Interrupted Landscape: A Picturesque Approach to Contemporary Paintings of Nature

Abstract

This research project is concerned with the way in which nature is idealised through images, and questions how painting might be able to address this using visual strategies borrowed from the 18th Century aesthetic traditions of the Picturesque. Contemporary popular landscape images, often photographs, present an ideal of nature that is vast, nurturing and self-sustaining. To submit to this ideal, though enjoyable, is to overlook the lived reality of nature in all its extremes as well as the cultural and environmental problems linked to idealised views of nature. By drawing on historical and contemporary literature surrounding the Picturesque, this project explores the ways in which the closely related concepts of ‘variety’, ‘roughness’, ‘irregularity’ and ‘intricacy’ can inform contemporary landscape paintings that reflect the complex experience of nature in the real. The outcomes of this studio-based research project demonstrate how an expanded notion of these methods—including choices in composition, colour, the application of paint, and the interaction of works in a space—disrupt idealised representation by fracturing or interrupting the image, preventing a cohesive and therefore reductive reading of the landscape. This interrupted form of representation operates similarly to real nature, which refuses to be taken in at one glance. The paintings thus offer seductive representations of nature that nevertheless resist the ideal views of popular landscape imagery.