Continuing on with the presupposition that Art is learning to take the idea in our head (imagination means ‘picturing it’) and executing that idea in material form…
I have to bring up one particular mental picture obsession that stands out above the others (at least in the adult art education scene) and that is a landscape.
Sometimes I can’t help feeling sorry for watercolours. It’s such a playful, unpredictable, sassy medium that has so much it wants to share with us but most people demand that it give them a landscape. Like some poor musician who doesn’t get to play her soulful songs because the audience only wants to hear popular covers.
Driving quiet country roads is also pretty sweet. My own photo.
Don’t get me wrong, landscapes are cool. My favourite mode of travel is by train— for one, it’s the only mode that doesn’t give me motion sickness and, more importantly, I love to put my headphones on with my favourite tracks and take in the passing scenes. So good! That and riding my bike in the countryside or strolling with my dog in the wilds.
Have you ever noticed how your inner critic volume mutes when you take in some nature? I mean, it must be super rare for someone to be thinking: you know what would make this sunset really great? If there was less pink and a bit more orange near the horizon. Personally, I am forever amazed at nature’s disarming powers— a silky breeze, an aroma I can’t help huffing, undulating hues, fat grin on my face… All this and my thinking brain shuts right up and without it’s judgy, separating and discriminating babble, I get to be fully blissed out.
I suspect this rapture is partly (if not wholly) why people want to paint, draw, write or make something about landscapes. Nature has a way of levelling us to our unique essence. I mean, we are nature as much as we might think we’re outsiders. It makes sense that we would want to create something out of this connection (we’ve been doing it for thousands of years). Nonetheless, again and again I have watched the desire to recreate a landscape cause people a ridiculous amount of frustration and grief.
Landscape with Stones. 1893. Edgar Degas.
If you are someone in this position, allow me to propose the following: Maybe the desire to recreate the landscape is actually about expressing the ambient feeling that the landscape gave us; we long for the peaceful euphoria that came from a moving multi-dimensional and multi-sensory process (a landscape experience isn’t just a 2-D still shot). Is it possible for us to recall the non-judgemental feeling and allow something to happen with our material while we embrace that vibe? Some sort of landscape may unfold out of this or something completely unexpected. And possibly a bit of the creative essence that nature called forth in us will be imbued in the work. French painter Edgar Degas once said, “The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.” A work of art is not a replica or imitation. There are particular works of art that have given me the same blissed out state as I feel in nature and I attribute this to the presence of alive essence that the artist channeled and left intact.
Perhaps this is why we want to copy another artist’s work as well. We think we want a copy of the object (the painting, drawing, sculptch, tune etc.) but we are really after the feeling it calls out of us. If getting down with material and the intention of creating a landscape allows us to enter a fluid creative state combining thought/intuition and active/receptive forces, that seems pretty expansive and something to follow. But if our landscape obsession has us laboriously hunched, scowling and trying to beat some watercolour into submission, we could give it up and let the watercolour show us a thing or two.
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t.
I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
FRIDA KAHLO
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