent of sarcasm, politics and discourse.  The best irony would be no irony at all.  Landscape art may be infiltrated once again to mainstream consciousness.  We’ll talk about pictures of pure weather over little people, milling animals, plants, rocks, and water.  In the end, we’ll drink wine and ponder strokes of color, telling the story of one moment to the place in our minds where wonder used to live.