Problems of the flat surface

Renaissance art had solutions in angels and other flying creatures occupying areas needing foregrounding. Breughel used birds to good effect. Clouds were employed by Dutch landscape painters and Constable/Turner—the viewer taken into spatial recession along some canal path or other, but the journey back was on a cumulonimbus.

Late nineteenth century art freed paint from its full time job of representation so brushstrokes could take the place of objects. Artists started tilting landscapes, raising horizon lines so that land and picture became one, especially in  works of Cezanne and Van Gogh. And from there on into various forms of abstraction. (In reverse, temporary apotheoses may occur when brushstrokes become flying creatures and spatial recession glimpsed in-between.)

wp-1590400553846.jpg

Steve Rushton On the road again oil on board 2020

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s