Continuing with my philosophical musings... sorry! Just skip if tooo booring...
M. Andrews says of art and landscape in the book ”Landscape and Western Art” (1999) that the idea of ”Landscape” itself is a construction:
…”A ‘landscape’, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply l o o k we are already shaping and interpreting.
A landscape may never achieve representation in a painting or photograph; none the less, something significant has happened when land can be perceived as ‘landscape’. …
Whether or not we are artists, we have been making this kind of mental conversion for centuries. The habit is part of the whole history of our relationship with the physical environment – and landscape representation is a vital element in that relationship. “
It is true that we look at our physical surroundings with a different eye related to our interest in it. Homers description of Odysseus surveying of the foreign lands he visited during his long and windy way back home tells the story of a colonizing people looking for opportunities to settle and use the land. Personally I look for something significant and focus on that element in the piece I am making as that feels like a way to tell a story about what I have seen, what I have felt being in that place, that time, looking the way I did on familiar shapes perhaps altered by the light of the day, the clouds or my own mood… losing myself in contemplation yet finding myself again through the process of creating a physical object that later can be reflected upon in its own right.
…”A ‘landscape’, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply l o o k we are already shaping and interpreting.
A landscape may never achieve representation in a painting or photograph; none the less, something significant has happened when land can be perceived as ‘landscape’. …
Whether or not we are artists, we have been making this kind of mental conversion for centuries. The habit is part of the whole history of our relationship with the physical environment – and landscape representation is a vital element in that relationship. “
It is true that we look at our physical surroundings with a different eye related to our interest in it. Homers description of Odysseus surveying of the foreign lands he visited during his long and windy way back home tells the story of a colonizing people looking for opportunities to settle and use the land. Personally I look for something significant and focus on that element in the piece I am making as that feels like a way to tell a story about what I have seen, what I have felt being in that place, that time, looking the way I did on familiar shapes perhaps altered by the light of the day, the clouds or my own mood… losing myself in contemplation yet finding myself again through the process of creating a physical object that later can be reflected upon in its own right.
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