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Contemporary Landscape Paintings |
Serengeti Dawn
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Calling All Butterflies
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Francesca's Villa
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Enter Gallery
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Gallery Description
Originally, 'landscape' meant a picture of a view, taking another thirty years to acquire the meaning of the view itself. A customary definition of landscape is 'a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance.' ‘Landscape’ in artistic terms is a work based on the artist’s observation and interpretation of a place, scene or view. This can be in the form of drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, film and many many more forms. The artist can represent the nature in any form he or she chooses.
The contemporary understanding of landscape includes the sense of it as 'an ideological tool shaping the way in which we envision and construct the natural world.' Contemporary interpretations of nature in landscape have moved away from mere observation to different visual perspectives like aerial photography, microscopic close-ups etc.
The artists of mid to late eighteenth century England used landscape extensively as content for their work. This "elevated" style of landscape painting included elements of both ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of a style known as ‘the Picturesque’, meaning ‘suitable for’ or ‘like a picture’
Landscape paintings continued to develop through the 19th century also. Twentieth century modernists and postmodernists have expanded the purely perceptual view of landscape, to include expressionist and conceptual considerations.
Contemporary landscape painters are continuously trying to push the boundaries of this artistic convention. Post-modernist theory demonstrates how our relations to the non-human world are always historically-mediated and constructed. For contemporary artists, landscape is a set of contingent visual and verbal conventions, rather than something natural and given.
Our collection of contemporary landscape paintings brings you some of the most elegant and picturesque paintings.
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Wednesday, August, 20 th
2008
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