Education and Inspiration

The landscape is unique among subject matter — in its grandeur, its complexity, and its color dynamics. The landscape painter is continually challenged to find ways of translating these qualities into a convincing representation of space and light.

A landscape painter conjures this magic with the same spells all artists use—form, value, color, space, composition, and the paint itself. But nature doesn’t reveal its secrets so easily. Because nature is more extreme in its expansiveness, its complexity, and its light, landscapists must go a little further and look a little deeper to find what they’re looking for.

If I wanted to begin painting the human figure, I would need to start learning genre-specific knowledge … anatomy, proportions of the human form, and certainly how light, shade and color act upon the skin. Similarly, the landscape painter is posed with a unique set of challenges that demand a genre-specific approach.

In all the years I have been studying the landscape, the most encompassing challenge has been the ability to simplify and translate.

Simplification and translation

Any good landscape painting I’ve ever done was also simple. Whether it was a plein air sketch that took 30 minutes or a large studio painting that took months, I had to find a way to translate the vast amount of color and detail into a coherent statement that made sense not only to me, but to the viewer. As we’ll see again and again, this is never a matter of copying nature. It’s a process of seeing the world through painter’s eyes, a process of translation and distillation.

Landscape painters, of course, don’t have an exclusive on this process. Still life, figurative or abstract painters also simply. However, because the landscape is so vast and filled with so much information—we’re forced to simplify in bigger and more radical ways.

The language of landscape

Simplification can be likened to a special language designed for describing the landscape. Nature provides us with so much detail, so much color, and so much space that it becomes impossible to capture it all. We can never paint every leaf or blade of grass, or branch within a wooded area. That’s a job best left to the camera. Instead, we must find a way to translate the complex imagery of the landscape into a set of symbols that come to represent the original image. We learn to use smaller sentences and simpler words; perhaps even create new words to take the place of ten others.

A painter continually searches for the lowest common denominator — the single “word” or brush stroke that will convey the meaning in the most economical fashion. The set of symbols or marks the painter chooses can never be the actual landscape, but they can communicate the same thing and serve as an analogy to the impression.

Evolving toward simplification

Learning how to simplify, however, is not a simple thing. Nor is it something the beginner or novice does naturally. It is a difficult process that evolves only through conscious observation and practice.
There is a natural tendency, particularly in early training, to be impressed with realism and detail. Learning how to accurately draw what we see fills us with a real sense of accomplishment. Eventually, the student arrives at a point where he or she can draw precisely, where accuracy is no longer a problem. This the beginning.

Although essential, the ability to reproduce realistically or with detail is just the first level of a painting. The objects, or the things we name within a painting, are ultimately vehicles for the aesthetics that truly guide the structure of the picture—shape, color, value, form and line.

This isn’t to say that detail should be shunned. When appropriately placed and used in the right amounts, it can be an essential ingredient to a painting. The problem arises when detail is treated as the primary goal, the be all and end all, without an appreciation of the underlying aesthetics. When detail and realism are employed they must always remain subordinate to overall design, massing, and composition.