LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Landscape painting takes as its subject the physical world that surrounds us and can include features such as mountains, valleys, vegetation, and bodies of water. The sky is another important element shaping the mood of landscape paintings. Landscape art ranges from highly detailed and realistic to impressionistic, romantic and idealized. While oil landscape painting predominates, acrylic and even mixed media are common as mediums.

 

While early landscape frescoes date as far back as the Roman era, it was only in the fifteenth century that landscape painting began to be commonly seen, beginning as background to whatever religious subject was being portayed. It was with the Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th centuries that landscape painting became established as a separate artistic genre. Partially inspired by Transcendentalism and the Naturalist movement, landscape painting became an even more important art form in the 1800s.  It has been said that the impact landscape painting had during this time period was so influential it required people “to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity."

Contemporary landscape art has evolved to include more than just the natural world.  As less of the earth has been left untouched by man, landscape now feature some sort of human evidence such as buildings, roads, or fences.  One of the popular trends in contemporary landscape painting is plein air painting, said to convey nature in a fuller way than studio painting.