LANDSCAPE PAINTING: Artists Who Love the Land

What Is a Landscape Painting?

How does an artist paint a landscape (a picture of land and nature)? A landscape artist is like a magician. The artist can make a whole world on a flat piece of canvas. This world is made only of paint!

A tree with lots of leaves can be made with just a few strokes of a paintbrush. Shiny lakes, splashing waterfalls, and bending grass are all made from paint. Dark clouds that look like they might make it rain are just paint too.

It's amazing! Small dabs of paint can make us feel like we are somewhere else. We can look at a painting and imagine a quiet river winding around hills. We can almost hear waves crashing on a rocky shore. We can feel like we are looking into a huge, deep canyon.

The Artist Makes Choices

A landscape artist is not like a camera. A camera copies exactly what is in front of it. But an artist doesn't have to paint exactly what he sees.

If there are too many trees on a hill, the artist can leave some out. If the trees look like they're in the wrong spot, he can move them. If a riverbank looks too empty, he can add rocks that aren't really there.

The artist also decides what she wants us to notice. If she paints a field, she decides if we should see each blade of grass, or just see the field as a soft blob of color. She can paint the field as if we are looking down from an airplane, or as if we are lying on a picnic blanket looking straight ahead.

Before making these choices, the artist must decide something else: should she paint outside, or inside a studio (a room where artists work)?

Painting outdoors lets the artist watch nature closely — the dirt, the clouds, the way light bounces off water. She can watch how sunlight and shadows change all day long.

Painting indoors lets the artist work slower. He can rearrange things, and change colors and shapes the way he wants.

Many artists do both! They make quick sketches outside, then paint the real picture later in their studio.

Painting the Air

Air is an important part of a landscape too, even though we don't think about it much. An artist has to paint air so well that we can almost feel warm sunshine or a rushing wind. She has to make it seem like it would take a bird hours to fly across the picture.

This is hard to do! There's no paint that comes labeled "sunshine" or "gentle breeze" or "gloomy day." The artist has to create wind, sunshine, and mist using only the paint on the brush.

Making Flat Paintings Look Deep

No matter where an artist paints, there's one big challenge: making a flat canvas look like it has deep space in it. When this works well, it feels like magic — like we could step into the painting and keep walking for miles!

Artists use special tricks to do this. Here are five "space tricks" you can try yourself:

1. A winding path. A path or river that curves from the front of the picture to the back makes it look deep.

1. Changes in size. A tree close to us looks much bigger than a same-size tree far away.

1. Overlap. A rock close to us can cover part of a bigger cliff behind it.

1. Changes in clarity. A far-away mountain looks blurry and less clear than one that is close.

1. Diagonal lines. Land that goes away from us at an angle looks like it goes back into deep space.

Four Artists Who Loved American Land

George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer were four American artists who used these tricks well. They didn't just want to trick our eyes — they wanted to show how huge and beautiful American land really is.

Catlin, Moran, and Bierstadt loved exploring. They were drawn west by rivers, mountains, and canyons nobody had explored yet. They joined trips that studied the land, and they painted pictures of what they saw.

Homer was different — he loved the East. He especially loved the rocky Atlantic Ocean coast in Maine.

Back then, there were no cameras like we have today, and no travel videos. These four artists helped Americans see and love their own country. Today we have TV and can travel easily by car, train, or plane. But these quiet paintings still show us how amazing our land is.

This issue of Art to Zoo looks at paintings to explore how Americans felt about their growing country. This was during a time called "westward expansion," when American settlers moved west across the country, up until the late 1800s. You will learn some basics about landscape painting and practice geography (the study of land and places) using real regions of the United States. All the paintings here are from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.

About the Artists

George Catlin
George Catlin grew up in the East and loved Native Americans since he was a boy. When he was 34, he decided painting Native Americans would be more fun than being a lawyer. So in 1830, he headed west. For six years, he traveled from village to village along the Missouri River. He painted portraits of tribal chiefs, buffalo hunts, dances, and other Native American ceremonies.

Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran was an artist from the East who loved joining geology trips (trips to study rocks and land), even though he wasn't very tough or rugged. He traveled to the faraway start of the Yellowstone River in Wyoming. Two years later, he went to the Grand Canyon and sketched it many times from a lookout spot called "Powell's Plateau." Back in his studio, he combined ideas from his small sketches to make huge paintings. His beautiful watercolor paintings of Yellowstone helped convince Congress to make Yellowstone the first national park in 1872.

Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt went to California in 1859 with a team that measured land. This was after the gold rush made everyone curious about California. Back then, people in the East only saw small black-and-white photos of California's wild beauty. But Bierstadt was smart about business. He knew that if he made big, impressive paintings of California, people in the East would pay to see them.

Winslow Homer
In 1893, Winslow Homer left his busy life in New York. He built a studio in an old barn on a cliff called Prout's Neck in Maine, right next to the ocean. He loved walking on the cliffs during big storms to watch the waves crash against the rocks. But on calm days, he wasn't very interested in the ocean. He said a calm ocean looked like "a duck pond"!