LANDSCAPE PAINTING: Artists Who Love the Land

Introduction

How does an artist create a landscape painting? A landscape artist is like a kind of magician who can build an entire world on a flat piece of canvas. Of course, this world is made only of paint. Trees that look full of leaves are created with just a few flicks of a paintbrush. Shining lakes, splashing waterfalls, grasses bending in the wind, and dark storm 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—a calm river winding around hills, a rocky shoreline where we can almost hear the waves crash, or a giant canyon that seems to stretch for miles into the distance.

It's important to remember that a landscape artist is not like a camera, simply recording whatever happens to be in front of it. An 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 the picture. If he thinks the trees are in the wrong spot, he can move them. If a riverbank looks too plain, he can add rocks that weren't really there.

A landscape artist also has to decide what she wants viewers to notice. If she's painting a field, she must decide whether she wants us to see each individual blade of grass or just a blur of color representing the whole field. She might paint the landscape as if we're looking down from an airplane, or as if we're lying on the ground on a picnic blanket.

Before making any of these choices, the artist must first decide whether to work outdoors, directly observing the land, or indoors in a studio. Working outdoors lets an artist study nature's colors—the soil, the clouds, and the reflections on water—and observe how sunlight and shadow shift with every passing moment. Working in a studio, on the other hand, allows the artist to work more slowly, rearranging the composition (the way objects are arranged in the picture) and adjusting colors and shapes based on personal choice. Many artists use both methods: they make quick sketches outdoors, then create the finished painting later in the studio.

Air is also an important part of any landscape, even though we rarely think about it. A skilled artist has to paint the air so well that we can almost feel the heat of the sun or the rush of the wind. The artist must make it seem like it could take hours for a bird to fly across the picture. This is difficult, since there's no paint tube labeled "sunshine," "frosty air," "gentle breeze," or "gloomy day." Instead, 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, they must solve one basic challenge shared by all landscape paintings: creating the illusion, or trick of the eye, that makes a flat canvas look like it has deep, three-dimensional space. When this is done skillfully, the effect is amazing—we feel as though we could step into the painting and walk for miles.

Landscape artists know several techniques, or "space tricks," that create this illusion. Here are five that students can try themselves:

1. A winding path. A path or river that curves through the picture from the front to the back makes viewers believe the space is deep.

1. Changes in size. A tree close to the viewer looks much bigger than a tree of the same actual size that is far away.

1. Overlap. A large rock that's close to us can partly cover a much bigger cliff behind it, showing that the rock is nearer.

1. Changes in clarity. A distant mountain range looks hazier and less sharp than a mountain that's closer to us.

1. Diagonal composition. Land that stretches away from us at a diagonal angle appears to recede, or move back, into the distance.

Four American artists—George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer—used these techniques skillfully. Their main goal wasn't just to trick our eyes, but to show the enormous size and beauty of the American landscape.

Catlin, Moran, and Bierstadt were artist-explorers drawn west by the powerful, untouched rivers, mountains, and canyons of America. They joined scientific and surveying expeditions—organized trips to explore and map unfamiliar land—into parts of the country that hadn't yet been explored, creating visual records of the land through their paintings.

Homer, meanwhile, preferred the East Coast; he loved the rocky Atlantic shoreline of Maine. All four painters helped Americans see and appreciate their own country during a time when photography was still new and travel films didn't exist yet. Today, television gives us endless images, and we can easily travel by car, train, or plane to almost any river, mountain, canyon, or coastline we want to see. Still, the quiet paintings created by these four artists continue to show us the grandeur of our land.

This issue of Art to Zoo looks at several artworks to explore how Americans felt about their expanding nation during the period of westward expansion, up until the end of the 1800s. It introduces students to basic ideas about landscape painting and lets them practice geography skills, helping them appreciate the different physical features found across various regions of the United States. All the paintings discussed here are part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art collection.

About the Artists

George Catlin
George Catlin grew up in the East and had been fascinated by Native Americans since he was a boy. At age thirty-four, he decided that painting portraits of Native Americans would be far more interesting than practicing law. So in 1830, he headed west. For six years, he traveled from village to village, using the Missouri River to get around. He painted portraits of tribal chiefs, as well as scenes showing buffalo hunts, dances, and other Native American ceremonies.

Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran was an artist from the East who loved joining geological expeditions (scientific trips to study the earth), even though he wasn't naturally rugged or outdoorsy. He traveled with an expedition to the remote starting point of the Yellowstone River in Wyoming, and two years later visited the Grand Canyon, where he sketched the view many times from a lookout point called "Powell's Plateau." Back home in his studio in the East, he combined ideas from his small sketches to create huge, detailed paintings. By then, he had built a strong reputation as an artist, and his beautiful watercolor paintings of Yellowstone helped convince Congress to make it the nation's first national park in 1872.

Albert Bierstadt
In 1859, Albert Bierstadt traveled to California with a land-surveying team, at a time when the California gold rush had captured the curiosity of the entire country. Back then, people in the East mostly learned about California's amazing wilderness through small black-and-white photographs brought back by surveyors. But Bierstadt was a smart businessman as well as an artist. He understood that if he created large, impressive "great pictures" of California's landscapes, people in the East would pay to see them.

Winslow Homer
In 1893, Winslow Homer left his busy life in New York City and built a studio in an old stable on the high shoreline of Prout's Neck in Maine, just a few hundred feet from the ocean. He loved walking along the cliffs during powerful storms, studying how the crashing waves battled against the rocks. On calmer days, though, he wasn't nearly as interested in painting the water—when the ocean was still, he thought it looked as boring as "a duck pond."

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Lesson Plan Step 1: Views of the American West — True or False?

Objectives

• To understand that a landscape painting may or may not accurately show a specific real place.
• To identify 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 different views of the American West. After students study the images for a few minutes, ask: Which painting was painted outdoors? Which painting was painted indoors in a studio, based on outdoor sketches? Which painting shows a place outside of the United States?

1. 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 dotted with small islands; the cone-shaped hills, called "bluffs"; the Native American man in the scene; the small number of trees; the absence of any buildings or roads; and the wide, open sky.

B. Using a map of the western United States, locate the two-thousand-mile stretch of the Missouri River between Fort Union, North Dakota, and Saint Louis, Missouri. Try to estimate where the point "1,320 miles above Saint Louis" would be. Explain that before trains and cars existed, 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. Refer back to the "About the Artists" section to remind students about George Catlin. Have them read Catlin's own description, found on Activity Page 1A, of how he painted River Bluffs, 1,320 Miles above St. Louis. Ask what they can learn from his written words that they might not be able to tell just from looking at the black-and-white image of the painting.

D. Read Space Trick 1 aloud to students:

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

Have students place a finger on the river at the lower left corner of the picture. This part of the river, closest to the viewer, is called the foreground. Ask them to move their finger along the river until they reach the islands—this area is called the middleground. When they've followed the river as far back as it goes, 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, marks the farthest point the eye can see.

E. Read Space Trick 2 aloud to students:

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

Ask students to compare the height of the bluffs in the foreground with the height of the bluffs farther back, in the background. Explain that Catlin made them different sizes on purpose, to create the illusion of deep space. Then have students measure the height of the man in the painting and draw a second person the exact same height...