|
Artist Statement - What Landscape Painting Should Be
Landscape painting should touch nature, it should have a tactile presence on several levels. The scenery should not be "out there" but loom up close to be touched. The forms should be drawn so the eye can trace their edges, making them palpable and material. Landscape painting needs to materialize its subject making it tangible, dense and essential. The objects must occupy their space with conviction and force and at the same time act in concert to form a lively whole, a dense surface with complex and symphonic movement. This density of volume and fullness of plane creates a seeing experience where the illusory and the actual become interchangeable. The density of landscape painting should extend also to its symbolic program with forms acting as emblems or totems as well as images. Buried deeply in the core of the trees, rocks and pools there should be an evocation of the human body, its actions and gestures. In this way the painting becomes poetic. On a mythic level landscape painting should speak to the forces of nature and magnify its unabashed demonstrations of life and death. It should highlight both the overt energy and the crushing exhaustion that is seen in every inch of the wilderness. Such a landscape painting reminds us that we are part of the aboriginal world and suggests the immediacy and timelessness of nature. In looking at landscape painting we should recognize that very same timelessness in ourselves. Jerry Cutler |
||