Contemporary Landscape Painting - Replication or Interpretation?

Martin Greenland - Headland (2017) Oil on canvas

Jonathan Mansfield - Seascape (West Bay) (2018) Mixed media on paper

On the surface of it, we would imagine that landscape painting is a fairly simple business. The artist goes out into the wilderness, finds a scenic spot, puts brush to paper or canvas, and makes a beautiful picture. Job done! All of this may be the case. Scratching the surface of these precepts, however, may reveal other possibilities. Does 'The Landscape' actually exist at all? Is it possible that our idea of the landscape, as a thing, is more of a belief than a reality, shaped both by our own subjective experiences and understanding of the great outdoors, coupled with the cultural influences and narratives that have helped to form and frame that subjectivity? Might the landscape seem hostile, welcoming, beautiful, comforting, challenging, wild, pastoral, horrific, or many other things; might the same landscape be all of these things, at different times? Perhaps these ideas, understanding, and experience of the landscape help to shape what kind of landscape painter we aspire to be. This could also be attributed to our particular technical abilities, in conjunction with our motivations and creative desires, but the endpoint would seem to be that the visual language that we use to convey our particular vision of 'The Landscape' must surely be shaped by our own thinking and experiences and, as a result, be unique to us.

Perhaps, in the context of that thinking, there is a 'democracy' about Landscape Painting - we all have an understanding of it, and therefore we can all understand paintings made about/of/from the landscape. This can also be problematic; what if my vision of 'The Landscape' is very different from yours (or the next person's)? We can't, of course, as individual artists, legislate for all of the subjective possibilities of an audience. Our best bet is to develop and refine the 'language' or 'voice' that works for us, and in which we believe, and use that language to convey the meaning of our own subjective visual stories about/of the landscape.

Exercise:

Create a series of small(ish) studies, drawn and/or painted from memory, of landscapes which are significant to you.

Reflect upon how much, and in what ways, these studies are true to the actual landscapes as you remember them, and how important you feel this issue is in relation to your ambitions as a painter of the landscape. Do you think that someone looking at the work will understand what was important to you, about these particular landscapes?