Preserving Places

Great landscape paintings are hardly just representations of a place.  In fact, the truly best are representations by genre only.  Landscapes are windows by which we measure our own human experience, reminders of time spent and time remaining.  They kindly become whatever we want them to be—a childhood memory of walking in the forest, hills outside a grandfather’s farm, the first rays of the morning sun coming up over the stillness of a lake, mountaintops capped with the first signs of snow.  They are reminders of when others who are gone were still among us living and breathing.  This is, the cycle that landscape painting doesn’t just remind us of, but connects us to and helps solidify our place.

Landscape painting is just as important today as it was 200 years ago.  The need for artists to understand and interpret our environment is something that will never change.  While artists sometimes fret over having to drive further and further out to find the last pristine places to capture, we are happy they can still find them.  Even if we’re not among the privileged few who experience them firsthand, we are happy in the assurance of their existence.  Finding these places is only half of it, however.  Today’s landscape artists are also documenting them for posterity, preserving these last great places for future generations.

Whether a grand place or small, there is beauty found at every turn and direction.  Today’s top landscape artists capture this beauty in a variety of mediums and styles, and they provide glimpses into our memories and experiences.  Ultimately the ability to make us connect to these memories and experiences of land makes a landscape painting great.”

“You’ve got a 12 by 16 inch or canvases not much bigger than a window, but you have vast surroundings you have to focus down on.  You have to get the location, lighting and shadows right and get the essence of the moment down very quickly, especially when the scene includes people.”  Darrell Hill

“I continue to be amazed at the complex simplicity found in nature.  Before I knew anything about color harmony, balance, texture, shape, value or composition, I knew that the sight of a sunset or the interesting shape of a billowing storm cloud brought undeniable emotion to my heart."  Michael Bingham

“I feel the landscape, either as the focal point or backdrop, has been the most harmonious element in my work throughout the years.  It’s an endless network of pattern, design, and color, but most importantly it’s an integrated aspect of the human experience.  We all find a personal connection to the landscape as it relates to us individually.” Joseph Alleman

“My mission, as a painter, is to effectively apply colors in a beautiful combination to transmit the many moods of nature.”  Carole Gray-Weihman

“I look for the overlapping patterns in nature for my subjects.  Often these are more sensed than seen—it takes careful observation of the nuanced colors and the multitude of details to discover the inherent composition in a landscape.  Once these patterns reveal themselves, I interpret them with oil paint.  It begins with the careful choosing and mixing of colors while being sensitive to values and color temperatures…My satisfaction with a painting comes from how well the distillation of the information I saw in a scene comes together to capture the mood.”

From  “Preserving Places”, American Art Collector, #71, September 2011