Investigating the Scope for Contemporary Landscape Painting to Represent the Anthropocene Age

Abstract

This project contends that landscape painting offers an important visual language and a suitable medium and mode to represent the Anthropocene age. I argue that painting traditions have provided a fertile site from which to critically respond to changes in our environment. Landscape painting inevitably draws from and reflects the traditions of its history, but also extends and transforms itself through creating hybrid interpretations and shifts of position throughout time and place. The aim of this study is to re-evaluate landscape painting in the Anthropocene age; at times, this may result in images that seem either ambiguous or contradictory, as contemporary responses to the landscape challenge our existing perspectives. I suggest that the establishment of an inferred subjectivity between depictions of the landscape and the position of the viewer may provide a means of suggesting, and at times visualising, a connectedness through which to better instil awareness of complicit behaviours that affect the environment. Historical records of landscape painting suggest that how humans depict the landscape is a response to how humans treat the landscape.