In defense of the landscape genre
I’m a little ashamed to admit, as an art major, my devotion to the landscape genre. Art-makers put landscape on the shelf long ago, as you’ll know if you’ve browsed the Tate Modern or ventured into MOMA. In the glory days of the French Academy, landscape painters could turn their noses up at lowly still life artists and meat painters. Late 19th century artists used landscape as means to communicate moral messages. Monet used landscape for innovative light studies. But, several million meadows later, these days the landscape is hackneyed. Low-brow. It’s much more posh to talk color field painting, Minimalism or the post-modern mixing of media. Landscape painters’ sole patrons are motel contractors who count on mediocre art to match hideous bedspreads.
To make a landscape painting is as tedious as to comment on the weather–but it doesn’t have to be. The real problem with landscapes is that their vocabulary has been reduced. How did you draw landscapes in grade schools?
Purple mountains, a ridge of trees and a lake, right? But landscape can mean all sorts of things: foothills, flood planes, swamps, groves, neighborhoods, faults lines, sand dunes, rock outcroppings.
I just returned from hiking Mount Adams, and even the cliche mountain had character. Was it purple? No. Not from up close. Its slopes are covered with landslides of rock, some bumpy and red like a dried-up loofah, some clean-sliced and gray, with beautiful shadows.
When the sun went down the rocks turned a color somewhere between glowing orange and purple.
Tiny wildflowers clung to rock crevices. I was impressed with a pink-leafed variety that looks flaming red when paired with gray rock, the only color for miles to rival the sky. My whole body got to know the landscape: my fingers, the grit of the loofah rocks, my feet the shapes of pebbles that tried to hitchhike in my Chacos and my abdomen the mountain’s incline. I examined melting mountain glaciers and found out what it felt like to lick one.
I love landscapes. They express the uniqueness of places. Think like a geologist or a botanist–this earth is covered with thousands of interesting colors, shapes and textures.
Walla Walla is known for its rolling hills and its smoke-tinted sunsets, those geographical markers that shock students at first (especially those who reside west of the Cascades–no trees!) but later come to represent best-loved bike rides and stargazing of college.
I don’t care simply that we have wheat fields–I care about the particular curves that characterize them, and that in autumn they turn tufty and golden. When landscapes are specific to detail, they capture what people love about where they live.
In Klamath Falls, Oregon, where I grew up, people love an ugly old pine tree that stands alone on Hogback Mountain.
The landscape isn’t dead, because places continue to be special to people.
Irreplicable sunsets still paint the night sky, and I continue to try to paint them.
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