Landscapes

Artists have often enlisted landscapes in their search to discover vehicles for expressing emotions as well psychological states of mind.  Without the presence of figures in the picture to suggest narrative content, pure landscape, devoid of human beings, permits the artist an opportunity to create a purely pastoral subject matter for projecting meanings onto the canvas. There are no stories within these pictures, or the stories themselves are subordinate to the landscape elements reinforcing mood or generating psychological interpretations meant to be felt and understood by the viewer.  Up until and including the Renaissance, landscapes have often been dependent on Biblical or Mythological tales to justify their presence in works of art.  But over time, artists realized landscape, unfettered by a definite narrative, could communicate subjective forms of thought from the artist to the viewer.  By visualizing terrains inspired by elements of realistic depictions of nature, but exaggerated and conjured into other-worldly creations, different aesthetic possibilities emerge.  The artist here experiments with presenting invented unknown landscapes to be imaginatively projected as distracting refuges for the over-wrought contemporary mind.

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The scenes visible in this section derive from dream sequences, imagined fantasies, and extreme aberrations of meteorological events: tornadoes, floods, cyclones, volcanic eruptions and other climatic disasters.  Images here could have been recorded on asteroids or cruising near stars, from mountains and in caverns, gliding above gardens and skimming the surface of oceans, or nestled within shaded forests and calm fields undisturbed by human eyes.  They are meant to inspire strangely mystifying feelings unreachable through contemplation of typical traditional landscape scenes, and may instigate unfamiliar, but perhaps stimulating curious, reveries in the consciousness of those viewing them.