Landscape Paintings - Inspiring Artists For Centuries

Landscape art, often painted on canvas, is the depiction of natural scenery like mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. The main subject of the painting is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. Although the scenery may not be the main focus of the painting, landscape backgrounds for the objects and figures can still be an important part.

The sky is almost always depicted in landscape art, and weather is often an important element. The landscape is a representation, so it has developed in cultures that have a sophisticated tradition and history of representing other subjects in art. The most advanced examples of landscape art exists in Western painting and Chinese art, both going back well over one thousand years.

Early landscapes were of imaginary scenes, although townscape views represented actual cities, with varying degrees of accuracy. Various techniques were used to simulate the randomness of natural forms in invented compositions. Degas, for example, created cloud forms from a crumpled handkerchief held up against the light, and Alexander Cozens used random ink blots to form the basic shape of an invented landscape, which he elaborated upon.

Most experts believe that "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," painted by Konrad Witz in 1444, is the first Western rural landscape. It had a distinctive background view across Lake Geneva to the Le Môle peak. At first, artists would make drawings and watercolor sketches of natural settings, and then take them inside to do the actual painting. Painting en plein air, or outside, didn't become widely practiced until the 1870s, when ready-mixed oil paints in tubes and the portable box easel became available. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also made a point to encourage it among artists.

It took a while in the history of art for landscapes to become a popular, established subject matter. Before the 1700s, landscape paintings were considered lower in status than portraiture, which patrons tended to value more. Most paintings that depicted things that occurred outside in nature didn't focus on the nature itself, but on some event that happened there or on individuals or still-life. The nature was a backdrop, and not the focus on the painting.

Landscape painting goes all the way back to the 8th century in China, where there's a strong tradition of shan shui ("mountain-water"), an ink painting consisting of a "pure" landscape. The only sign of life in these paintings is a single sage, or a glimpse of his hut. Landscape backgrounds became more and more sophisticated in China as the centuries went by, until it became a classic and much-imitated form of art. Most of time Chinese landscape painting, like in Roman times, consisted of grand panoramas of imaginary scenes, usually backed with a range of spectacular mountains.

It takes a great deal of technical expertise to paint a good landscape. Perhaps the reason for that is that artists have to capture a three-dimensional view on a two-dimensional space. The challenges of perspective, color, and composition had to be overcome. When they were, mostly due to the innovation and creativity of the artists, it became an important genre in its own right.

Source : Ezinearticles