Signed and Dated Abstract Landscape Watercolor on Paper. Blue sky with pinkish mid-range and an earth toned bottom third. Signed indistinctly bottom right and dated '84.
Overall Size: 25 1/2 x 30 1/4 in.
Sight Size: 13 1/2 x 18 in.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in painting of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather can be an important element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. Two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West it only became explicit with the appearance of Romanticism. Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy. If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place, especially including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. The word “landscape” entered the modern English language as “landskip” (variously spelt), an anglicization of the Dutch “landschap,” around the start of the 17th Century. In the 18th Century watercolor painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English specialty among both professional and amateur painters. By the beginning of the 19th Century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscape painters, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. The topographical print, often intended to be framed and hung on a wall, remained a very popular medium into the 20th century, but was often classed as a lower form of art than an imagined landscape. The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting. In the United States the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late 19th Century, is probably the best-known native development in landscape art. These painters created works of mammoth scale that attempted to capture the epic scope of the landscapes that inspired them. Although certainly less dominant in the period after World War I, many significant artists still painted landscapes in the wide variety of styles exemplified by Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, and Sidney Nolan. Today, landscape painting is a firmly established form, and often an early beginning for artists who are honing their skills before attempting more intimate pieces.
