Gardens

The garden is another rich traditional sub-genre of landscape painting.

I love the intense greens in this work by the Spanish painter Juan Manuel Fernandez Pinedo.

Gardens were a favourite subject of Vuillard and Klimt, flowerbeds and gravel paths fulfilling their love of pointillist pattern and colour:

Australian painter, Ric Amor, combines plant forms, statuary and built elements in this work reminiscent of moderns such as Picasso and Le Corbusier.

Dennis Doheny

The use of luminous mist behind trees is a clever device. Particularly when working in fine detail, you need mysterious nebulous areas to breathe life into the painting.

Len Chmiel

Sizes: 16 x 22, 12 x 12 inches

Len Chmiel states on his website that he aims to convey the subtle beauty of nature without being too literal. He tries to push the boundaries of reality rather than just depicting it. 

I love the sensitive painterliness and mark-making in these works.

Magic Realism

Rockwell Kent, American, 1882-1971, lilacs, c 1968, 24 x 34 inches.

In works of fantasy or surrealist art the  supernatural is usually immediately obvious, but in Magic Realsim a dream-like or mythic dimension is only subtly implied within a realist framework.

Formalist qualities such as the centrally placed figure, simplified repeated forms,  and the roof lines converging at the point of interest, where the flower is being plucked, produce a kind of dream-like, surreal or magic realist effect. They are a little too synchronistic to be true.

The subject is apparently mundane, but the formality, and stage-like lighting, suggest an event of mythic importance or something occurring in a dream, the significance of which escapes  the conscious mind. 

A touch of Magic Realism can give a landscape a fascinating edginess.

Buildings

Buildings can give a landscape painting a geometrical element or pattern, an opportunity to introduce colours and shapes not found in nature. 

The proportion of built to natural environment can be played with. These two landscape paintings have an almost even balance between buildings and nature, creating an interesting tension. 

The townscape or cityscape, is a subgenre of landscape painting that emerged in the seventeenth century.

The top image is a detail from a painting by the Danish artist Christen Kobke.

The lower work is unknown.

John Linnel

Storm in Harvest, 1856
source: art inconnu

Color Loudness

Bright colors are popular with many art buyers, and many painters, realising this, tend to indiscriminately exaggerate color regardless of the subject and lighting conditions and mood. The result is that their work can seem unconvincing. (which is not to say that photographic accuracy should be the aim). The loudness is stimulating initially, but soon becomes tiring.

However, the intense colours in these beautiful landscapes,  by the American artist Mark Kerckhoff, are appropriate, as his subjects here are arid badlands where the light is intense.

Vibrancy of color is not achieved by simply turning up the 'volume' of color, but by an understanding of complementarities.

Sizes: 
Top: 20 x 24 inches
Bottom: 12 x 16 inches.