Art Alive ~ Online Education Kit ~ New England Art Museum ~ Armidale

•Landscape paintings reflect attitudes toward the natural world and often mans place in it. Rural and country settings while being descriptive of the physical world are best understood in terms of human existence within it.
•Until the end of the 18th century landscapes were often painted in a studio indoors.
•Over time the way landscapes have been depicted has changed. 18th century awe inspiring ‘sublime’ forces of nature of wild snow-covered mountain ranges and vast valleys can be seen in the works of Eugene von Guerard, Mount Kosciusko, 1862, Govett's Leap and Grose River Valley, Blue Mountains, New South Wales, 1873, and more recently David Hockney’s A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998. A more ordered relationship between people and nature in the cultivated landscape of ploughed fields and paddocks of grazing animals, can be seen in John Constable's Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816 and Thomas Gainsborough's, The Watering Place, 1774-7 as well as Garrowby Hill, 1998, by David Hockney.
•Depth in the landscape is created by bands of brown and greens to represent the earth and blue to represent the sky and in between trees or buildings, roads, animals or people to link the two. Look at the work of Claude-Joseph Vernet, View of Naples with Vesuvius, 1748, George Innes, The Lackwanna Valley, 1856 and Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, c. 1882-5.
•Artists have the freedom to transform the landscape to show nature not as it is but as a lost or wished for idealised environment. Look at the artworks of Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with a Rainbow, 1636-7, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, View of the Ancient Town of Agrigento, 1787. Harsh and unforgiving landscapes can be seen in Erich Heckel’s Landscape in Thunderstorm, 1959 and Paul Nash’s The Menin Road, 1919.
•To see the human response to the country and how humans live within the rural landscape look at the realistic works of the Barbizon School of artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-Francois Millet's, The Gleaners as well as Rosa Bonheur's, Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849.

Which of these places would you like to visit? CLICK on the images below to find out more!