Landscape Painting As Exploration

Yesterday I told my weekly Wednesday night students to turn their easels toward the window and paint the view from the studio, which happened to offer stray clouds drifting across a silvery evening sky above the industrial skyline of Lowell Mass: slate-gray rooftops, yellow-gray warehouses, re-sided duplexes and apartment houses. 

View of Haarlem, Van Ruisdael, 1670s. NOT the view from my studio. 

My students rose admirably to the challenge of responding directly in paint to what they saw. It seemed to me that everybody got some very good painting out of it, and of course the experience of painting from life like that, as the light changes and the colors shift, is invaluable for an understanding of what painting is. It's the moment when you have to fall back on your own intuitions to select your subject from the vast choices you're given.

Houses on a Hill, Cezanne, c. 1880.

I told them later that painting "from the hip" like that offers an opportunity to test one's innate interests and strengths - what worked? Was it something to do with a particular color or color combination? An evocative mood? Paint handling - hints of expressive technique? It's a chance to suspend judgment and find out where the act of painting wants to lead you. 

The Seine at Pecq, Maurice de Vlaminick, 1905.

I think it's most important to recognize one's interests and one's strengths and to figure out how to "play to" them in your work, which can also mean downplaying other aspects of the craft to foreground one's intent. Technique is important, so is valuing one's perception of the world (and one's beliefs about art) and developing a personal language of image, line, mass, color, composition, paint handling, everything. This is what YOUR art is all about. And ultimately, THAT is what's going to matter to you over time as well as what people will respond to in your paintings. 

Does that make sense?

At the beginning, I think, the way to fall in love with painting is to get away from critical judgment about what you might be doing "right" or "wrong" (by what and whose standards, for heaven's sake, right?!). In the end, after all the training, all the absorption of technique and tradition, all the talk and critical thinking, when there's a brush in your hand, maybe "you just go on your nerve," like poet Frank O'Hara said; act first, from intuition and emotion, and then, after the dust clears, ask: What choices did you find yourself making - and why? 

Landscape by Stuart Shils, c. 2005.

For my part, right now I find I'm interested in expressing a moment of aesthetic experience encompassing broad gestures of color and paint and the "right" details for that painting. 

I think it's a worthy goal to assimilate and adapt as much technique and art history as one can learn. Guided by experience, it is the well from which one draws to discover what one's own work is "about," an important consideration, as friend and fellow landscape painter Donald Jurney is wont to insist. 


And of course, work can be "about" so many things - color, texture, humanity, redemption, damnation, pure emotion, tension, peace, light and shade, the curve of a shoreline, the age of an oak, the tentative character of saplings in spring, beauty, terror - indeed all "the joy and fear of existence." 

The Most Beautiful Painting in the World... According to Proust

Jan Vermeer's View of Delft (1660-1661) may just be a perfect landscape painting. Once you've really looked at it, you realize it's the kind of thing you don't forget, that you could spend hours - a lifetime! - dreaming over it and still not have your fill. I've never seen the actual painting, but I'm captivated by the images of it that I've seen.

No great painting emerges out of pure invention, and Vermeer was building upon the solid foundations of the Dutch landscape tradition. We can see this in the painting's scale, its low horizon line, the overall color and luminosity, and the big cumulus clouds casting their shadow on the waterfront while the area awash in sunlight peeps out behind. Here's a landscape by Van Ruisdael that puts the foreground in cloud shadow.

Jacob Van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields, 1671

Yet, the poise, charm, and energy of Vermeer's design makes View of Delft unique. It's got an incredible degree of balance and integration between highly varied yet somehow harmonious elements!

It's arranged in a series of broad and irregular horizontal bands,"counterbalanced by smaller varied vertical units" (I'm relying for most of this on A.C. Barnes's analysis which appears as an appendix to his quirky yet rigorous The Art in Painting). And this series of graceful rhythmical divisions and subdivisions interpenetrate and integrate with each other so as to unify the whole.

Radiography shows that Vermeer deliberately extended the reflections to the extreme right, the effect of which is to unify top and bottom and further anchor the whole design.

The cloud band forms "a series of three predominately vertical units; the row of buildings and trees is rhythmically subdivided by a more pronounced and varied pattern of upright elements, the gables, steeples, towers.

The reflections in the water carry the subsidiary vertical elements of the pattern to the area of the canal, and the figures (there are 15), the two posts, and the prow of the ship function likewise in the foreground bank." (Barnes, p. 455)

Each band's color notes contrast with those of the band it touches, and the general color tone thus produced for each area of the painting (the sky, the blue-red-green masses in the center, the water, the bank) contrasts with and sets off that of its neighbors.

Throughout, the drawing, which is accomplished through color and light, is expressive and not overwrought, highlighting the essential character of each aspect of the subject, whether the sun-baked brick, the green masses of  trees, the slightly blurred reflections, the figures, or the space-relationships between the elements. 

A treatise could be written on the how Vermeer expressed "the theme of blue and red, varied with minor motifs of gray and green," in the row of buildings and trees. The color notes are predominately an earthy red and a blue "of extraordinary sensuous and structural quality, which is the key-note in this part of the design, and indeed is so powerfully eloquent as to be chiefly responsible for the individuality of the entire picture." (ibid)

French novelist Marcel Proust pits the exquisite beauty of one minute detail of the painting against the life of a character in one of his stories. The painting wins.

For a delightful commentary on Proust's use of the painting, along with the relevant excerpt, you have to check out this person's blog entry (and don't miss the comment on Aldous Huxley's pick for the most beautiful painting in the world.)