LANDSCAPE PAINTING: Artists Who Love the Land

Introduction

How does an artist make a landscape painting? A landscape artist is like a magician who can create a whole world on a flat piece of canvas. This world is made only of paint. Trees that look full of leaves are made with just a few flicks of a paintbrush. Shiny lakes, splashing waterfalls, grasses bending in the wind, and dark rain clouds are all made from colors squeezed out of a paint tube. It's amazing that small dabs and smears of color can create places we can visit in our imagination—like a calm river winding around hills, a rocky shore where we can almost hear the waves crash, or a huge canyon that seems to stretch for miles.

A landscape artist is not like a camera that just records whatever is in front of it. The artist doesn't have to paint exactly what he sees. If he thinks there are too many trees on a hill, he can leave some out of his picture. If he thinks the trees are in the wrong spot, he can move them. If a riverbank looks too empty, he can add rocks that aren't really there.

A landscape artist also has to decide what she wants viewers to notice. If she is painting a field, she must decide whether she wants us to see each blade of grass, or whether she wants the field to look like a smear of color. She can paint the landscape so we see it from above, as if we were looking down from an airplane, or from the ground, as if we were lying on a picnic blanket.

Before making any of these choices, the artist must decide whether to work outdoors, on the actual land, or indoors, in a studio (a room where an artist works). Working outdoors lets the artist study nature's real colors—the soil, the clouds, and the reflections on water. He can watch how sunlight and shadow change every moment. But if he paints indoors instead, he can work more slowly. He can rearrange the composition (how the parts of a picture are arranged) and adjust colors and shapes however he likes. Many artists use both methods—they make sketches outdoors, then paint the final picture later in their studio.

Air is also an important part of any landscape, even though we don't usually think about it. An artist has to paint the air so well that we can almost feel the sun's heat or the rush of wind. He has to make it seem like it might take a bird hours to fly across the picture. This is hard to do—there's no paint tube labeled "sunshine," "frosty air," "gentle breeze," or "gloomy day." The artist has to create wind, sunlight, and mist using only paint and a brush.

Creating Illusions

No matter where a landscape artist sets up to paint, he faces one big challenge: making a flat canvas look like it has deep space. When this is done well, it feels like magic—we feel like we could step into the painting and keep walking for miles.

Landscape artists know certain tricks that work well. Here are five "space tricks" that students can try themselves:

1. A winding path. A path or river that winds from the front of the picture to the back makes us believe the picture shows deep space.
2. Changes in size. A tree close to us looks much bigger than a tree of the same size far away.
3. Overlap. A rock close to us can overlap, or partly cover, a much bigger cliff behind it.
4. Changes in clarity. A mountain far away looks hazier and less clear than a mountain close by.
5. Diagonal composition. Land that stretches away from us at a slant, or diagonal, looks like it's moving back into the distance.

Four American artists—George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer—used these tricks skillfully. But their real goal wasn't just to trick our eyes. They wanted to show the huge size and beauty of the American landscape.

Catlin, Moran, and Bierstadt were artist-explorers. They were drawn west by the wild power of unexplored rivers, mountains, and canyons. They joined geological and surveying expeditions (trips to study and map the land) into parts of the country that hadn't been explored yet. They made paintings that recorded what the land looked like.

Homer, however, preferred the East. He loved the rocky Atlantic coast of Maine. All four painters helped Americans see and love their own land at a time when photography was brand new and travel films didn't exist yet. Today, we see so many images on TV, and we can easily travel by car, train, or plane to almost anywhere. But the quiet paintings these artists made still show us the grandness of our land.

This issue of Art to Zoo looks at several artworks to explore how Americans felt about their growing country during the time when settlers were moving west, up until the end of the 1800s. It teaches students some basic ideas about landscape painting and lets them practice geography skills, helping them appreciate the different regions of the United States. All the paintings discussed here belong to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.

About the Artists

George Catlin
George Catlin was from the East. Since he was a boy, he had been fascinated by Native Americans. When he was thirty-four, he decided that painting pictures of Native Americans would be much more interesting than working as 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 and scenes of buffalo hunts, dances, and other Native American ceremonies.

Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran was also an artist from the East who liked joining geological expeditions, even though he wasn't really the outdoorsy, rugged type. He traveled to the remote source of the Yellowstone River in Wyoming. Two years later, he visited the Grand Canyon, where he sketched the scenery many times from a lookout point called "Powell's Plateau." Back in his studio in the East, he combined ideas from his small sketches to create huge paintings. By then, he was already a respected artist, and his beautiful watercolor paintings of Yellowstone helped convince Congress to make it the nation's first national park in 1872.

Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt traveled to California in 1859 with a land-surveying team, after the gold rush had made the whole country curious about the West. At that time, people in the East only knew about California's amazing wilderness from small black-and-white photographs that surveyors brought back. But Bierstadt was a smart businessman as well as an artist. He knew that if he painted large, impressive "great pictures" of California, people in the East would pay to see them.

Winslow Homer
In 1893, Winslow Homer left his busy life in New York and built a studio in an old stable on a high shore at Prout's Neck in Maine, just a few hundred feet from the ocean. He loved walking along the cliffs during wild storms to watch the waves crash against the rocks. But on calm, pleasant days, he wasn't as interested in the water—he said the calm ocean looked like "a duck pond."

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Lesson Plan: Views of the American West — True or False?

Objectives

• To understand that a landscape painting may or may not show a real place exactly as it looks.
• To recognize techniques that create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

Materials

• Copies of Activity Pages 1A–D
• Pens or pencils
• A map of the western United States

Subjects
Art, geography, U.S. history

Procedure

1. Give each student a copy of Activity Pages 1A–C, which show three views of the American West. After students study the pictures for a few minutes, ask: Which painting was painted outdoors? Which one was painted indoors, in a studio, using outdoor sketches? Which one was painted outside of the United States?

2. Introduce students to River Bluffs, 1,320 Miles above St. Louis by George Catlin, shown on Activity Page 1A.

A. Ask students to describe the painting. Make sure they notice: the winding river with a few islands; the cone-shaped hills, called "bluffs"; the Native American man; the small number of trees; the lack of buildings and roads; and the wide-open sky.

B. Use a map of the western United States to find the two-thousand-mile stretch of the Missouri River between Fort Union, North Dakota, and Saint Louis, Missouri. Try to figure out where the spot "1,320 miles above Saint Louis" would be. Explain that before trains and cars were invented, traveling by boat along the Missouri River was one of the only ways to reach the West. Native American villages, fur-trading posts, and forts were built along its banks.

C. Look back at the "About the Artists" section to introduce George Catlin. Have students read Catlin's own description on Activity Page 1A of how he painted River Bluffs, 1,320 Miles above St. Louis. Ask them what they learn from his words that they couldn't tell just from looking at the black-and-white picture of his painting.

D. Read Space Trick 1 to students:

SPACE TRICK 1: Catlin uses a winding river to lead our eyes into the distance.

Ask students to put a finger on the river at the lower left corner of the picture. This part, closest to the front, is called the foreground. Have them slide their finger along the river until they reach the islands—this area is the middleground. When they've moved as far back as they can along the river, they've reached the background. Then have them trace the bumpy line where the top of the bluffs meets the sky. This line, called the horizon line, is the farthest point our eyes can see.

E. Read Space Trick 2 to students:

SPACE TRICK 2: Catlin makes shapes in the foreground larger than shapes in the background.

Have students compare the height of the bluffs in the foreground to the height of the bluffs in the background. Explain that Catlin made them different sizes on purpose, to create the illusion of deep space. Ask students to measure the height of the man in the painting, then draw a second person the exact...