I recently read an article about a collector who bought a landscape painting and asked the artist where the area was that he had painted. She seemed surprised when he replied “It’s no place except in my head”.
Of course, all creative ideas originate in the head, but for some reason people tend to think landscape paintings are of a particular place. I do it too, and I should know better considering that my own landscapes are composed of various elements from several different sites. This illustrates the skill level of the artists who make the landscapes so believable.
MAKING IT AN ATTRACTIVE PLACE
I don’t try to paint totally realistic landscapes, because my intention is just to create a space where the viewers would want to visit if they could. I do a lot of photography of wooded areas around Oregon and select the parts I find most attractive to put in my paintings. I consider these to be graphic impressionisms and I compose the paintings using basic design structures.
I’m currently working on a scene of a river in New Hampshire that a relative photographed. The river and surrounding trees made a nearly perfect composition, but the foreground needed something added, so I painted in several of my favorite vine maple branches. Of course, these are native to the Northwest, not New Hampshire, so anyone knowing this would assume the river is also in the Northwest. See how easy it is for an artist to combine geographical locations?
A TRUE STUDIO PAINTING
Abstracting the landscape elements is also something I like to do on occasion. Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of it lately because I’m still having fun painting the two aspen tree trunks in my studio. I just completed a painting of the tree trunks, viewed from all angles, and added some vine maple branches from the trees surrounding my studio. The suggested mountains in the background? Those were from my head.
See the painting below – “Towering Aspens with Vine Maple Trees”, a 60″ x 36″ oil and wax on canvas. Click on the image for a larger view.
