Discuss: The Limits of Landscape

I’ve read several of Solnit’s pieces and appreciate her as a writer. This article is a bit too much of the art critic for me. I am a writer who occassionally does art. I am of the mind of Arguelles’ “The Transformative Vision” - that everyone is an artist and manifesting your vision in some form of art is a spiritual necessity.

I found myself doing large outdoor landscape sculptures when I lived in the mountains of northern New Mexico - found art, “god art” we called it, tree limbs and bird wings and dried sunflower heads and stones. I did monoprints with acrylics on leather and wood, wildcrafted wreaths, tuned waterfalls and rerouted small creeks. I’ve taken thousands of photographs of the natural world. I’ve written poems and songs and stories for the love of nature. I’ve cried a million tears for what we’ve lost. I’ve taken every child I could find to the bank of a river, every chance I got, and told them all the stories I knew. We can never do enough. In these days when all is threatened, let us not discourage anyone from making their gift. It is all needed. Very much. I’m writing a blog at http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com about living in harmony with the natural world.

Landscapes are a limited vision of a place we love for personal reasons.
As such they are loaded with emotional content. I co not think it is necessary to make the traditional right of wrong statement here. Nature is One. Landscape is a perception of Nature involving a lot of the viewer personal vision, which should be of interest to us, as there is no limit to perception. That does not make Nature a Subject. It is just different.
A landscape is a dream, a memory of a cherished place where personal things have happened…
It is limited? well by choice . You cannot recollect a thousand landscapes and feelings at the same time. One view and you sit and ponder and let the imagery unlocked by the landscape flow out.
I would also disagree with the artist inability to render energy.
I think every good landscape carry its own energy. I think that what happens that is not necessary is to compare two things that are not comparable. Nature is all powerful, I dare say we all know it.
when the artist chooses to paint a landscape , he odes not have in mind to compete with Nature.
He operates a transmutation of sort through the filter of his consciousness.
I appreciate Solnit’s piece and her passion for the limitless. she just forgets that like Nature we are limitless.

i’ve recently moved…to a new place and by states, it’s now my 11th geographical state…solnit ever makes the point that the changes in the land are cause enough for us to reflect on what inner change we’ve experienced as a result…now that i’m living in a desert state, it seems it’s the last place “free enough” to scar…and yet, it’s the last place that allows one the room to find renewal, if not a paradoxical escape from a culture that scars for profit and convenience… you may want to consider those landscape artists out there (Michael Asbill in New York, for one) whose work is not just about place or change but the change of place…these artists are the new impressionists that cause us to see not just strokes of impression but constructs of our impression on the canvas of land…

“If Ansel Adams had made a photograph of the moon rising over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, I doubt the nation would be contemplating storing our nuclear waste there.  No one is suggesting we should store it in Yosemite, thanks in part to Adam’s landscapes.”
This is precisely the problem. The repetion of images of a particular chosen landscape, chosen for its match to a current cultural ideal, makes it a place to save to be held static, to be preserved - often without consideration for the people that may live there, who may have shaped the landscape. Marshy boggy areas are deemed suitable for digging up and siting windturbines, for draining and building on; they are places not considered beautiful, not a landscape to be photographed, painted.
I am an artist and I do work with landscape/Nature/natural world - the environment that I find myself in (performance, drawing, photovisual, written word). I do admire photographs of the world we live in. But photographs do fix things. The photograph that headed the article points this out, it is suggested to us as a veiwer that this is The Place from which to get The Shot, the prefered shot. And I am moved by Turner’s landscapes, but he is not always very particular about acheiving the clear representation of the landscape, it is more of an experience.
The area of Britain that I live in is a national park, there is a vested interest in keeping it as it is, no change: bare hills, quaint buildings. Thank heavens some of the farmers got some of their comfortable double glazed easy to live in bungalows build before the planning regulations got too rigid.
All the world that we live in needs to be left alone as much as possible, not just the famous views.I have a preference for art that makes one think about the world, not just admire it at a distance, for example work by Josef Beuys & Mierle Laderman Ukeles

A good painter will absorb these arguments, understand the 2-D limitations, and make the most of all of it. Landscape painting is not a fix-it form, it certainly is really old with lots of accumulated baggage. Of course, in a capitalist economy, we will find people treating any art like real estate. When its good, it speaks to something, although maybe not the politics du jour. But it IS just painting and its so interesting to hear decades old arguments come up. Why must we beat ourselves over the head. Is it because this other work, while institutionally accepted, is not culturally adopted. Everyday people still want that good ol dose of skill for realism? Painting is still synonymous with art? Message over medium, message over medium, message over medium. Look, most landscape painting is dull given the thousands upon thousands of practitioners both amateur and professional, commercial and academic. So, if there’s something out there of deep cultural value I sure do hope it rises to knock all that dull landscape painting off the wall.