A hint of nature characterizes today's abstract landscapes; works subtly evoke a sense of time and place
Art Business News, Feb, 2005 by Laura Meyers
Continued from page 1.
In London, Pond Galleries is also turning increasingly to abstraction, including abstract landscapes, according to Pond Galleries' Dee Hutchings. "It's not so much that we've noticed a trend, as our gallery owner herself is much more interested in abstract landscapes" he says. The gallery has exhibited Patrick John Mills' "Roots" series, which alludes to roots in the soil, and the earth's erosion. In addition, Pond has recently introduced two new abstract landscape artists to its roster: Wendy Sutherland and Susannah Lance. Lance, who paints in Cornwall and Devon, captures the beach and seascapes in bright blues and reds. "Her use of color is led by her culture and Asian history, rather than what she sees," says Hutchings.
In contrast, he adds, "Wendy Sutherland is Scottish-born, and her use of color is very clearly Scotland," says Hutchings. Even though the work is very abstract, "the moors and the heathers might be pinks and mauves, with a strong, vibrant blue sky on one day, or on another day it's a misty gray. You see this in the colors she chooses. In her work there is a real strong sense of the horizontal plane, and you get the sense that you may be looking down a valley, but like other abstract painters, she is most interested in the placement of color."
Art critics have described Sutherland's work as painted from "an internal eye." The artist depicts not just the view from her Scottish Highlands home, but what it feels like to stand there beside the hill or river.
Some abstract landscape artists are interested in pattern along with color. For example, Australia's Peter Griffen uses complex layering, decorative patterning, primitivism, and vibrant color to evoke Australia's Western Desert and Aboriginal culture. His recent survey exhibition, "Land and Sky," was presented at galleries in Paris, London, Sydney and Melbourne. In one typical, almost cartoon-like landscape, we look from an aerial perspective over a countryside filled with bright-hued objects, with trees on a ridge in the distance, almost suspended from the sky.
And South African artist Gail Altschuler, who now works in London, also uses pattern and intense color in her abstracted works. Inspired by ornamental African fabrics, decorative ceramics, jazz music, and artists like Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Britain's own Bridget Riley, a well-known "op artist" and colorist, Altschuler "weaves" together repeated patterns to create her symbolic abstract landscapes. "Through abstraction I aspire towards the infinite rather than the specific," she observes.
These contemporary landscape artists occupy a shifting terrain, bridging abstraction and representation. They are in good art-historical company, starting with Paul Cezanne, the "father" of modern art, who constructed paintings from the "geometry" he considered frequent in nature: the sphere, the cylinder and the cone. Although Cezanne's work was not nonrepresentational, he altered near and far, color and tone, and line and proportion in his landscapes. Cezanne said that art itself "was a matter of theory developed and applied in contact with nature."
Paul Gauguin, too, later influenced abstract paintings. He approached the landscape and the use of color symbolically. He advocated using color robustly and subjectively, not realistically--arguing that one ought to paint a beautiful tree the most vivid shade of green, rather than a color dulled by imitating nature exactly. In 1905, a circle of German artists calling themselves "die Brucke," (the Bridge) drew inspiration from Freud's studies of the subconscious mind, as well as the imaginative and often anguished use of color exemplified by Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The Brucke artists began using color expressively, rather than to define space on the canvas, painting starkly simplified landscapes in brilliant colors. For instance, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, in "Forest" painted vibrant, artificial arrangements of red tree trunks standing in a forest of blue, green and orange.
A half-century later, modernist artists were still experimenting with both form and expression. Aristodimos Kaldis, a contemporary of the New York scene, and Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, painted emotional abstracted landscapes of remembered scenes in Greece (while he was in the United States) and New England (while he was in Greece). "What I try to do is abstract beautiful landscapes and discard the unessentials," Kaldis told an interviewer in 1974. His abstract landscape works are enjoying a Renaissance today, according to Shannon Richardson of MB Fine Art in West Hollywood, CA. "Kaldis' paintings are very lyrical--color was very important to him. And he did not want any one focal point in his canvas" says Richardson.
In a Kaldis landscape, the subject is broadly distinguishable as mountains, trees, or the sea, but he was most interested in color and abstraction, often applying color outside the lines to draw the eye to the overall composition. The paint itself, often placed with his fingers rather than by brush, was dramatically gestural. Kaldis described his work as "explosive space," explains Richardson. And whether the subject matter was the Aegean Sea or the Cote d'Azur, she adds, "He never painted these landscapes while he was in Greece. It was all from memory--the ideas and the feelings of the place, rather than the actual representation of the landscape."
Today in Britain, many observers credit famed artist David Hockney with focusing renewed attention on the art of painting, particularly figurative portraiture and landscape. "Hockney has noted, and of course it's true, that it is very difficult to capture a landscape," says Hutchings of Pond Galleries. "Landscape artists have better technical training--they must learn to draw, something Hockney very much campaigned for."
Hockney's new book, "Hockney's Pictures: the Definitive Retrospective," published in November by Bulfinch Press, devotes nearly a quarter of its pages to the artist's explorations of "Space and Light" landscapes throughout the world. In these landscapes, many sketched and painted in watercolor in the past few years in Norway, Iceland, Spain, Arizona's Grand Canyon, and Yorkshire, Hockney sought new ways to depict light play, weather and changing seasons in the countryside. In his 2002 landscape paintings of Norway and Iceland, for example, Hockney used saturated violets, purples, violets, grays, blues, pinks and greens, to capture misty mountains and fjords.
His landscapes are both decorative and expressive. "I actually felt those wiggly lines," Hockney writes of the undulating canyon road in a semi-abstract landscape titled "Nichols Canyon." He doesn't worry about what is possible, and instead draws and paints playful, inventive landscapes.
From Hockney to Leestamaker, Adams to Zaremba, now that more artists are creating abstract landscapes, are collectors more interested in the genre?
Lisa Levin of New River Fine Art says they are. "Abstraction is a trend whose time has come. You can see it in interior design. Designers have gotten away from a heavy Old World feel--many designers are pushing a more minimalist look. And abstract paintings fit right in." The enigmatic abstract landscapes which vaguely represent horizon lines and natural elements attract both first time art buyers and seasoned collectors, Levin says. "A novice can appreciate a Leestamaker painting, but a sophisticated collector also can be challenged by his work."
Moreover, framing of these abstract works "is falling by the wayside," observes Lorraine Evans, co-owner of Art@94 in London. "Most of our abstract landscape paintings are painted on canvas and stretched on to gallery bars (boxed canvases). No one has asked for them to be framed, which I think shows that a lot more people now want more of a modern look and feel to their home."
For reprints of this article, contact LaTonya Brumitt at 314-824-5504, or e-mail labrumitt@pfpublish.com.
SOURCES
* Anne Stahl {artist), art@annestahl.com or anne_stahl@yahoo.com
* Ann Tower Gallery (artist: Patrick Adams), 859-425-1188.
* Art @ 94 (artist: Lizzie Gregory} 01442 234123, artat94@xln.co.uk
* Don O'Melveny Gallery (artist: Anne Stahl), 323-932-0076
* Gail Altschuler (artist), Gail@GailAltschuler.com
* Lydon Fine Art (artists: Elizabeth Firing, Stephen McClymont, Maria Olivieri Quinn, Stephen Dinsmore, Trevor Bell), 312-943-1133
* Mark Borghi Fine Art/MB Fine Art, New York and West Hollywood, CA (artist: Aristodimos Kaldis), 212-439-6425, 310-550-0050
Top of Page